Larger than life

ABUL Kashem Fazlul Huq went through a rather rich, fulfilling life, of course with its periodic disappointments. Born on October 26, 1873, he died in Dhaka on April 27, 1962. The final four years of his life were hostage to physical agony, compelling him, as Sirajuddin Ahmed notes in his excellent work on the late politician, to implore the Almighty for deliverance from his sufferings.
And yet Sher-e-Bangla, as he has come to be known in history, was one of the more prominent Bengali politicians whose entire life revolved around the principle of public welfare. By the time the All-India Muslim League met in Lahore in 1940 to demand a separate homeland for India's Muslims, Huq was already a household name within undivided India's political circles. But it was certainly that conference in Lahore which cemented his reputation as the Tiger of Bengal.
Abul Hashim, himself one of the foremost Muslim politicians in pre-partition times, records in his slim work, In Retrospect, the grandeur in which Huq made his way to the podium in Lahore on March 23, 1940. He made his entry into the venue of the Muslim League conference even as Mohammad Ali Jinnah was busy exhorting the party faithful on the need for Pakistan. Observing Huq, all League representatives cheerfully welcomed him as Sher-e-Bangal. Huq clearly savoured the moment. He deliberately slowed his walk to the dais, bowed left and then right as he acknowledged the cheers and finally found his place beside Jinnah. The future founder of Pakistan told the assembled delegates: "The tiger has now been caged." Moments later, Fazlul Huq moved the resolution for Pakistan.
Huq quit the Muslim League in 1942 and after that, till the division of India, engaged in various political permutations and combinations, notable among which was his forging a coalition in Bengal with Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. It was a coalition that in the end was fated to collapse.
In 1947, Huq moved to East Bengal, the eastern province of the newly created state of Pakistan. With politics increasingly taking a negative hue through the parochialism of the ruling Muslim League, Sher-e-Bangla found himself adopting, more and more, anti-establishment and therefore popular causes.
In 1954, the combined force of his personality and those of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and Moulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani (symbolised by the Jukto Front) forced the Muslim League out of power through landmark elections in East Bengal. As chief minister of East Bengal, Huq expected to redraw the frontiers of politics vis-à-vis relations between the province and the four provinces constituting West Pakistan. In the event, he failed.
Soon after his government took over, an unhappy West Pakistani ruling clique instigated riots at Adamjee jute mills in Narayanganj. And then Huq made a trip to West Bengal, met his old friend Bidhan Chandra Roy and waxed nostalgic about the historical ties between the two parts of old Bengal. The Pakistani administration painted his remarks as a conspiracy to break up Pakistan. On May 31, 1954, barely two months into office, the Jukto Front ministry was dismissed under Section 92(a). But a political comeback was what would define Huq's career within slightly more than a year. In August 1955, the man who had been accused of treason in May 1954 was inducted into the cabinet of Prime Minister Chaudhri Mohammad Ali as Pakistan's interior minister. That was remarkable peripety for Sher-e-Bangla.
Fortune came his way again when, on March 24, 1956, a day after the Pakistan constituent assembly adopted a constitution for the country, Huq took over as governor of East Pakistan. Here too something of history was made, since Huq was the first Bengali to be governor of his own people. His predecessors had been either British colonialists or West Pakistanis.
A.K. Fazlul Huq was removed from the office of governor on April 1, 1958. That effectively was the end of his career in politics. Age was finally catching up with him. In the four years left to him of life, he would be witness to the first military takeover of Pakistan in October 1958 and the suppression of democratic politics in the country.
Sher-e-Bangla remains, warts and all, a significant point of historical reference in Bangladesh, indeed in pre-1947 India.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.