Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy

Who was Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy?

Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy was an eminent Bengali nationalist, liberal democrat, politician and statesman during the first half of the twentieth century. He served as the Prime Minister of Bengal in British India and was the fifth Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Born into a prominent Bengali Muslim family, Suhrawardy was educated at Oxford, and joined the Swaraj Party of Chittaranjan Das upon returning to India in 1921. He became the Mayor of Calcutta, the largest city in British India, during the 1930s, and later, as a member of the All-India Muslim League, assumed the premiership of Bengal in the mid-1940s. Along with Sarat Chandra Bose, Suhrawardy mooted the United Bengal proposal, in an attempt to prevent the Partition of Bengal. Following the partition of India, he became a leading populist statesman of East Pakistan, leaving the Muslim League to join the newly formed centre-left Awami League in 1952. Along with A K Fazlul Huq and Maulana Bhashani, he led the pan-Bengali United Front alliance to a resounding victory in the 1954 East Bengal elections, which witnessed a crushing defeat of the Muslim League in East Pakistan.