In The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar dedicated her book on history’s most massive migration to ‘all our divided families’. For millions of people, that divide ran as much through the land as it did photo-frames and dinner tables.
With some separations in public view — touching on Dr Mahmud Husain of the Muslim League and elder brother Dr Zakir Husain of Congress, Zamindar writes, “Many well-known public figures in the subcontinent became members of divided families, although this is usually a less acknowledged fact of their lives.”
For good reason: depending on one’s politics, Partition meant freeing Pakistan or amputating India. “Suffer we have to,” Pakistan’s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, would say, counting himself among the members of India’s Muslim minority provinces: either they could stay behind at the majority’s mercy, or move to the new country he’d created for them.
But fate was at its most ironic in the United Provinces, now Uttar Pradesh: the land that had most fired up Pakistan’s independence was still stuck in India.
It was also home to the Husain brothers; the original Husain Khan had migrated from Kohat to Qaimganj, a small town in UP, around 1715. Until independence, the Pathans of Qaimganj were best-known for revolting against the British Raj in 1857 — and getting hanged for it.
(One Adrian Hope, 4th Punjab Infantry, was sent “marching to the Qaimganj area for the purpose of rounding up and trying rebels and destroying their property,” writes a colleague. Brigadier Hope was shot dead in Awadh, by a rebel in a tree.)
Born around the turn of the century, the Husain brothers grew up amid the Muslim qaum in crisis — all their decisions would bear the impress of this fact in one way or another.
For the longest time, empire had lent the Muslim mind security and status; Mughal, Safavid, Ottoman. But when the first was gunned down, the second overrun, and the third taken apart in favour of a western-style nation-state, India’s Muslims, as historian D. A. Low rightly put it, found themselves facing the sort of reckoning they’d never had to before.
Two major solutions arose, and they spelled a world of difference between nationalist Muslims like Zakir Husain, and Muslim nationalists like Mahmud Husain.
The nationalist Muslim threw in his lot with a united India. The Muslim nationalist thought separation the only way out. And when irreconcilable ideas grew into living, breathing countries, the brothers would take dramatically different paths.
For the older Husain, it was Gandhi that lit India’s way: the Mahatma would back Zakir in coming up with a response to Aligarh’s angry young men; the result was Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, a university “almost precariously indebted to this one man’s personality and obvious excellence”, one observer wrote in 1946.
But Mahmud Husain, himself educated at Jamia, was moved instead by Aligarh’s anger in human form: Muhammad Ali Jauhar, whom Mahmud saw as both towering hero and cautionary tale. “It became clear to me,” he said after witnessing Jauhar’s agony, “that no movement premised on Hindu-Muslim unity could succeed.” Jinnah and the League were the only answer.
The kind that found the very idea of the Congress Muslim unhelpful, if not offensive. When Zakir’s name was put forward for the interim government in 1946, Jinnah told off the viceroy, Lord Wavell, “…The Muslim League would never accept the nomination of any Muslim by you, other than a Muslim Leaguer.”
Yet the same Jinnah, along with Liaquat Ali Khan, wanted brother Mahmud for Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly, and would sign off on him for their parliamentary committee on fundamental rights and minorities. The Quaid weighed belief before blood.
As did the other side: shocked by a report in Dawn that Zakir was leaning towards Pakistan, Gandhi wrote to him, “I can’t believe you could have said such a thing. Whatever it is, you had better make a statement about what you had said.”
Because revering or rejecting Pakistan had become a key seam of the Indian divide. For Mahmud Husain, the movement seemed “the ideal and ambition of a whole people”.
For Zakir, it spelled disaster. One biographer titles that chapter of his life ‘Approaching Catastrophe’. “Shall we lean upon this society in which brother is turned against brother?” Zakir asked at Wardha. “…this society which knows of no song that all may sing?” At Jamia’s silver jubilee in 1945, he made one last public plea to his guests of honour — Nehru, Jinnah, Liaquat, and Azad, “For God’s sake, put your heads together and extinguish this fire.”
But it was too late. On August 21, 1947, Zakir was stopped and nearly stabbed at the Jullundur train station by Sikh youths; he was rescued from near-certain death by a Hindu railway officer who had been quietly keeping an eye on him, and a Sikh soldier that escorted him to safety.
During the hellish ride back to Delhi, Zakir learned of the murder of his friend in Lahore, economics professor Brij Narain. He was consumed by guilt: why hadn’t his life been taken in return, “to settle the account”?
He wrote to his brother Mahmud on 28 August, anguished. “The situation in Delhi isn’t good either. The fear is that something can happen any time … in any case, people in Pakistan will likely be safe — we’re just in passing. We’ll simply come to an end like this.”
Zakir Husain died some two decades later, while serving as India’s first Muslim president. Asked around that time what Partition meant to him, Mahmud Husain, whose entire family had chosen to stay behind in India, said, “I have lived as a Pakistani, and I will die a Pakistani. But how are we to forget the earth we buried our elders in?”
Having lost both parents by early childhood, Mahmud’s elder was Zakir — the brother who had raised him.
‘The state of our dreams’
A history professor late of Heidelberg, Mahmud Husain was elected to the first Constituent Assembly from East Bengal on July 6, 1947. Unlike the five other non-Bengali members — parachuted into their seats from outside — Mahmud had been living and lecturing at Dhaka University since the early 1930s, and had even been charged by the students with leading the pro-Pakistan rally on Direct Action Day.
Now the dream had been made real: he would say of Pakistan’s creation that “the miraculous had happened”, a belief that persisted to the end of his life. His faith in his party, however, would clash with his empathy for East Bengal, and mark the end of his politics.
But all that came later: the first five years of Pakistan’s independence were “years of emergency government … recurring crises of war, near-famine, and disorder,” writes American political scientist Wayne Ayres Wilcox, with the frenzied new state the ‘sole barrier between oblivion and existence’.
For reasons similar, 40-year-old Mahmud started out as a true believer in Liaquat’s Muslim League, and was appointed the party’s chief whip in the assembly. In those early days, his nationalism was stark; a gentler approach could have brought the opposition in from the cold.
Yet it was also in service of an idea at risk: as Wilcox put it, “No nationalist movement or party ever faced greater obstacles.”
Hence, Mahmud doubling down: when opposition leader Sris Chandra Chattopadhyaya said Pakistan had given up on the two-nation theory, Mahmud called it “a preposterous claim” that undid Pakistan’s very basis, “We possess common nationality … but we are not the same nation.”
So too for Pakistanis with Indian citizenship. “Once they have made a decision, let them stick to it,” he said, “There is no point in being in more than one place, and thereby being nowhere.”
As for separate electorates, reviled by the Pakistan National Congress, Mahmud said they had lessened communal clashes. (“What has Dr Zakir Husain to say?” one Congress member asked. “I prefer to speak for myself and not for anybody else,” said his brother.)
It was again Mahmud, joined by Leaguers as different as Abdur Rab Nishtar and Zafrulla Khan, that defended the Objectives Resolution in 1949, a tract meant to set out what the Constitution would look like. Bashed by the left and mangled by the right, the resolution stopped midway — for a country that knew, deep down, it could become neither secular tent nor divine mission.
Yet its religious colouring dismayed the opposition all the same: though Liaquat’s League could have easily accommodated the less radical changes suggested from across the aisle, it dismissed them point by point — a sour note to start on for any fresh parliament.
Arguing its Islamic clauses only related to the Muslim majority, Mahmud saw the resolution as a wall against tyranny: “I can assure the Members of this House that if ever a dictatorship was established in Pakistan — let us hope that it never will — the dictator will not quote this Resolution in support of his authority”; that the words “through the people” were a sure guarantee of “the essence of modern democracy”.
As it turns out, lawyers would indeed press the resolution-turned-preamble against each dictatorship of the future: against Ayub and Yahya’s martial law in Asma Jilani (argument accepted); against Bhutto’s in Zia-ur-Rehman (argument accepted, overturned in appeal); against Zia’s in Nusrat Bhutto (argument abandoned); against Musharraf’s in Zafar Ali Shah (argument partly rejected); and against military trials of civilians in District Bar Association (argument accepted in dissent).
“The state of our dreams shall not be sovereign without any limits,” Mahmud Husain said on the floor of the house. “…This state will be based not upon the will of a single individual, autocratic and absolutist, but upon the will of the people themselves.”
Or so it was thought; to one foreign observer, Mahmud’s citing European thinkers on the floor of the house was a bit fancy. “How many of these learned gentlemen understood the much-abused term ‘sovereignty’ in the familiar classroom sense of deputy minister Mahmud Husain, PhD?” writes scholar Leonard Binder. “Erudite references to the sins of Bodin and the excesses of Machiavelli did not stir them at all.”
Though Binder’s smirk was aimed at parliament, it landed cleanly on the establishment waiting in the wings: the generals, judges, and bureaucrats that would wreck the assembly, and tip the state of our dreams into its long nightmare.
Nation-building, piece by piece
Though Pakistan had appeared on the world map, its cracks had yet to be filled in. If India counted over 500 princely states, what is now Pakistan, too, made up just half its present size in 1947 — with a string of former chiefdoms still undecided.
Unlike full provinces, however, these were ‘lands of hill and desert’ on the edges of empire, with Congress boss Patel moving fast to secure “a full basket of apples”. By August 15, most had acceded to India, not one to Pakistan.
“The Muslim League recognises the right of each state to choose its destiny,” Jinnah promised. But by the time Liaquat handed Mahmud Husain the portfolio of states and frontier regions in 1950, the Quaid was gone, the states were still rocky and Kashmir and Hyderabad, the two “troublesome giants”, seized by India amid blood and terror.
“One of the League’s few intellectuals,” Wilcox writes, Mahmud’s instructions “were to bring the developed states into the federation”. And “the new minister, a tactful but aggressive personality,” found himself with enough room to manoeuvre.
Per Mahmud’s estimate, the popular will was on Pakistan’s side. The princes most desired that appearances be kept up — and as long as actual powers were handed over to the federation, who cared? The centre’s babus bristled at Mahmud receiving the Amir of Bahawalpur at the railway station, yet the aim was to make their handshake final. In the spring of 1951, Mahmud announced that full provincial status had been decided for Bahawalpur.
“The changes carried out by the cabinet of Liaquat Ali Khan and Mahmud Husain led to the expansion of central power in the states,” writes Wilcox. “The rulers were edged out of power quietly … compulsive reaction to state crises gave way to reflective constitutional planning.”
A tall order in itself, given the wild patchwork the British had left behind: tribal areas, princely states, governor’s provinces, and a chief commissioner’s province widened to include almost half of West Pakistan’s territory — Balochistan.
Here too, Liaquat appointed Mahmud chair of Balochistan’s constitutional reforms committee; the eventual Mahmud Husain report minced few words. The Sardari system was a “legacy of the past”, wrote Mahmud, and provincial status for Balochistan was the remedy: with an elected assembly, adult franchise, local bodies, and proper policing in place of levies.
The report also took pains to rebut its conservative critics: illiteracy was no basis for denying popular representation to Balochistan, who were more than able “to choose the right type of people for the legislature”.
As for political education, it would grow through elections and public debate. Calling Balochistan’s lack of institutions “no fault of the people”, Mahmud was “happily impressed by the most widely spread political consciousness throughout the province … manifested by a vigorous demand for provincial autonomy”.
The report was presented to the Constituent Assembly at the close of 1951. Dubbed “a remarkable document” over half a century later in Martin Axmann’s history of Baloch nationalism, it has since remained frozen in time.
As has the question of the tribal areas. When Mahmud pointed out that security concerns had outweighed constitutional reforms there, one observer remarked that this came not from a man “interested in autocratic power, but from one of the true liberals of the Muslim League”.
Yet this missed his goal: “Wherever conditions exist where a part of the tribal belt is agreeable to come into the [frontier] province,” Mahmud said on the day several areas decided to join Hazara and Mardan, he was sure the people would welcome it; that being the “ultimate destiny of the tribal areas”.
In each corner of the country, Mahmud Husain stuck to the same principle: enfranchisement equalled integration. But with the murder of Liaquat Ali Khan, federalism — from Bengal to Balochistan — would be dealt a body blow.
Losing Liaquat
Years later, while giving the last interview of his life, Mahmud Husain implied it could all have gone differently — if one man had lived.
Shortly before he fell to an assassin’s bullet, “Liaquat confided in Mahmud Husain,” writes Lawrence Ziring, that a huge cabinet shuffle was in play, “and that his highest priority was removing Ghulam Muhammad”, the finance minister.
On learning of such plans, the minister said he’d sooner kill himself. A vulgar and ruthless bureaucrat, Ghulam is seen today as democracy’s first arch-villain.
And yet he was a symptom of two broader problems Liaquat hadn’t yet been able to fix: a federal solution between Punjab and East Bengal, and the imperial pull of the West versus the rest. (Mahmud Husain would end up on the wrong side in both cases.)
What is widely accepted, however, is that the prime minister had reached a turning point. British cables found him exceedingly “cagey” at committing himself to Western military alliances in the Middle East; the US ambassador doubted “that progress was likely at this stage”. Liaquat was shot four days later.
Amid even greater tumult at home: finding a magic formula that tied Punjab to Bengal, separated by a thousand miles of hostile Indian territory, had brought Liaquat to the brink. His answer had been forming a basic principles committee, for thrashing out a constitutional consensus.
It had been a thankless job: what was a concession to one seemed a betrayal to the other. The committee’s first report in 1950 had ended in uproar when the Bengalis found their majority whittled down in the Senate. Changes to the report in 1951 ended in uproar again, when the Punjabis felt reduced in both houses.
The uniqueness of the world’s only “double country” didn’t help. “We are attempting to evolve a new kind of constitution,” committee member Mahmud Husain told the house. “We have no definite models before us, and a task like this is bound to take time.”
With the temperature climbing, Mumtaz Daultana, Punjab’s grasping chief minister, demanded Liaquat come sell the report to his people. Per Ziring, Mahmud Husain “personally pleaded with Liaquat not to make this particular journey”, based on intelligence reports of a plot to kill him in Punjab. “But the prime minister chose to ignore the reports, as well as his minister’s plea … Liaquat believed in the matter so much that he decided to go anyway.”
When twin gunshots rang out in Company Bagh, Rawalpindi (from an Afghan spook formerly in the employ of Pakistan’s government), it would spell a new lease on life for the half-paralysed Ghulam Muhammad. The Bengalis dealt in dark whispers that their freshly anointed governor-general had backed the hit; even army chief Ayub Khan, the muscle behind Ghulam and the new gentry, found their indifference to the murder “disgusting and revolting”.
Over in India, the still-angry young men of Aligarh didn’t share the same apathy: they raged to their vice-chancellor, a bewildered Zakir Husain, that the university siren be sounded to mark the death of their alumnus. A student objector was beaten up, and the door to the bell room was broken open. The siren sounded loud.
Four years in, both brothers still stood at Partition’s long edge.
Unmade by the unelected
The new order moved fast. Mahmud Husain’s proposals for Balochistan, tabled just weeks after Liaquat’s murder, were stillborn; the state ministry handed over to Mushtaq Gurmani. “The era of Liaquat’s forgetful tolerance and Mahmud Husain’s tact gave way to one of Gurmani’s dictations,” writes Wilcox.
Abroad, Ayub rushed to grasp America’s brass ring, as well as its armaments. At home, Liaquat’s balancing act was done away with, and the Bengalis — despite Dhaka’s own Khwaja Nazimuddin as premier — cut adrift. Pakistan’s original sin was not military ingress. It was denying the majority its agency. The two would merge soon enough — when the jackboot replaced the vote altogether.
Language proved an early provocation, as police opened fire on student rioters in Dhaka in 1952, killing four. How much this one act of brutality would sear itself into the Bengali memory was clear a decade later, when Mahmud Husain — as Dhaka University’s vice chancellor — approved the design for a monument to the students, known today as Shaheed Minar.
Mahmud’s view was informed by experience: he had been an unceasing advocate for Urdu; not to surpass Bengali, but as a shield against English, the land’s old imperial tongue. When the opposition tried fast-tracking Bengali as a national language on April 10, 1952, Mahmud voted for Sattar Pirzada’s suggestion that the House take it up in due time.
When it did, from March 7, 1954 and onwards, both Mahmud and Pirzada voted for Bengali being raised to a national language alongside Urdu. Such steps were welcome: ideologues in favour of a federal accord.
But the core clash of the 1950s — held at bay while Liaquat lived — now boiled over. Some colour it in ethnic terms: of a Bengal group versus a Punjab group. To be sure, the rights of the Bengali majority lay at the bleeding heart of the crisis. But the coming strongmen, Ayub and Iskander Mirza, weren’t Punjabi, just as the Bengal group was a misnomer for many of its most vocal members — Nishtar, Sattar Pirzada, and Mahmud Husain.
It must also be said that the Bengal group, made up entirely of Muslim Leaguers, could hardly claim to speak for all Bengalis, given the fast-rising Awami League and Chattopadhyaya’s depressed Congressites. If anything, the Bengali opposition was as fed up of the cabinet as the establishment.
Put simply, the clash was between the elected and the unelected: one sought its strength from a parliamentary majority, the other from generals and bureaucrats. In one sense, however, geography cannot be denied: most of the population was in the east; much of the army in the west.
And to read the chatter of British and American officials, only one could rescue a poor and excitable country from itself. With the imperial project’s favoured lieutenants — Ghulam, Ayub, and Mirza — constantly in their ears, Western envoys saw Nazimuddin’s cabinet only in terms of members that required picking off. Descriptions were rehashed from Mirza’s regular rant sessions: Fazlur Rehman (“obstinate”); Sattar Pirzada (“unsatisfactory”); and Mahmud Husain and Nishtar (“strongest supports for the mullahs”).
Left out of this analysis was that Fazl was against joining any one Cold War bloc, appalling London and DC; that Pirzada was deathly opposed to One Unit, to gasps in Lahore; and that Mahmud was cast as a mullah supporter only after expressing his derision for the governor-general. “Real republics,” he would say, “aren’t run by bureaucrats.”
His views of the Jamaat and Ahrar — whose mobs were lynching Ahmadis and setting fire to Lahore — were as severe. The country would groan “under the most wild and pernicious tyranny”, Dawn reports him saying on December 4, 1952, if a set of “arrow-minded” religious persons were able to capture power. This should never happen and “we will not allow it to happen”.
For the establishment to then flail around to its foreign patrons — alleging everything from incompetence to extremism — was to miss the point. Author Allen McGrath summed up the real reason best: these were the ministers “most difficult for Ghulam Muhammad to control”, and each one was purged on April 17, 1953 — that all were from non-Punjab provinces was hard to miss. Nazimuddin became Pakistan’s first prime minister to fall by coup; he would call it the “rape of democracy”.
But the intrigue against Nazimuddin came with a price for the bureaucrats: their junior partner, impressed by his own strength, now nudged past them. Ghulam “could never have dared to dismiss a ministry which had appointed him,” Bengali leader Suhrawardy wrote that week, “had he not have had the support of the army.” And the army was Ayub’s.
As Suhrawardy would learn for himself: when his Awami League-led coalition swept the polls in East Bengal in 1954, and ally Fazlul Huq’s bizarre statements began ringing out in the press, their weeks-old ministry was sacked in favour of the emergency under Iskander Mirza. Dhaka stood demeaned again.
Slowly but surely, the old lines were crumbling. On July 17, the Constituent Assembly saw extraordinary scenes when Mahmud Husain went against the screams of his own party in slamming emergency rule in East Bengal, while his most strident Congress critics — Chattopadhyaya and Bhupendra Kumar Datta — rose in his defence.
“We call ourselves a democratic state,” Mahmud said, “but a province which consists of the majority of its population has been denied the democratic right to govern itself.” Even in East Bengal’s secretariat, he added, “not a single Bengali secretary” could be found, that hatred had begun seeping in as soon as Partition.
As the deputy speaker tried cutting him short, and new prime minister Bogra blamed the whole thing on communism, the assembly was up in arms.
“He has exposed you thoroughly by the naked truth,” Chattopadhyaya said. “…I tell my friend Dr Mahmud Husain that of all the Muslim members of the Muslim League party who spoke here, he has said the truth and reality which others had not the courage of doing.”
The centre’s growing panic was no coincidence: with the League having been thrashed in East Bengal on the altar of autonomy, the Bengali bloc could now ally with the smaller provinces and outvote Punjab. Even the ingenious Bogra formula, which provided for a minimum of 30 per cent votes from each wing on important matters, wasn’t good enough for Lahore.
Given this was their third try after the first two reports, Mahmud Husain’s patience had worn thin. “In a nutshell, sir,” he had said in an earlier session, “all this jugglery has led to this: that one single unit of Western Pakistan has been able to secure as many seats in the Upper House as Bengal.”
Mahmud called it “a camouflage”: “simply to give the Punjab its 10 seats, even the ultimate interests of Pakistan have been overlooked.”
On September 21, the assembly’s anger reached its climax: the late cabinet, helmed by Nazimuddin, Fazl, and Mahmud Husain, tried taking the Constitution back. Per one scholar, “The arbitrary action of the governor-general in dismissing the Nazimuddin ministry had been neither forgiven nor forgotten.”
In a lightning raft of bills tabled by Sindh’s M. H. Gazdar and hurried along by speaker Tamizuddin, the governor-general was stripped of his powers to sack the assembly, while the executive was made responsible to parliament. The Constitution of 1954 was sent for printing.
At long last, the Long Parliament had reason to celebrate. “Democracy in Pakistan has come alive,” Dawn said, hailing the “zeal, speed, and determination” of the assembly.
Thirteen years later, the memory of September 21, 1954, would still upset Pakistan’s first strongman. “A resolution was printed in the middle of the night,” Ayub Khan said, “placed in the pigeonholes” of the rebel lawmakers, “and passed within 10 minutes”. He compared it to a murder in the dark.
If so, it was a murder that may well have put in place a democratic settlement in Pakistan: the draft Constitution of 1954 raised Bengali to a national language; afforded the east its majority in the House; created a Senate to soothe the federation; used the Bogra formula to pull along both wings in federal fashion; allowed for a prime minister from a minority faith; dismissed the idea of One Unit out of hand; and defanged the governor-general in favour of the prime minister and parliament.
“We have no doubt that the people’s joy will be shared by that sagacious statesman who is our Governor-General,” cheered Dawn, “who is averse to autocracy and dictatorship”, and for whom the amendments would mean lessening “the burdens of high office”.
If there was joy, it showed up as a second coup. The soldiers were moved, the assembly was padlocked, and the Constitution gutted by the dying Ghulam Muhammad on October 24 — 72 hours before it was to be passed.
Exile at home
With the Long Parliament killed off, Mahmud Husain quit politics forever. Four years later, his lead critic, Iskander Mirza, announced Ayub’s martial law; a dictatorship of the army was declared; and the Jinnah-era Muslim League buried without ceremony.
Mahmud returned to teaching: first as head of the history department at Karachi University, and then settling into the University of Dhaka as vice chancellor — the same place where, as a young man of 25, he had begun his career as an academic.
In the three decades since, he’d had time to reflect: on age, on change, on history. Addressing Dhaka’s students at their convocation in 1961, Mahmud said, “We have lived through experiences that you have not had; you can look forward towards a future that we will not share … what can bridge the gap between them is the historical sense which education tries to impart in you. A man without a sense of history is not truly civilised.”
But his real message was about renewal. “You as young men must understand the legacy you have inherited from the past,” he said. “It is quite possible that you will not like certain parts of it, and will want to remould it or refashion it. But history will tell you that the best kind of remoulding, and the most effective, is that which is inspired by a full understanding of all that your traditions imply.”
Not that history was done yet: Dhaka’s students — who had embraced Mahmud’s call to Pakistan a generation ago — had found their next battle: the grotesque 1962 Constitution (dreamed up by Ayub and drafted by his lawyer), along with the arrest of Suhrawardy the same year, were reason enough. Waves of protests started spilling out on campus.
Ayub’s governor, the widely despised Monem Khan, thought violence the right response. But when students protested in front of the Dacca College compound, said Dawn, Mahmud “did not agree with the authorities that disciplinary action should be taken against these students. Matters came to a climax … when “the authorities” demanded his resignation immediately.”
Put in explicit terms, Mahmud refused to allow the security forces to enter the campus. Repeating what he had done when Pakistan’s first coup unfolded, the vice chancellor “declined to resign and preferred dismissal”.
Ousted yet again, Mahmud headed to Dhaka airport, where the students had rushed to protest his departure. After he landed in Karachi, he told the reporters gathered there, “Main mu’alim hoon, police afsar nahin. (I am a teacher, not a police officer.)”
It only followed that Mahmud’s choice for the 1965 presidential election was Fatima Jinnah, who gave it her all against Ayub; but for the rigging, it would have been Fatima in the presidency. Upon news of her sudden passing, Dawn places Mahmud, with fellow mourners, at her house that day.
Two years later, news of another actual president’s departure came through: his brother Zakir Husain’s.
Choices
In his thoughtful meditation At Home in India: The Muslim Saga, Indian foreign minister Salman Khurshid writes about his grandfather, Zakir Husain, and about the India “for which two decades earlier, during Partition, he had chosen to give up his brother, nephews, and nieces”. True, Zakir did give up his brother. But Mahmud gave up his entire family.
“Mahmud Husain Khan had met his two brothers, Zakir and Yusuf Husain, in India only once after Partition,” Khurshid writes. “…The three educationists met in New Delhi during the 1956 UNESCO conference. The only other time that Mahmud Husain Khan travelled to India was to attend the funeral of President Zakir Husain on May 3, 1969.”
In fact, the record reflects two-way travel. Weeks after the conference, Zakir Husain visited Pakistan to attend Mahmud Husain’s daughter’s wedding in Karachi, where the brothers are photographed alongside Fatima Jinnah.
“Mahmud Husain Khan did not make a special choice to live in Pakistan,” Salman Khurshid goes on. “As head of the political science department of Dacca University, destiny placed him in Pakistan. India lost an eminent educationist and Dr Zakir Husain his favourite brother.”
But just as it would be a disservice to Zakir Husain to say Pakistan lost a visionary because he happened to be heading Jamia in Delhi, it would be unfair to say the same of Mahmud Husain in Dhaka.
After all, Mahmud did not become a Pakistani by default — as if he’d forgotten to board the Delhi train. Believing in the Pakistan project was a choice. Making it the purpose of his life was a choice. Referring to Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a ‘nijat dahinda’ was a choice.
And leaving the brother he loved was a choice: the author is correct to say Mahmud was Zakir’s favourite brother, just as Zakir was Mahmud’s north star. When that star faded out in 1969, the younger Husain had his first heart attack — one he never fully recovered from, and which abbreviated the rest of his days.
The second devastation was the land he had fought for all his life: East Pakistan, as it descended into a living nightmare.
Back in the old days, Mahmud had shaken his head at the Congressites wanting a secession button in the Constitution; only tyrannies did that, relying on brute force to crush such urges. In free states, however, he sighed on the floor, “to provide for secession would be tantamount to committing suicide”.
“Then you can leave it out,” said Bhupendra, “and see what happens.”
No one had paid much attention then: 1953 was another country, before parliamentary solutions were done away with; before emergency fell over Dhaka; before One Unit extinguished majority rule; before the capital was shifted from Karachi to Islamabad; before the humiliations of Ayub’s long dictatorship.
But now it was 1970, and Mahmud Husain had already exited the cabinet, the assembly, and the university over East Bengal — over the quest for a federal republic. The solution he arrived at was sobering: if Pakistan’s two halves were to part, he said, he hoped it would be with the quiet closure of two brothers at their father’s funeral; words of greater subconscious significance than may have appeared to him.
There would be no such parting: the popular will was denied. Gruesome civil war ensued.
Dhaka University was the first target, as Yahya’s men rained fire on the same halls where Mahmud had laughed and cried with his students (the brigadier there would shrug that using tanks, mortar shells, and machine guns on a college campus may have been ‘overkill’).
In the rest of the city, too, history tore itself apart: the Shaheed Minar was torn down by the military, while ex-governor Monem Khan was executed by Mukti Bahini militants.
In his book Doctor Mahmud Husain: Ek Tarikh Ek Idara, professor Syed Ghulam Abbas writes that Mahmud inveighed against using military force to the end. But when the fall of Dhaka was announced, “his composure broke. He wept and wept inconsolably.”
Mahmud Husain died three years later, while serving as vice chancellor of Karachi University. One observer quoted on the occasion, “Dil hee toh hai na sang o khisht/dard se bhar na aaye kyun.”
Parveen Shakir, M.A. student at Karachi University, on Mahmud’s passing, 1975:
اترا تھا لہو جس کا رنگ شاخِ شہر میں
پھیلا تھا نمو پھول نے جس دستِ ہنر میں
روٹھا ہے گلستان سے بہاروں کی طلب میں
بکھرا ہے ہواؤں سے وہ خوشبو کے سفر میں
The one whose blood brought color to the branches of the city,
Whose artistry made the flowers bloom with such vitality,
Has turned away from the garden in search of spring,
Scattered by the winds on a journey of fragrance
In death, the institutions Mahmud had honoured — Karachi, Balochistan, and Sindh Universities — closed that day; the national assembly passed a unanimous resolution (“He continued to serve the cause of education in Pakistan till his end,” said speaker Miraj Khalid); and Jamia Millia Islamia, Malir — which he had founded and named for his brother’s in Delhi — housed his burial as he had wished.
With a handful of exceptions, writes Sharif ul Mujahid, “no educationist, no literary figure, and no political leader … induced such widespread profound and unmitigated sorrow by almost all sections of the Pakistani society since the 1950s”.
Exactly half a century since his death, however, Pakistan remains as contested as ever. As one great novelist put it, “I do not expect history to be anything but a long defeat.”
Parliament has never been weaker and the establishment never stronger; students in the so-called peripheries have no protections; and the federal impulse lies shattered by the deep state.
Bahawalpur is not yet a province; Balochistan is not yet trusted with popular representation. In merging with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the tribal areas may have taken a significant step toward their “ultimate destiny”; their actual progress on the ground remains arrested.
Other struggles continue: when Mahmud Husain tabled the original Pakistan Army Act in the assembly, as deputy defence minister in 1952, it made no mention of trying civilians. It would take Ayub Khan (a recurring antagonist in Mahmud’s life) to amend the law; the Supreme Court’s Constitutional Bench has now reversed its own landmark verdict from 2023, restoring Ayub’s change. Military trials of civilians remain on the books.
As for free thought, both Jamias — in Pakistan and India — have become metaphors for their respective founder-brother’s dreams. Of the original, Zakir Husain’s Jamia in Delhi, Salman Khurshid writes of how it was reduced to “an unwanted child after independence”, the cause of which lay “in the predicament of nationalism and minority character”.
If so, Pakistan can hardly claim the same excuse: the minority question is far from the scene for Malir’s Jamia, which has Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s nationalisation to thank for its disrepair. (“A mature and affectionate teacher,” Bhutto said to the press upon Mahmud’s passing.)
And yet, even if history were a long defeat, per the same novelist, it did carry “glimpses of final victory”.
So, too, did Mahmud Husain’s journey from a young nationalist man in Jamia, amid grief and fracture, to a beloved teacher in Karachi. If any one theme stands out, it’s that countries are not created once: what was wrested from empire now requires wresting from itself. If Pakistan was impossible until it wasn’t, so will be federalism, democracy, and dignity.
But to be able to get there, we must first remember. Or, as Mahmud Husain put it, “Let history be an actual record of what we were, not what we ought to have been.”
As both brothers’ lands went to war this past week — with television anchors invading Karachi, and Indian fighter jets getting blasted out of the sky — history’s hopes remain unfinished: in ways more than one, Pakistan’s beginning has not yet ended.
