Probing early Pakistan: East Bengal politicians and their exchanges with Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan,1947–51

Abstract

This article builds on the correspondence of the prime minister of Pakistan with five political figures from East Bengal who flourished between 1947 and 1951. These were Khwaja Nazimuddin and his brother Shahabuddin, Fazlur Rahman, Nurul Amin and Jogendranath Mandal. Their exchanges with Prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan—at the head of the central government in Karachi—provide a portentous pre-history of the future engagements between the two wings and their states and societies in the lead-up to the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. The fragments of these exchanges presented here are an attempt to provide a glimpse into Bengali politicians’ manifold activities in Pakistan, which revolved around the minority and refugee question, religious orientation of education, non-devaluation and its impact on trade, a range of administrative issues and party politics. Drawing upon their letters in the Liaquat Ali Khan papers, this article deploys these five themes as entry-points into East–West exchanges before and beneath the conventional coordinates of linguistic provincialism (1948–52), economic instigation (1954–66) and democratic desires (1966–71).

Introduction

Until recently, the late 1940s remained something of an ‘academic no-man’s land’ in the Indian subcontinent, as the two successor states to the British Raj found themselves besieged by ‘the long partition’. ¹ In Pakistan, given its two-winged emergence, the west-based state soon found itself ranged against its eastern counterpart along the fault lines of identity and integration. ² The question of identity often congealed around issues of language and religion, whereas attempts at integration tended to be centred on practices of food and work. Simultaneously, the state embarked upon a stop–start constitutional trajectory from dominion to democracy and from republic to military rule, ‘in search of a narrative’. ³ Each of these themes have been well-traced by the existing scholarship in an attempt to ‘make sense’ of both the united and then divided Pakistan. ⁴ However, before the stage was set for a series of climactic acts—from the riots of 1954 to the war of 1971—multiple attempts emerged from the wings to engage the two, as shown by Neilesh Bose in his cultural history of ‘Pak-Bangla’ from the first partition (1905) to the second (1947) and 5 years beyond (1952). ⁵

In a similar vein, preceding the mid-1950s political coalition of A. K. Fazlul Huq (East Bengal’s chief minister, 1954 and governor, 1956–58), Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (prime minister, 1956–57) and Maulana A. H. Bhashani, an assorted group of East Bengali politicians not only represented the province but verily personified it. ⁶ They were Khwaja Nazimuddin (governor-general, 1948–51 and prime minister, 1951–53) and his brother Khwaja Shahabuddin (interior minister, 1948–51), Nurul Amin (chief minister, 1948–54), Jogendra Nath Mandal (labour and law minister, 1947–50) and Fazlur Rahman (commerce minister, 1947–54), in addition to Mohammad Ali Bogra (prime minister, 1953–55). They tried variously to navigate the chasm between the national centre and the regional province, which was widening—given the former’s Pakistanisation of the latter—from as early as 1948. Some of them are present in the scholarly recall as post-1947 extensions of pre-1947 enthusiasms of the Purba Pakistan movement. ⁷

Their individual interactions, which are the focus of this article, evolved in a fivefold framework of the early postcolonial nation-state and comprised (a) the partitioned domain of minority refugees; (b) ideological refractions on the question of future official education; (c) politics around the economy, namely the issue of currency devaluation; (d) challenges of administration in a fragile apparatus and (e) political aims for personal gain. Utilising hitherto unused correspondences between these politicians and the first prime minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, this article attempts to reconstruct a complex and detailed narrative around miscellaneous aspects of the first 5 years in the region and the nation.

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay has searched for ‘meanings of freedom’ in West Bengal over a similar time-frame. ⁸ As the historiography of Pakistan has evolved internationally within Cold War frames and internally within those of Islam and martial law, there remains comparatively less scholarship on its earliest East Bengali players on the political turf. ⁹ Alongside, there is scholarship on the Pakistan army and its wars, ¹⁰ with a greater focus in the West, whereas the East is now ensconced in a history of Bangladesh, c. 1971. ¹¹

Alternatively, and arguably, a historical treatment of inter-personal exchanges between these prominent East Bengali figures throws a diverse light on different aspects of politics in early Pakistan, going beyond its endemic West-based ‘faction building’. ¹² Some of these sketches include discussions of familiar content, such as the majority–minority question, which emanated from the 1947-induced population exchange. ¹³ Others are lesser known, like the attitudes towards early education initiatives and the proclamation of economic sovereignty via the value of currency. This article uses information from the correspondence between the above-named politicians and Liaquat Ali Khan to demonstrate the heterogeneous character of the Pakistani state and society.

As Layli Uddin wrote, East Bengal was ‘the principal space’ in which the Pakistani state performed, which, as Bose noted, was its ‘largest single bloc’. ¹⁴ It is therefore interesting to study the distinctive performances of some principal East Bengali players from the perspective of writing a history of the state’s formation on its own terms, not merely as a teleological prelude to Bangladesh. At the time of the dramatic decline of the All-India Muslim League and the accompanying ‘ascendancy of the bureaucracy’ there, studying the correspondence of these East Bengali politicians enables us to study their adaptations to (East) Pakistan during its first 5 years of existence. ¹⁵

‘…no talk of union…’

As Sayeed Ferdous suggested, in the first 5 years after Partition, personal identities changed in uncertain regional and national public spheres. ¹⁶ For instance, there was Mohammad Ali Bogra, a future prime minister of the country, albeit one who was considered a ‘political nonentity’. ¹⁷ In 1943, he was chairman of the district municipal board in his pocket borough of Bogra, before becoming the parliamentary secretary to Nazimuddin. Four years of Nazimuddin’s (1943–45) and Suhrawardy’s (1946–47) premierships in a united Bengal had given way— 4 months into a partitioned Bengal—to a Muslim League deeply divided between three factions: rural-professional, conservative-landed and ‘modernist’. ¹⁸ Meanwhile, Nazimuddin’s ministry’s ‘discriminatory treatment to those…who did not vote for’ him was regrouping ‘power politics in Eastern Pakistan’. ¹⁹

Nazimuddin had cancelled nominations and elections to local bodies first and issued an ordinance later, drawing upon the Government of India Act of 1935, the Bengal Municipal Act of 1932 and even the Bengal Local Self-Government Act of 1885. If he wished to wipe the pre-partition slate clean and create what Bhashani called the ‘pocket League’ and Suhrawardy the ‘sarkari [government] League’, then he was doing so in a cynical manner. ²⁰ These nominations made before 15 August 1947, were targeted in West Bengal too, by the Prafulla Chandra Ghosh ministry, before it relented. In the East, Nazimuddin’s recalcitrance created space for the formation of an opposition, the Awami Muslim League in June 1949, led by Bhashani.

Mohammad Ali Bogra’s representations to Liaquat Ali Khan from December 1947, in which his case studies were the district boards of Chittagong and Tipperah, as well as his own experiences, provide examples of Nazimuddin’s decisions. Bogra’s nominee in his district had voted for Suhrawardy, and so Nazimuddin preferred Dr Mufizuddin Ahmed, who had voted against the League in 1945. Despite his absence from district board meetings, he was present in the elections, fighting Bogra, the League candidate. More worryingly, breaking with precedent, no member from the scheduled castes was appointed, and this would soon become a flashpoint within the League in the East. In Tipperah, on the other hand, the situation was stagnant. The same board had been functioning there for 11 years and the same chairman for 17. Bogra had suggested—unsuccessfully—Tofazzal Ali, an advocate who was the ex-deputy speaker of the provincial assembly and had accompanied Liaquat Ali Khan in his electoral tour of Assam in 1945–46. In Chittagong, where the nominations had been made in consultation with the district magistrate, they were cancelled at the insistence of the secretary of the district Muslim League, and Bogra argued that locally nothing new had happened post-Partition in political representation. ²¹

Liaquat Ali Khan had no issues with this; rather, he simply wished that Nazimuddin would spread the largesse as widely as possible. As befitted the prime minister of a somewhat uniquely vulnerable country, he did not want anyone ‘to feel aggrieved, as this promoted disunity’, and hoped that Nazimuddin would ‘remove the grievances which Mohamed Ali…feels so strongly’ about. ²² Nazimuddin, on the other hand, felt strongly about the province’s deteriorating ‘ways and means’, which made administration impossible. Reflecting upon the troubled financial legacy of the undivided province and the transfer of government to Dacca with its attendant demands, he reported that having spent about ₹10 million from their receipts, East Bengal had a ‘debit balance’ of ₹4.3 million and pending bills of ₹15 million. ²³ With the revenue deficit for the financial year expected to deteriorate, and West Bengal threatening non-payment of inter- provincial claims, Nazimuddin sought about ₹50 million from Karachi. ²⁴

This was not the only embarrassment for the still-un-elected premier, who, along with certain of his cabinet colleagues, was relying on the prime-ministerial suggestion to extend the time one could remain in office without being elected to 1 year. ²⁵ It was no easy matter to hold an election then, for the 1935 rules mandated that a person could not vote in an area without having resided there for the greater part of that year. In 1947–48, it prevented thousands, including Nazimuddin, ‘who were registered voters in…West Bengal from [becoming] a voter in East’. ²⁶ The kaleidoscope of Nazimuddin’s concerns in the summer of 1948 is a good prism through which to see the conversations between Karachi and Dacca. Conscious of the ‘small’ presence of the army with the departure of British officers in his ‘isolated’ province, Nazimuddin appealed for a strengthening of the area. Perhaps this had something to do with Governor-General Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s visit, which had seemed ‘most opportune’ to Nazimuddin in a ‘very gloomy’ scenario. ²⁷ The premier’s list for brightening this gloom, shared with Liaquat Ali Khan, included a mix of institutional, material and individual concerns:

An overseas allowance for officers from East serving in West…arms and ammunition for East…offices and residential quarters for staff in East. Dawn [to] be published from Dacca [too]. Retrench[ed] central service officials…to be treated as refugees…but…different from those in West [and] the centre to bear the expenses. Bird and Co. were asked to supply coal…to whole of Pakistan…. They were stopped because it was suggested that some Hindus should also be included in this organisation. This may lead to delay and cause a serious shortage in 2–3 months’ time… ²⁸

In September 1948, Nazimuddin was informed that by year-end, about 8,000 railway employees were going to be retrenched, prompting fears of violence and requiring protection for railway property. The alarmed premier protested that it was ‘neither practicable nor desirable’ to do so as the price of rice had risen owing to floods, and the government was ‘trying to move its reserves to the interior’. ²⁹ Without force, without food and with a troubled borderland, Nazimuddin needed this retrenchment to be postponed until 1949, when either the new crop would come to the market or the new crop of the National Guard would enter the province.

There was no denying that Khwaja Nazimuddin’s major concern in September 1948, before he left Dacca for Karachi to become Pakistan’s second governor- general upon Jinnah’s demise, was about Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. ³⁰ The gadfly from Calcutta, who still resided there, Suhrawardy was the bete noire not just of Nazimuddin but verily the then-state of Pakistan itself. He was visiting Dacca on a 10-day tour for communal harmony, but, in the premier’s eyes, it was a visit where the consummate politician was meeting with party workers. Neither of these pursuits was to the liking of the former nawab, and when writing to Liaquat Ali Khan, he complained in predictable terms and charged Suhrawardy thus:

Everywhere he runs down Pakistan… He told the Hindu electorates of Dacca University that if they vote against [the] government candidate, and [he] is defeated, this will help in strengthening his position—and he is for the protection of minorities and ultimately for the unity of two Bengals. ³¹

Nazimuddin consequently prohibited Suhrawardy’s entry into East Bengal, but before doing so, he laid out the charges in the press. Informing him that his programme was unnecessary and unfair because it created the impression that the minorities were being mistreated, Nazimuddin taunted Suhrawardy that the latter had thus far not travelled in West Bengal, from where the Muslims have been forced to leave for East. But it was Suhrawardy’s meetings with the workers that particularly disturbed Nazimuddin, given their alleged ‘trend…to instigate the supporters of United Bengal’. The third charge was that ‘a person who…is a national of the Indian dominion…cannot take part in the internal politics of another dominion’, whereupon followed the detention order of 3 June 1948. ³²

Suhrawardy, who still resided at 40 Theatre Road in Calcutta, was the redoubtable Leaguer of the years 1945–47. He had trumped the Indian National Congress in the 1945–46 provincial elections, trail-blazed the Direct-Action Day violence in mid-August and thereafter entered an unlikely alliance with Gandhi to calm down passions across the province. Together with Bhashani and the philosopher-activist Abul Hashim, who had politicised ‘Bengali Muslims around the idea of Pakistan’, he had taken the League in Bengal beyond the Dacca-based clique. ³³ No wonder Nazimuddin had no love lost for the professional, who, alongside Sarat Bose, had appealed to the Congress’s central leadership against the division of Bengal. ³⁴ Subsequently, as the question of minorities emerged, Suhrawardy’s position was close to that of the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru’s:

The Muslims of the Indian Union have made India their home…I wish that the Hindus of East Bengal would adopt the [same] attitude…. There can be no talk of union…but there can be closer cooperation and friendliness…. Communal harmony is dependent upon the goodwill of the majority…a Minorities’ Security Council/Department should be established…. While each dominion claims friendliness with Britain, America, Russia, China or Indonesia, it considers its sister dominion to be its enemy. ³⁵

In the two Bengals, 2 years before the epochal Nehru-Liaquat pact, Suhrawardy was claiming that a million Hindu refugees had moved to the West from the East. ³⁶ This migration needed to be checked by Nazimuddin’s government, else it would ‘throw out the Muslim population in Assam, Orissa, Bihar and even Uttar Pradesh’, and so, for Suhrawardy, it was ‘for the sake of Pakistan itself…that the Hindus should be kept in East Bengal.’ ³⁷ The ‘complacency and the immobility’ of Nazimuddin’s government appeared alarming to him, notwithstanding the 1948 B. C. Roy-Nazimuddin declaration ‘safeguarding the minorities on either side’. ³⁸ A cosmopolitan Suhrawardy lamented that while there were ‘customs regulations between European countries…nowhere the passengers are subjected to harassment as here’, ³⁹ and sighed that with official trade at a standstill and assets being divided, was it any surprise that Dacca’s Hindu traders and middle class was migrating? ⁴⁰

When he travelled to New Delhi, it was the Karachi and Sindh government that were in Suhrawardy’s sights. He requested Liaquat ‘to consider appointing a Hindu minister in Sindh [or] a Hindu parliamentary secretary, a Hindu district magistrate and a Hindu superintendent of police…if you really want the Muslims of India to get a fair deal.’ ⁴¹ Then, there was the refugee property and its requisitioning policy, which would metamorphose into the era-defining evacuee property complex. ⁴² Here, Suhrawardy wanted both governments to go slowly, so that people stayed and claimed that ‘in Delhi, 3,000 houses [are] kept vacant for the Muslims to return’. ⁴³ He also brought up a counterexample from Karachi, that of ‘a house of Khem Chand known as “Rock House”…. I have held peace meetings in this house and the owner is determined not to leave…. Still notice has been served…this is a critical case.’ ⁴⁴

These were but digressions, and on 30 May 1948, Liaquat Ali Khan told Suhrawardy that he disapproved of the latter’s public criticisms of Pakistan, as these were fodder for critics in India. Suhrawardy’s location afforded him a greater appreciation of the communal situation in India, where he claimed that ‘feelings of hostility are kept up by the refugees [and] the position can be eased only if the Hindus here feel that Pakistan is dealing generously with non-Muslims’. ⁴⁵ Suhrawardy thought that minorities within Pakistan were ‘insurance’ for minorities in India, and so, whether in Sindh or East Bengal, there had to be ‘Hindu ministers, secretaries, administrative officers, minorities boards, educational institutions….’ ⁴⁶ After his externment from Dacca in early June, Suhrawardy did attempt a point-by-point rebuttal of Nazimuddin’s charges, as his personal ‘fruits of independence’ from a British government that, after all, had never behaved like this with any of them. His retort to Nazimuddin deserves to be quoted at length, for it fits with the wider debates relating to Pakistan’s later failures in national and democratic consolidation:

[1] I, as a Muslim and as one who has moved in East Bengal could render more service to the minorities by working in East Bengal among Muslims…. A voice raised by the minorities will cut no ice with the majority… [2] Why should Muslims [of East Bengal] consider [Union] after having obtained Pakistan? To unite and become a part of the Indian Union, Pakistan can never agree. To unite, and become a part of Pakistan, the Indian Union can never agree. To unite and become sovereign, neither will agree [Here, he left out the fourth option, realised in 1971: to remain divided but leave Pakistan]. [3] The question of citizenship has not yet been concluded…but, even if I was a citizen of the Indian Union, Pakistan was formed to save not only the Muslims of the majority areas but also of the minority areas… ⁴⁷

J. N. Mandal: ‘Becoming Hindu’

Liaquat Ali Khan’s promise to look into this matter was not followed by any support. ⁴⁸ The prime minister was neither willing nor able to enter a matter that, to him, was rather provincial. More than that, he could not agree with Suhrawardy that Nazimuddin was ‘complacent about the position of the Hindu minority’, and instead preferred to trade charges with his counterpart, Jawaharlal Nehru. ⁴⁹ Taken together, all this makes for a denser reading of the three-dimensional equations between East and West Bengal, the centre and the province and Pakistan and India. There was one political leader in Pakistan, however, the turn in whose treatment belied Liaquat’s claim about Nazimuddin’s concern. Indeed, his ‘becoming Hindu’ was arguably a factor in the lack of recognition of caste politics in Pakistan. ⁵⁰ This was the Scheduled-Caste leader Jogendranath Mandal, whose appointment as Pakistan’s minister for law and labour from August 1947 to September 1950 was an anomaly, even if in line with the preceding (1945–47) period’s anachronisms. ⁵¹

From the outset, Mandal approached the premier in the east and the prime minister in the west to include two scheduled caste members in the cabinet at Dacca, to appoint one parliamentary secretary and to ‘observe communal ratios in other departments.’ ⁵² As 1947 gave way to 1948, he felt frustrated while seeking ‘a time limit for such action’, for otherwise he feared being forced to resign. ⁵³ Mandal belatedly grasped that in both New Delhi and Karachi, the ‘greatest stress’ was the evacuees’ property, which, for some Pakistani ministers, was ‘the only positive gain’ of Partition. ⁵⁴ For Nazimuddin, the ‘slightest relaxation’ also meant a ‘grossly disproportionate number of Hindus’ being appointed, who would try to exploit the scheduled castes. ⁵⁵

By May 1948, the situation had moved beyond such tokenism. Mandal spoke about receiving many representations from the East Pakistan scheduled castes regarding their future. ⁵⁶ Worried that many of them had been ‘successfully misguided by…the caste-Hindus’, ⁵⁷ he wished to visit the province, to which the prime minister agreed. ⁵⁸ By mid-June, he was in Calcutta, as the non-inclusion of scheduled-caste members in the Nazimuddin cabinet had ‘accentuated…disruption’ among the community, and they had convened a conference in mid-July at Barisal, Mandal’s native district, which he attended. ⁵⁹

When he returned to Karachi, Mandal had another major task in front of him, namely that of the appointment of the first chief justice of the federal court of Pakistan, which would have a ripple effect on the two high courts of Lahore and Dacca. ⁶⁰ This necessitated raising the retirement age of the judges from 60 to 63, bringing it closer to that of the judges of the federal court (65). Mandal made this suggestion keeping in mind the ‘very poor’ standard of the Dacca high court; an ‘understaffed’ set-up that faced the prospect of falling behind its Lahore counterpart in seniority and efficiency of its judges. ⁶¹ This provides context for the fact that only one out of the first five chief justices came from Dacca, and that too in 1960 for a brief tenure. ⁶² But Mandal, whose functioning was constrained by the partition, was more interested in the atrocities against the scheduled castes in East Bengal and the inequities against non-Muslims in West Pakistan. ⁶³

In September 1949, Mandal brought up the case of R. C. Seth, the chief chemist of Dalmia cement’s Shantinagar factory in Karachi, who had been working there since October 1947 but had recently been reported by the police. Mandal was suspicious, as similar concerns owned by non-Muslims in Pakistan were similarly ‘making room for Muslim aspirants.’ ⁶⁴ In 2 years, out of the thousand or so employees of the cement factory, only four were non-Muslims, of whom three were Pakistani Hindus, with Seth being the only exception. The interior ministry’s inquiry, on the other hand, claimed that Seth was ‘from Jullundur [and was] suspected of having taken part in the massacre of Muslims in 1947.’ ⁶⁵ More than the issue itself, it was Mandal’s ‘attitude [and] tone’ which was disliked in Karachi because ‘he will become centre of receiving complaints…and eventually it will be used…by India.’ ⁶⁶ In November 1949, Mandal narrated other such instances to the prime minister and shared the increasing number of letters from members of the Scheduled Castes about troubles in the East, which underlined that while, ‘for the previous acts, the police were responsible…in the recent occurrences…[people were] involved’. In his representation to Khan, Mandal provided a list of instances, with names and addresses, which Manohor Dhali (MLA) had compiled:

1. Forcible conversion (7 cases), 2. Criminal assault and rape of women (10 cases), 3. Looting of houses (7 cases), 4. Looting of shops (6 cases), 5. Looting of cattle (cases from 3 villages), 6. Inhuman assault resulting in death (9 cases), 7. Extortion of money (cases from 10 villages of amounts Rs 800/-, 1000/-, 800/-, 50/- and 9000/-), 8. Cow slaughter (1 case), and 9. breaking of images of goddesses (3 cases). ⁶⁷

Similar vignettes were also received from Nityananda Biswas (Bagerhat, Khulna), a founding Namasudra member of Mandal’s Scheduled Castes Federation. Then, information came from Dacca (Ramerkhola village, PS Serajdigha) of Namasudra houses being looted due to a quarrel regarding crops and cattle, which had led to the death of one Muslim and thus provoked the adjoining villages. Kalicharan Roy Chowdhury—the Namasudra president of the district federation and a ‘staunch supporter’ of the government—and members of his family were beaten, while arrests were made from the scheduled castes. A similar statement was issued by Surendra Nath Biswas (village Boultali, PS Gopalganj, sub-division of Faridpur), and Mandal hoped that Liaquat Ali Khan would speak with the premier, Nurul Amin. Mandal accepted that ‘in such cases, some police excess is inevitable’ and all he wanted was that ‘such instances should not be exploited for…persecution’, for ‘it will only lead to exodus.’ ⁶⁸

By February 1950, Mandal was back in Dacca to try to stem the rising tide of migration, which would eventuate in the Nehru-Liaquat pact in April. There, he came to know that serious disturbances had taken place in the capital itself and met with Amin. Thereafter, he visited Barisal and Khulna, where the situation was so unsafe that even Mandal was unable to leave Dacca freely. Afterwards, he wrote to Khan that ‘almost all [Hindus are] restless to migrate’, with ‘the scheduled castes suffer[ing] [similarly]’. ⁶⁹ Consequently, Mandal advised, in contradiction to the Nehru-Liaquat agreement, that ‘safe passage should be provided for those who want to evacuate [as] stopping intending evacuees will add complications….’ ⁷⁰ By September, Mandal himself had started to stay away from Karachi. ⁷¹

In the first week of October 1950, the Pakistan deputy high commission in Calcutta reported that Mandal, in an interview with the Civil & Military Gazette, had mentioned ‘his differences of opinion…over the question of treatment of minorities.’ As the Calcutta newspaper Rozana Hind carried this report, Mandal refused to meet Pakistani officials ‘on grounds of health’. ⁷² Instead, he issued a strong statement announcing his resignation and ‘castigating’ the ‘unsympathetic’ Karachi, ⁷³ behind which the Pakistani officials and press saw the hand of Nehru’s opponent over the Delhi Pact, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee. ⁷⁴ A week later, Karachi published a statement, giving its side of the story of Mandal’s departure.

Since May 1950, Liaquat Ali Khan had read reports alleging that Mandal was in touch with Mookerjee and others ‘who were bent upon wrecking the Delhi Agreement’. ⁷⁵ When Nurul Amin finally appointed Mr Barori, another scheduled-caste leader, as minister, Mandal denounced it. Barori had been a minister in united Bengal, but he did not belong to Mandal’s federation. Subsequently, these personal and political entanglements deepened, with Mandal alternatively affirming his loyalty to Pakistan and opposing Barori’s appointment. ⁷⁶ This uncertain state continued till September 1950, when an unwell Mandal went to Calcutta. As his stay there was prolonged, speculation about his future lingered, and in the first week of October, the dam of claims and counterclaims burst with Mandal’s letter of resignation appearing in Indian newspapers.

To Karachi, Mandal’s position seemed in line with the Hindu Mahasabha’s that either East Bengal should be incorporated into India or ‘all Hindus should be pulled out of Pakistan’, which was at odds with the positions of both governments. Karachi had strong words for Mandal’s ‘betrayal: a self-confessed liar, traitor and coward…the greatest disservice to the cause of minorities throughout Pakistan.’ ⁷⁷ From mid- October, both Dacca and Karachi were focused more on Mookerjee than Mandal. Reports came from Calcutta claiming that the ‘draft of the resignation letter was composed by S. P. Mukherji’ and the ‘party [Mandal] was now joining would see that Muslims do not live in India.’ ⁷⁸ It was not as if Mandal had a unanimous welcome in India. In the press, an editorial in the Bombay Chronicle dated 10 October 1950, called him an ‘opportunist [who had] put in jeopardy interests of minorities by provoking the majority in both.’ ⁷⁹ Meanwhile, in Dacca, the working committee of Mandal’s federation had met and passed resolutions condemning his resignation ‘without having consulted this federation’, cancelling his membership, demanding his expulsion from Pakistan’s constituent assembly and distancing itself from Mandal’s action as it had ‘no reflection on the loyalty of the scheduled castes to Pakistan.’ ⁸⁰ On his part, with every statement, Mandal seemed to be giving both states fodder to attack him. On 22 October 1950, the Hindustan Times carried his words as below:

I should have come out of Pakistan as early as October 1947, but I continued against my will and judgement, only to oblige Hindu friends…who thought that I should not forego the opportunity of learning first-hand the Pakistan move to exterminate the Hindus. ⁸¹

National Education and National Currency

While extermination was one extreme, another frame of this interconnected history was education and its national plan in accordance with the objective’s resolution of March 1949, moved by Liaquat Ali Khan in the constituent assembly. The lead in this arena was taken by a lawyer–politician from Dacca, Fazlur Rahman, who—as Pakistan’s minister for commerce and education in September 1949—laid out a twofold policy for an education system based on Islam and to imbue children with an international outlook. ⁸² He felt that the time had come to overcome the existing system, as it could not be expected to produce loyal citizens. At the educational conference of November 1947, Mandal had opposed Rahman’s proposal for Urdu to be the language of primary education, ⁸³ just as he would criticise the 1949 objectives resolution for its disregard for minorities. By 1952, when Rahman got a board of historians to prepare a history of the freedom movement of Muslims, Mandal had left, having refused the limited rights on offer. ⁸⁴

For the successful achievement of Rahman’s aim, two things were essential: textbooks and teachers. As far as textbooks were concerned, the need was to draw up a syllabus for every subject based on ‘Islamic ideology (as distinct from theology)’ and to get textbooks written by Urdu authors ‘the same all over Pakistan’. There was also the matter of compiling a national history as a reference book, comprising topics like Islamic history and civilisation, the rise and fall of Muslim states worldwide and the contribution made by Muslims to the sub-continent. ⁸⁵

Though education was constitutionally a responsibility of the provinces, as in India, their limited resources made it imperative for the centre to take the lead. The literacy percentage for India in 1947 had got further skewed in Pakistan with the ‘exodus of non-Muslims (educationally more advanced) and…Muslim refugees (to a large extent illiterate).’ ⁸⁶ Adult education, however, was not merely the imparting of literacy but also had spiritual, civic and vocational dimensions. This involved infrastructure and audio-visual aids provided by a resourceful and powerful central government.

Above all, for Rahman, Karachi had a duty to produce ‘patriotic citizens not warped by narrow provincialism or Hindu influence in East Bengal.’ ⁸⁷ A related issue was the position of Urdu, as by adopting Hindi in Nagari script, India had sidelined it. ⁸⁸ In Pakistan, therefore, it was imperative to have Urdu in Arabic declared as the ‘state language’, thereby overcoming the ‘parochial mentality’ of East Bengal and Sindh as well as the resistance of West Punjab and the Frontier Province. ⁸⁹ Perhaps the foreshadowing of Bangladesh was never more evident than in the pre-history of post-partition language tensions, as exemplified by the All-Bengal Urdu association and the rival East Pakistan Renaissance Society (est. 1942) and on the fate of the ‘Pak-Bangla’ culture in the new nation-state. ⁹⁰

Rahman considered it imperative for all central government employees to know Urdu, and a bureau of translation was to be set up for all technical and scientific terms. He recalled that in 1949, the non-Muslim community still constituted a third of East Bengal’s population, with its ‘caste Hindus—wedded to Bengali in Sanskrit—the hard-core of resistance’, and was concerned about their ‘anti-national mentality’ enough to suggest reconstructing Bengali language in Arabic script, thereby ‘putting an end to…the common culture of the two Bengals.’ ⁹¹ Rahman was supported by the interior minister Khwaja Shahabuddin, who too highlighted ‘the mischievous language movement’ to the prime minister, also due to the lack of attention to Dacca in major newspapers; for example, the Dawn devoted merely six lines to the first meeting of the legislative assembly there. ⁹²

Turning to technical education, Rahman noted that Pakistan had only three engineering colleges and three universities for a population of 80 million. A grants committee was needed, and here, to him, the hurdle was the conservative finance ministry. Rahman planned to establish a history board, adult-education centres in East Bengal and a number of central committees on syllabus, script and technical education. His future proposals included the central government assuming responsibility for free primary education, setting Urdu as the state language, using the Arabic script for regional languages and setting up centres for translation and teacher training. In the financial year of 1949–50, he sought the prime minister’s support for two schoolteacher- training institutions, a university science college, a polytechnic and a high school—all in Karachi—as well as a university for the Frontier Province, a grant of ₹1,050,000 for the University of Punjab and a grant of ₹2,100,000 for Dacca University. ⁹³

In the autumn of 1949, it was not only the national plan of education, which aimed at ‘containing East Bengal’ that Fazlur Rahman had an influence on. ⁹⁴ Arguably, his was the most influential voice on Karachi’s decision to abstain from devaluing its currency—ignoring London’s lead—when New Delhi did so. His input as the commerce minister—with Pakistan’s premier export jute being from East Bengal—was key to Liaquat Ali Khan’s decision, and within 2 months, a buoyant Rahman, whose ‘brainchild’ this decision has been called, was keeping the prime minister’s spirits high by giving a ‘cheerful picture’ of export prospects. ⁹⁵ Although jute was not yet moving in substantial quantities because of a deadlock with its principal buyer, India, baling for foreign markets went on. ⁹⁶ The cotton market was holding better, while wool prices in the commonwealth were such that devaluation stood ‘discounted’. The last substantial item, tea, had seen a new contract with Britain for 1950, and for Rahman, ‘the only fly in the ointment’ was dealing with India. ⁹⁷ Here, his economic bullishness matched his nationalist bravado, and he argued for a formal partitioning of the currency, given that ‘with the two rupees no longer at par, full and formal exchange control is inescapable’:

We can eliminate ‘distress’ transactions and ‘free’ rates and we can carry conviction to the world of our decision…. Traders’ pressure will begin to build up against [New Delhi for] formal recognition [of our rate] …. We have reports of foreign firms awaiting devaluation of our rupee…. I would go so far as to say that our application for the membership of the IMF should not be pursued until this matter with India is settled. Otherwise, the fund may make…devaluation the condition for our membership…. Everything would be lost if we do not show firmness in handling India’s non-recognition of our rupee. ⁹⁸

Much of the above would play out over 1950–51, and Rahman remained a steadfast supporter of non-devaluation, softening its consequences for Pakistan’s contracting economy by proposing developmental works. His model was large-scale government expenditure like that done in America in the 1930s. In this drive too, his main adversary was the cautious finance ministry. Rahman was a votary of the deficit budget and argued that handling ‘a deficit budget [was] an indication of our confidence in our future’, while the exchange value of the Pakistani rupee was to be ‘dictated by the terms of trade’, which improved through the year. ⁹⁹ So much so that, by September 1950, exactly a year on from when the two rupees were put on their ‘divergent paths’, ¹⁰⁰ the International Monetary Fund came around to accepting the latter, as in the first 6 months of 1950, Pakistan had achieved a ‘favourable trade balance…with each of the main currency areas—hard, soft and US account.’ ¹⁰¹ This owed a lot to the Korean War and vindicated Rahman, who exulted thus:

The IMF paper…gives ground for confidence [as] India excepted, exports rose about 15 per cent…pressure on import [is] not serious [and] overall trade balance [is] achieved…. The risk we run come[s] from the emphasis laid on our controversy with India – all the decline in Pakistan’s exports consists of decline in the raw jute exported to India…. [However] maintenance of both rupees at the same value becomes relatively unimportant [as] developments towards reduced economic interdependence were [already] under way. ¹⁰²

‘…vulnerable central government…’

Economic interdependence between India and Pakistan was not the only aspect under strain in those transitional, ‘formative’ times of the late 1940s. ¹⁰³ This article has focused on the phase of representations in the first 5 years, before the West Pakistani centre and the East Pakistani province stepped on a spiral of mistrust. An example of this came when the first unit of locally-raised troops in the East moved into its newly-built barracks—the first post-1947 cantonment there—accompanied by a ceremonial display, but not a single minister turned up despite the invitations issued. ¹⁰⁴ By that time, Nurul Amin from Mymensingh was the premier in Dacca, about whom it has been written that he ‘lacked personality…failed to control the bureaucracy [and] was responsible for the failure of democracy in east’, not least during the February 1952 language riots. ¹⁰⁵

In November 1950, however, Amin reminded Liaquat Ali Khan about a grant for the border police and the East Pakistan Rifles, as New Delhi had borne the cost of the latter’s predecessor. After 3 years, a ‘subvention of 30 per cent’ for both these organisations, subject to a maximum of ₹1.75 million, was sanctioned, which however was not enough for Amin. ¹⁰⁶ In the same month, he was recalling his government’s protest at the revision of jute export duty, done without consulting Dacca. It had adversely affected the latter even before non-devaluation in September 1949, and Amin calculated that his province would not be in a position to ‘derive the benefit of increased export as the maximum amount’ to which it was entitled was limited to ₹35 million. ¹⁰⁷

For the 5 years subsequent to the end of World War II, Dacca was receiving—and forwarding to Karachi—representations like the one made by sixty peasants of Tipperah for a pending payment of compensation to war evacuees of the Singarbill aerodrome, for which land in the Brahmanbaria subdivision had been acquired in 1946. There was disagreement about whose liability it was to pay and how it was to be paid. The cultivators approached their ministers, who appeared helpless, thereby risking unpopularity. Amin suggested to the finance minister that a part—10 million out of the total liability of 60 million—be advanced for the ‘cultivators, who are our nationals and suffering’, without necessarily weakening ‘our case with India’, ¹⁰⁸ which ‘undertook to pay these claims’ in late 1948 but had not acted upon it. ¹⁰⁹

Earlier, in January 1949, Nurul Amin had suggested the name of Khan Bahadur Mudabbir Husain, an ex-minister and then-legislator in Dacca, as Pakistan’s envoy to Indonesia. Among his qualifications was that he could ‘speak Urdu quite well’ and that Governor-General Nazimuddin supported him. ¹¹⁰ A year later, when Sahibzada Mohamed Khurshid died while holding the post of governor of the Frontier Province, Nazimuddin suggested recalling High Commissioner Bogra from Canada. Given that the appointment of the governor of Dacca was coming up in March, Nazimuddin felt that with the departure of the British civil servant Frederick Bourne, the situation demanded ‘a Bengali’ as one of the governors and supported Bogra at either the Frontier Province or Sindh, arguing that ‘a non-Bengali’ would then be acceptable to East Bengal. ¹¹¹

Meanwhile, as early as December 1947, Liaquat Ali Khan had offered a central cabinet seat to Khwaja Shahabuddin, who served as interior minister from May 1948 to November 1951, even though Nazimuddin suggested sending him to Burma. ¹¹² Shahabuddin was a combative holder of a crucial three-dimensional post, holding the charges of interior (police), information (newspapers) and broadcasting (radio). Over 1948–49, he badgered the prime minister about several schemes related to the Karachi municipal corporation, rent restriction, civil defence, co-operative societies, cantonment board, prohibition and ‘getting officers’ from the East for his ministry. ¹¹³ He later pushed for the formation of a central cadre of police in Pakistan, to be trained at Sardah, East Bengal. ¹¹⁴ On the question of inter-communal ratio in departmental representation, he held the line that ‘Muslim officials, coming from the people, were more acceptable to the people.’ ¹¹⁵

Two further snippets from Shahabuddin’s tenure are of special interest here, given the light that they throw on the multiple contradictions at play at the time. One of these came from the princely state of Hyderabad, whose annexation by New Delhi in September 1948 saw many notables flee to Pakistan. ¹¹⁶ These included, on the one hand, the old guard Nawab Moin Nawaz Jung, the last external affairs minister of the Nizam and on the other hand, the new radicals like Abdur Rahman Raees, the communist editor of Waqt. Raees found himself in immediate and lasting detention in Pakistan on account of the opposition to his release by the nawab. It was suggested by some cabinet members that either Raees should not be released or he should be externed from West Pakistan to Dacca. At this, the East Pakistani ministers closed ranks, for as ‘an Urdu journalist’, Raees could not do anything there. Shahabuddin was especially concerned ‘on account of communists’ but Raees could not be jailed ‘indefinitely’, and so Shahabuddin offered to keep him ‘under watch’. ¹¹⁷

Secondly, in January 1950, Shahabuddin was greeted in Dacca with the sight of ‘railway employees living in wagons near the governor’s house for more than 2 years’, as there were no houses for them and their postal and telegraph counterparts. ¹¹⁸ Unsurprisingly, he wrote to the prime minister about the ‘vulnerable position’ of the central government in the province and, later that same year, that in rural areas, agrarian reform was ‘essential’ to meet ‘communist agitation’. ¹¹⁹ There followed an East Bengal state acquisition and tenancy bill. ¹²⁰ Shahabuddin also found it convenient to turn the spotlight away from internal governance to external subversion, in the form of the ‘Hindu organisations in Calcutta’, with their aim ‘to foment disturbances’ and form a ‘provisional East Bengal government’. ¹²¹

In the tense months before the April 1950 Delhi Pact, Shahabuddin was as much occupied with riots, refugees and rehabilitation across the two Bengals as his opposite number in India, Vallabhbhai Patel. Commenting on the latter’s press conference on 12 January 1950 at Calcutta, where Patel had suggested that ‘West Bengal Hindus were suffering from political frustration’—a suggestion that was read as an acknowledgment of riots against Muslims—Shahabuddin urged ‘military defence’. ¹²² Once this high tide subsided with the prime ministerial pact, his focus swung to the western border, where in a comparatively quiet but extended passage of migration, Muslims from six western districts of Uttar Pradesh—namely Aligarh, Agra, Moradabad, Pilibhit, Bareilly and Shahjahanpur—left for Pakistan by crossing the Jodhpur–Sindh border. A glimpse of their numbers can be seen here:

21/5 3700, 22/5 3800, 23/5 800, 24/5 600, 25/5 2300, 26/5 1600, 27/5 2300, 28/5 1700, 29/5 750, 30/5 400, 31/5 200, 1–15 June—2543, 15–30 June—1963, 24/7 92, 25/7 98, 26/7 88, 27/7 285, 28/7 91, 29/7 132, 30/7 185, 31/7 150, 1/8 100, 2/8 105, 3/8 171, 4–5/8 5000. ¹²³

It is remarkable that amid such uncertainty, both the Pakistani and Indian governments went ahead with their preparations for the respective censuses of 1951. It was Shahabuddin under whom the preparatory work was undertaken, which included finding an experienced officer and providing funds over 1950–53. ¹²⁴ That the Indian census, followed by the first general election, made more news was anticipated by Shahabuddin. Rather mindful of impressions abroad of nation-building exercises, he urged Liaquat Ali Khan to give ‘frequent interviews to foreign journalists here’, namely those of the London Times, United Press of America, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, Tass, Star and The Economist. ¹²⁵ It is another matter that in the very month that the first votes were cast in India, the first prime minister of Pakistan would fall to an assassin’s bullets. That would see Shahabuddin’s brother, Khwaja Nazimuddin, achieve the improbable feat of succeeding Liaquat Ali Khan in October 1951, having succeeded Jinnah in September 1948.

‘…what we want [is] many Aligarhs…’

Fittingly, this treatment of early Pakistan finishes—as it started—with the nawab and premier of Dacca and the governor-general and now prime minister in Karachi, Nazimuddin, who would seek thousands in allowances and privileges for ‘entertainment’ in August 1950. ¹²⁶ As governor-general, some of Nazimuddin’s most significant interventions were about the East, like in the bloody aftermath of the initial lull in the wake of the Nehru-Liaquat pact, when West Bengal saw a tour of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee that left a trail of violence against Muslims, from Nadia to Malda and Dinajpur. Between a resentful Mookerjee and a restless Mandal, Nazimuddin felt that the problem of Bengal could only be solved by the ‘knowledge that Pakistan can hit back’. ¹²⁷

It was on jute policy, however, that Nazimuddin weighed in the most, given his close association with it since 1934–35. ¹²⁸ He opined that the Liaquat Ali government should maintain a minimum price and attract foreign buyers, until Pakistan’s principal buyer, India, returned to the market. Even if this took half a year or more, as feared by the finance ministry, Nazimuddin supported Fazlur Rahman’s contention that ‘foreign purchases plus 25–30 per cent of purchase by [us] will keep the prices up, till India buys our jute.’ ¹²⁹ Otherwise, with fall in price of rice, an ‘economic depression’ was feared in the East. ¹³⁰ Eventually, over spring–summer 1951, New Delhi and Karachi agreed to first a limited barter exchange and then a currency rate to resume their trade. ¹³¹

By this time, East Bengal was already designated as ‘that distant province of Pakistan’. ¹³² Following the events of January–February 1952, the language movement and its accompanying clashes, some even suggested an imposition of ‘Islamic culture [over] the collective ego.’ ¹³³ In individual terms too, the pities of partition in Bengal continued to tumble out, as when K. G. Morshed, Pakistan’s representative on the partition committee there, found that his former parent cadre, West Bengal, had declined to pay his pension, while his current employer, Dacca was reluctant to take over the liability. ¹³⁴ The issue went back to the summer of 1947, when officials had been given the option to choose and Morshed had opted for West Bengal, only to change his mind subsequently in the hope that Dacca would ‘consider’ him, which would be ‘acceptable’ to Calcutta. ¹³⁵ But it was in constitutional terms that some of Pakistan’s future emerged in the early letters of these East Bengali politicians. In May 1952, a note from someone ‘known’ to him was shared with Khwaja Nazimuddin, which is worth producing here in some detail, given its prophetic tone. It encouraged forsaking the paths taken by other countries and instead creating institutions tailored to fit the unique situation which confronted the burgeoning nation–state.

[Do] not settle a final constitution in the early future…. It is to our interest to have a Republic like India, a member of the Commonwealth [but] not immediate[ly]…. Pakistan, its two parts divided by unfriendly territory, with the Afghan problem and with 10 million Hindoos in one part, is unsuitable to the election system [of] England or America…. In countries similar to Pakistan, like Germany and Austria, it was a hopeless failure…. In France, it has worked because foreign policy, the colonies, army, navy and air force have never been in the hands of parliament…. Intellectually our governing class is still under British influence…. Something similar to the communist system of Russia should constitute parliament…for the next 20–30 years [or else] we will get on the rocks like Bismarck’s Germany…England will be interested as long as its interests are safeguarded…America will help only because you are not in the orbit of Russia…Pakistan was created by Aligarh [Muslim University] …You are spending millions on army when…what we want [is] many Aligarhs [universities]. ¹³⁶

Conclusion

This fivefold attempt to focus on both the known and the lesser-known political pasts of Purba Pakistan reveals tales of personal aggrandisement and institutional overreach. Nazimuddin, Shahabuddin, Nurul Amin and Fazlur Rahman invested themselves politically in the west wing of Pakistan. Their variegated aspirations were in an overlapping circle with the ambitions of their Bengali Muslim brethren and in the process betraying the expectations of Jogendranath Mandal, as Sen has argued. ¹³⁷ Mandal’s caste stymied him in India, while his community stagnated him in Pakistan, but the others on view were variously the elite of the old, who related to the post-1947 transition anew.

This study of their correspondence during these first years allows us to look closely at the career of the early Pakistani state, before the assassination of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan in 1951. This episodic foray affords us the content to see some of the first East Bengalis in the central government based in the West, revealing the manner in which they projected themselves onto it and not against it. As Neilesh Bose argued, ‘separating Pakistani-ness from Bengali-ness’ in the late 1940s and 1950s is important because ‘the great tragedies of the late 1960s and 1970s imprison Bengali Muslim history into sterile…frameworks.’ ¹³⁸

No matter which way one looks at it, this ‘formative phase’ was more fluid and complex than a simple standoff between eastern identity and West-based institutions. This article has attempted to show a glimpse of that by drawing upon primary material that provides evidence of a time and space when East Bengali politicians contributed to the early Pakistani state’s formation. It has traced their individual politics within the long aftermath of Bengal’s partition and tracked the emergence of the political practices of the new Pakistani nation–state in its search for stability, security, and consolidation.