HAJI Abdullah Haroon, whose death anniversary falls on April 27, was by all accounts an extremely compelling personality. He was multifaceted, his role multidimensional.

A businessman, a social worker, a philanthropist, an organiser, a builder of institutions and a political leader — he was all that at once. He believed in liberal values such as initiative, enterprise, hard work and competition, besides moral uprightness. Although he had his measure of trial and tribulation over the years, he was a success in whatever he did.

Consider, in brief, what all he accomplished. In terms of his own financial standing, he traversed the path from rags to riches without ever resorting to unfair means or gimmicks. He started out as an orphaned messenger and general help boy at age 14, and by 37 he was the ‘sugar king’. A person with a deep social conscience, he used his wealth to promote worthy causes.

Worthy of note was his role in the social development sector. Haji Haroon founded or helped organise a number of institutions including the Jamia Islamia Yatim Khana (1923), the Karachi Muslim Gymkhana (1927), the Hajjani Hanifabai Memon Girls School, the Sind Muslim League Employment Bureau (1939), the Wakt alal-Aulad Trust (1940), the Sukkur Relief Fund (1940) and a charitable trust (1941).

He was also actively involved, as president or as an executive committee member, with the Karachi Club, the Karachi Port Haj Committee, the Quetta Salvage Advisory Committee and the All India Memon Conference.

His generous contributions included among its beneficiaries the Angora (Ankara) Fund (1919-1920s), the Symrna Fund (1920s), the Palestine Relief Fund (1930s), the Bhuj Famine Fund as well as scores of other charities and organisations involved in promoting education, health and religion. The sums he contributed are anybody’s guess but must have run into millions, particularly in terms of current prices.

This remarkable gentleman’s interest in the awakening and emancipation of the masses led him to enter public life in 1913, once he had built for himself a solid financial base because, like Mohammad Ali Jinnah, he did not want to make a profession out of politics.

This penchant led him to involve himself, at one time or another, with the major political organisations in the country: the Indian National Congress, the All India Khilafat Committee (1919-29), the Sind Provincial Political Conference (1920-30s), the All Parties Conference (1928), the All Parties Muslim Conference (1930-34), the Azad Sind Conference (1930), and the All-India Muslim League (AIML).

Besides these, he was the president of several all-India conferences and bodies — the All-India Central Khilafat Committee (1928), the All-India Tanzim Conference (1930), the All-India Postal and RMS Union (1931), the All-India Memon Conference (1935), the All-India Muslim Conference (1935) and All-India Seerat Conference (1942).

From 1925 onwards, he became active in the movement for the separation of Sindh from Bombay and lobbied for this at all-India moots. Thus, he proposed a resolution on this at the Leaders’ Conference at New Delhi and the AIML, both in 1926. He was a member of the Brayne Conference on Sind (1932), the Sind Delimitation Committee (1935), the Administration Committee (1933) and was the chairman of the Reception Committee of the Sind Azad Conference, Second Session (1934).

However, his role in the AIML from 1937 onwards surpassed everything else he did in the political field. That year, he undertook the task of organising the League in the province.

In 1938, he organised the First Sind Provincial Muslim League Conference at Karachi, with himself as the chairman of the Reception Committee. In 1939, he was elected president of the Sind Provincial Muslim League, and became the chairman of the AIML Foreign Sub-Committee.

In 1940, Haji Haroon was nominated a member of the AIML Working Committee and in 1941 he presided over the Punjab Muslim Students Conference at Lyallpur. And in the same year he secured the Manzilgah Mosque in Sukkur on behalf of the Muslim League while he was its president.

Among all these achievements, however, the First Provincial Muslim League Conference in October 1938 represented his most important contribution in channelling the course of Indo-Muslim politics.

Though a provincial moot, it was not only presided over by Mr Jinnah, but has as participants a number of Muslim leaders — a virtual who’s who of Muslim India at the time: the premiers of Bengal and the Punjab, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, Maulana Shaukat Ali, Begum Mohammed Ali, the Raja of Mahmudabad, Maulana Jamal Mian of Farangi Mahal, Syed Ghulam Bhik Nairang, Maulana Abdul Hamid Badayuni and Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani amongst others.

The resolution adopted at this conference was of prime significance. Formulated by Haji Haroon, the resolution spelled out the concept of separate Muslim nationhood not merely in political and immediate terms but on an intellectual plane, spelling out the basics and basis of that nationhood.

This was the first time that Hindus and Muslims were formally pronounced two distinct nations, and “political self-determination” for them was demanded.

The resolution expressed “emphatic disapproval” of the federation scheme, and urged the British government to refrain from enforcing it. In consequence, the AIML at its Patna session in December 1938 authorised the president to explore a suitable alternative to the India Act of 1935.

Subsequently, a committee was appointed on March 26, 1939, to examine various draft schemes on the constitutional problem, which finally eventuated in the formulation and adoption of the Lahore Resolution on March 23, 1940. In perspective, this resolution initiated a trend which crystallised in the Lahore Resolution. In this sense, that resolution broke new ground; and Haji Haroon, its formulator, became a trendsetter at a critical moment in modern Muslim India’s political development.

The writer is an HEC Distinguished National Professor, has recently co-edited Unesco’s History of Humanity, vol. VI, and The Jinnah Anthology and edited In Quest of Jinnah.

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