OF all the Muslim leaders of Sindh, Abdullah Haroon, whose 75th death anniversary falls today, was the foremost in making an impact on all-India mainstream Muslim politics. The most remarkable fact about him was that he had the vision to see the problems of Sindhi Muslims in an all-India context. He thus established linkages between the Sindhi and the pan-Indian Muslim community; the only other Sindhi leader who shared this honour with him was Sheikh Abdul Majid. Abdullah Haroon’s impact on all-India politics was impressive both in the provincial and regional contexts.

His most important role in channelling the course of Muslim politics came in the late 1930s. He organised the First Sind Provincial Muslim League Conference in Karachi in October 1938, presided over by Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The most eminent Muslim leaders participated in the event. Notwithstanding its nomenclature, it was an all-India moot.

Nor were the topics discussed or the decisions taken confined to Sindh. Abdullah Haroon’s welcome address set the tone for the conference: it was radical and combative. Unless adequate safeguards and protections for minorities were duly provided, he declared, the Muslims would have no alternative but “to seek their salvation in their own way in an independent federation of Muslim states”. He drew a parallel with Czechoslovakia, partitioned to provide safeguards for the Sudetan Germans, and warned that the same might happen in India should the majority community persist in its “present course”. He said: “We have nearly arrived at the parting of the ways and until and unless this problem is solved to the satisfaction of all, it will be impossible to save India from being divided into Hindu India and Muslim India, both placed under separate federation”.

No one had spoken thus from the League’s platform before. The main resolution at the conference was also cast in this mould. For one thing, it put forth a common position by the Muslim leadership in the majority and minority provinces. The Sind Conference focused upon the Congress’s conduct in the Hindu provinces and its policy “to render the power of the Muslim majorities ineffective and impotent in” their majority provinces.

This conjunction of interests of the Muslim majority and minority provinces represented a milestone in arriving at a common goal for the entire Muslim community. And the resolution argued the case of separate Muslim nationhood not on a narrow basis such as “the caste-ridden mentality and anti-Muslim policy of the majority community”, but, more importantly, in terms of broader issues such as “the acute differences of religion, language, script, culture, social laws and outlook on the life of the two major communities”.

The concept of separate Muslim nationhood was spelled out not merely in political and immediate terms, but on an intellectual plane. Equally significant, this was also the first time that the Hindus and Muslims were officially pronounced by the Muslim League as two distinct “nations”, and a call was given for the “political self-determination of the two nations known as Hindus and Muslims”.

In order to jump-start the partition proposal and prepare the intelligentsia for it, Abdullah Haroon had Dr Syed Abdul Latif’s book The Muslim Problem in India (1939) published and circulated.

In the foreword penned by him, he shunned the circumlocutory language of the Karachi resolution for a more categorical enunciation of the still evolving Muslim goal, asserting that: “The Hindu-Muslim problem in India has grown so serious since the inauguration of the provincial autonomy in the country that the Muslims see no other way of consolidating their future except carving out cultural zones or separate homelands for themselves. What they insist upon is equality of freedom for every community — freedom for all and not for the majority community only.”

Finally, the foreign and domestic sub-committee which he headed prepared a comprehensive report which became the basis of the Lahore Resolution. This explains why Reginald Coupland in his Report on the Constitutional Problem in India had singled out Abdullah Haroon as having made a significant contribution to the constitutional debate in the late 1930s, leading to the demand for Partition.

In perspective, the Sind Resolution sought to break new ground: it was truly epochal. Indeed, it represented the penultimate step to, and prepared the ground for, the adoption of the Lahore Resolution at the Muslim League session in March 1940. And herein lies the significance of Haji Abdullah Haroon as a trendsetter in the politics of modern Muslim India, and as a ‘shaper’ of history in a larger sense. He thus carved out for himself a niche as one of the founding fathers of Pakistan, even though he did not live long enough to see his dream materialise in 1947.

The writer is an HEC Distinguished National Professor.

Published in Dawn, April 27th, 2017