A MONTH before his death in 1942, he uttered these prophetic words: “Pakistan is now inevitable. It is bound to come [into being] sooner or later. My purpose in life is at last achieved. Life has no more interest or excitement for me. I have had more than [what] I deserved. Now our children will be free citizens or a free country.” This was Haji Sir Abdullah Haroon, one of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s lieutenants and a member of the Muslim League Working Committee that drafted the 1940 Pakistan Resolution. After returning from Delhi he remarked: “The big goal is in sight. We are at last on our way to it.”
His death ended a full life that included service to his people through education, philanthropy, lawmaking, and, yes, business — conducted with such honesty that Gandhi said of him: “I will trust this man with a blank cheque”. Inspired by a mother who had become a widow at 17 when he was four, Haroon began his modest career in tradecraft in Karachi at 16 to ultimately become one of India’s richest men and was often called Sindh’s sugar king. Of his mother he used to say, “I’m as my mother made me.”
Having overcome the trauma of poverty by the time he was 31, Haroon began his reformist activities by founding the Sindh Muhammadan Association in 1910 to address his people’s social, especially educational problems, with massive donations to schools in Sindh and India, including the Aligarh University, besides giving succour to the people of Palestine and Turkey during the First World War and its aftermath, particularly to the victims of Izmir’s arson outrage.
Gradually Haroon gravitated toward India’s larger anti-colonial struggle dominated by such giants as Jinnah, Gandhi and the Ali Brothers whose Khilafat movement and the boycott of British products had rocked South Asia. He had only seven years of formal schooling, but his grasp of politics was uncanny. His tireless efforts for the Khilafat cause led to his election in 1924 as chief of the Sindh Provincial Khilafat Committee and in 1927 as president of the Central Khilafat Committee, wearing khaddar being part of his commitment to the charismatic Ali duo.