Suhrawardy, Hussein Shaheed (1893-1963)

Indian and Pakistani politician, prime minister of Pakistan 1956-57. In 1945 Suhrawardy became chief minister of the Muslim League, which argued for the partition of India after the British left. In 1946 he was elected chief minister of Bengal in a landslide victory and was in large part responsible for the deaths in August 1946 of hundreds of Hindu workers by middle-class Muslims in what is known as ‘The Great Calcutta Killing’.

Trained in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Oxford as a lawyer, Suhrawardy was elected to the new Bengal assembly in 1937 and held the finance, public health, local self-government, and labour portfolios. With independence in 1947 he moved to Pakistan and in 1949 formed the Awami League. He was elected president in 1956, but after a subsequent government barred him from political life and imprisoned him briefly, he became an outspoken advocate of a return to a parliamentary system.