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.