Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy

Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (8 September 1892 – 5 December 1963) was a Pakistani politician and statesman who served as the fifth prime minister of Pakistan from 1956 to 1957 and before that as the prime minister of United Bengal from 1946 to 1947. He is regarded as a patron of a Two-Nation Theory for the creation of Pakistan, for which he is revered as one of the leading founding member of Pakistan; and also as the pioneer of the Bengali civil rights movement in Bangladesh.

Born in 1892 at Midnapore, Bengal, Suhrawardy was a scion of one of Bengal's most prominent Muslim families, the Suhrawardys. He studied law at the University of Oxford, and joined the independence movement during the 1920s as a trade union leader in Calcutta, initially associated with the Swaraj Party. He joined the All-India Muslim League and became one of the leaders of its Bengal branch. Suhrawardy was elected to the Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1937 and led the Muslim League to decisively win the 1946 provincial general election in Bengal, serving as the last prime minister of Bengal until the partition of India. His premiership was notable for his proposal to create a separate and united Bengal — supported by the Muslim League but opposed by the Indian National Congress — and failing to prevent the Great Calcutta Killings. In 1947, the Bengal Assembly voted to partition the province. Suhrawardy briefly remained in India after partition to attend to his ailing father and manage his family's property. He eventually moved to Pakistan and divided his time between Karachi (Pakistan's federal capital) and Dhaka (capital of East Pakistan).