SETH Abdullah Haroon, whose 67th death anniversary fell yesterday, was a multifaceted personality. His role, spanning some 28 years of private enterprise and 29 of public life, was multi-dimensional.

His career was rather chequered — catapulting him from rags to riches, from a political non-entity to a top regional and a second-rung all-India Muslim leader. Thus, he was, at one time or another, a successful business magnate, an entrepreneur, a committee man, an organiser, a philanthropist, a founder of several educational, religious and social institutions, a visionary and a leader of outstanding merit.

Once he had established himself in business and attended to social causes calling for immediate attention, he was drawn to politics. In this case as well his motive was the economic amelioration and social uplift of the poor, backward classes. This cause led him to take up the cause of the separation of Sindh from the Bombay Presidency. At the Muslim League session at Aligarh (1925), he demanded a resolution on Sindh`s separation; at the Leaders` Conference at Delhi (1926), he put in a resolution on the issue; and from 1928 onwards, he argued against the financial solvency requirement for the separation of Sindh, stipulated in the Nehru Report (1928).

Abdullah Haroon served as secretary, Sindh Financial Inquiry Committee (1930-35) and as member of the Sindh Administrative Committee (1933) and the Sindh Delimitation Committee (1935). He also chaired the Reception Committee of the Sindh Azad Conference (1934), an organisation set up to counter the continuing Hindu propaganda and pressure against setting up Sindh as an autonomous province. Indeed, of all the Muslim leaders of Sindh, he was the foremost to make an impact on all-India mainstream politics.

Abdullah Haroon made his debut in all-India politics in 1917 when he joined the Congress. From 1918, he was closely associated with the Khilafat movement. He was president of the Sindh Provincial Khilafat Committee for five years (1919-24); he made his house available as a centre for Khilafat activities and for visiting all-India Khilafat leaders; he contributed generously to the Khilafat coffers, to the Angora [Ankara] Fund and the Smyrna Fund. In recognition of his services, he was elected president of the All-India Central Khilafat Committee in 1928.

The 1920s also witnessed his entry in electoral politics and all-India mainstream Muslim politics. In 1923, he won a seat in the Bombay Legislative Council, and in 1926, in the Indian Legislative Assembly, which he retained until his death in 1942. In 1920, Abdullah Haroon was elected president of the Provincial Muslim League, and from 1925 onwards he was active in the All-India Muslim League (AIML). Beginning with 1929, he was also prominent in the All-India Muslim Conference, which was set up as an umbrella organisation to counter the Nehru Report; he became its secretary and later president in 1935. And all through those years he worked strenuously for its amalgamation with the AIML, with a view to bringing about solidarity in disparate Muslim ranks.

The most remarkable thing about Abdullah Haroon was that he had the vision and the imagination to see the problems of Sindhi Muslims in an all-India context and to establish institutional linkages between the Sindhi component and the pan-Indian Muslim community; the only other Sindhi leader who shared this honour with him was Sheikh Abdul Majid (d. 1975).

Not only in the provincial context but also in the regional context, Abdullah Haroon`s impact on all-Indian politics was impressive. He was president of at least six all-India Conferences and bodies — the All India Central Khilafat Committee (1928), All India Tanzim Conference, Allahabad (1930), All-India Postal and RMS Union (1931), All India Memon Conference (1935), All-India Muslim Conference (1935) and the All-India Seerat Conference, Allahabad (1942).

However, his role in the Muslim League from 1937 onwards surpassed everything else he did in his entire political career. In that year, he undertook the task of organising the League in the province from the grass-root level. In 1938, he organised the First Sindh Provincial Muslim League Conference at Karachi, with himself as chairman, Reception Committee. In 1939, he was elected president of the Sindh Provincial Muslim League; he also became chairman, AIML Foreign Sub-Committee. In 1940, Abdullah Haroon was nominated member of the AIML Working Committee. The next year he presided over the Punjab Muslim Students Conference at Lyallpur. In the same year he secured on Muslim League`s behalf the Manzilgah mosque, which had provoked Hindu-Muslim riots in Sukkur, and caused Hindu-Muslim tensions in the previous two years.

Among these, however, the First Provincial Muslim League Conference in October 1938 represented his most important contribution to changing the course of Indo-Muslim politics. Though a provincial moot, it was not only presided over by Jinnah, but was participated in by a galaxy of Muslim leaders.

Nor were the topics discussed or the decisions taken confined to Sindh. Haroon`s welcome address set the tone for the conference it was radical and militant, it commended an ideological goal. Unless adequate safeguards and protection for minorities were duly provided for, declared Haroon, 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 which had been partitioned to provide safeguards to the Sudetan Germans, and warned that the same might happen in India should the majority community persist in its “present course”.

The main resolution at the conference was cast, in a pronounced manner, in Abdullah Haroon`s mould. Though diluted in the Subjects Committee deliberations at the insistence of Jinnah himself, the resolution retained enough of its clout to become a trendsetter and to warrant attention.

Thus, in calling for “the economic and social betterment, and political self-determination of the two nations known as Hindus and Muslims”, and for devising “a scheme of constitution under which Muslims may attain full independence”, the Sindh resolution was truly epochal, representing, as it did, the momentous penultimate step to the adoption of the Lahore Resolution (1940).

No wonder, Reginald Coupland singles out Haroon as “the only Muslim politician of any standing who had so far [until early 1939] taken a public part in the constitutional discussion” on the Pakistan proposal. And herein lies the enduring significance of Abdullah Haroon — as a trendsetter in modern Muslim India`s politics, and as a “shaper” of history in a larger sense.

The writer, HEC Distinguished National Professor, has recently co-edited Unesco`s History of Humanity, vol. VI, and edited In Quest of Jinnah (2007), the only oral history on Pakistan`s founding father.

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