It demands serious academic inquiry: why has the mass-based, anti-two-nation movement led by Allah Bakhsh among Indian Muslims been buried in historical silence? The answer lies in the convenience it offered both British colonial rulers and communal nationalists—Hindu and Muslim alike. These forces, then and now, have seen India as a land inherently fractured by religion. Tragically, the secular Indian state—whose own National Anthem includes the word “Sind”—chose to forget this remarkable legacy of unity, secularism, and inclusive nationalism.
Allah Bakhsh dedicated his life to countering the communal politics of the Muslim League and its divisive two-nation theory. He paid the ultimate price, assassinated on May 14, 1943, by killers hired by the Muslim League. His murder was not random—it was politically motivated to eliminate the one Muslim leader who could rally massive grassroots opposition among Muslims against the creation of Pakistan.
As Premier of Sind, Allah Bakhsh led the ‘Ittehad Party’ (Unity Party), which denied the Muslim League any significant foothold in this Muslim-majority province during the critical years leading to Partition. Though not a member of the Indian National Congress, he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the independence movement. When Churchill insulted India’s freedom struggle during the ‘Quit India’ movement, Allah Bakhsh renounced all British honors in protest, declaring, “Mr. Churchill’s speech shattered all hopes.” For this act of defiance, he was removed from office by Governor Sir Hugh Dow in October 1942—a dismissal orchestrated to facilitate the Muslim League’s advance in Sind.
Despite the widely known fact that Gandhi was assassinated by Godse—a man affiliated with the Hindu Mahasabha, Savarkar, and the RSS—very few know that Allah Bakhsh, a leading opponent of Pakistan and a staunch secularist, was killed nearly five years earlier. His popularity among Indian Muslims and his unwavering stand for a united India made him the most formidable obstacle to Jinnah’s separatist ambitions. His death cleared the path for the Muslim League’s entry into Sind, aided by a convenient alliance with British colonial authorities and, later, the Hindu Mahasabha.
Sind Muslim League leader M. A. Khuhro was tried as a conspirator in Allah Bakhsh’s murder but was acquitted for lack of “independent” witnesses—uncannily similar to how Savarkar escaped conviction in Gandhi’s assassination. These parallels raise disturbing questions about how justice was subverted for political ends.
Allah Bakhsh posed the most direct ideological challenge to the Muslim League. Just five weeks after the League passed its Pakistan resolution in March 1940, he convened the Azad Muslim Conference in Delhi—April 27-30, 1940—drawing 1,400 delegates from across India and representing major Muslim organizations like the Jamiat-ul-Ulema, Momin Conference, Majlis-e-Ahrar, Shia Political Conference, Khudai Khidmatgars, and others. The Statesman, despite its League sympathies, acknowledged this as the most representative Muslim gathering of the time. Over 5,000 Muslim women also attended, affirming the inclusive, democratic spirit of the conference.
The conference rejected the Pakistan proposal as “impracticable and harmful” and declared that Muslims must share equal responsibility in the collective Indian struggle for independence. In his presidential address, delivered in Urdu, Allah Bakhsh demolished the League’s claims to representing all Muslims and rebutted the two-nation theory with historical depth, spiritual clarity, and constitutional logic.
He declared India the indivisible homeland of all its people—Hindus, Muslims, and others—and warned against both Hindu and Muslim communal elites who sought to inherit the British imperial mantle. He cited the downfall of past Islamic empires as evidence that imperialism offers no salvation for the masses. In a powerful critique of cultural secessionism, he defended the shared Indo-Islamic civilizational heritage born of a thousand years of coexistence—architecture, music, literature, and administrative practices—and rejected the idea that such a legacy could be ghettoized into “Muslim” zones.
Allah Bakhsh lamented the Congress Party’s failure to engage with anti-League Muslims, which allowed the League to monopolize Muslim representation. Yet, despite this political isolation, he remained committed to building a secular, composite India, declaring that the goal must be “a vigorous, healthy, progressive and honoured India enjoying its well-deserved freedom.”
His vision is conspicuously absent in modern India. While Pakistan, born out of Muslim League politics, naturally erases his legacy, democratic India’s silence is more damning. It is a betrayal that today, Parliament houses a statue of Savarkar—who shared common ground with the League—but has no space for Allah Bakhsh, a martyr to the idea of an inclusive India. This omission is not just historical negligence—it is an ideological surrender that enabled the current Hindutva-driven takeover of Indian democracy.
We must ask: how did a nation that rejected both Hindu and Muslim communalism end up forgetting its most passionate secular voices? Reclaiming Allah Bakhsh’s legacy is not just a matter of historical justice—it is essential to preserving the idea of India itself.
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*Link for some of S. Islam's writings and video interviews/debates: http://du-in.academia.edu/ShamsulIslam. Facebook: https://facebook.com/shamsul.islam.332. Twitter: @shamsforjustice. http://shamsforpeace.blogspot.com
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