United Front | |
|---|---|
 1954 East Bengal cabinet formed by the United Front | |
| Urdu name | متحدہ محاذ |
| Bengali name | যুক্তফ্রন্ট |
| Abbreviation | UF |
| President | A. K. Fazlul Huq |
| General Secretary | Ataur Rahman Khan |
| Founded | 4 December 1953 (1953-12-04) |
| Dissolved | 1958 (1958) |
| Headquarters | Dacca,East Pakistan |
| Ideology | Islamic democracy Islamic socialism Antifeudalism Bengali interests |
| Political position | Big tent |
| Religion | Islam |
| Members | |
| Slogan | United Front Zindabad Huq–Bhasani Zindabad |
| Constituent Assembly (1955) | 16 / 72 |
| East Pakistan Legislative Assembly (1954) | 223 / 309 |
| Election symbol | |
 Boat | |
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TheUnited Front was a coalition of political parties inEast Bengal that contested and wonPakistan's first provincial general election to theEast Bengal Legislative Assembly. The coalition consisted of theAwami Muslim League, theKrishak Praja Party, theGanatantri Dal (Democratic Party), andNizam-e-Islam. The coalition was led by three major Bengali populist leaders:A. K. Fazlul Huq,Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy andMaulana Bhashani. The election resulted in a crushing defeat for the Muslim League. Veteran student leader of East Pakistan,Khaleque Nawaz Khan, defeated sitting prime minister of East Pakistan, Nurul Amin, in Nandail Constituency of Mymensingh district and created history in the political arena. Nurul Amin's crushing defeat to a 27-year-old young Turk of the United Front effectively eliminated the Muslim League from the political landscape of the then East Pakistan, with United Front parties securing a landslide victory and gaining 223 seats in the 309-member assembly. The Awami League emerged as the majority party, with 143 seats.[1][2]
A. K. Fazlul Huq of theKrishak Praja Party became Chief Minister of East Pakistan upon the victory of the United Front. The election propelled popular Bengali leaders into the Pakistani federal government, with leaders such asHussain Shaheed Suhrawardy andAbul Mansur Ahmed becoming key federal ministers. In the provincial government, young leaders such asSheikh Mujibur Rahman,Yusuf Ali Chowdhury andKhaleque Nawaz Khan rose to prominence. The United Front demanded greater provincial autonomy for East Pakistan. It passed a landmark order for the establishment of theBangla Academy in Dhaka.[citation needed]
Twenty-One Point Programme objectives were incorporated in the election manifesto of the United Front, an alliance of the opposition political parties, to contest elections of the East Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1954 against the then party in power, the Muslim League. The United Front was composed of four political parties of East Bengal, namely Awami Muslim League, Krishak Sramik Party, Nezam-e-Islam and Ganatantri Dal. The Front was formed on 14 November 1953 by the initiative of AK Fazlul Huq of Krishak Sramik Party, Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhasani and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy of Awami Muslim League.
The 21-point package programme in the election manifesto adopted by the United Front runs as follows:
1. To recogniseBangla as one of the State Languages of Pakistan;
2. To abolish without compensationzamindari and all rent receiving interest in land, and todistribute the surplus lands amongst the cultivators; to reduce rent to a fair level and abolish the certificate system of realising rent;
3. Tonationalise thejute trade and bring it under the direct control of the government of East Bengal, secure fair price of jute to the growers and to investigate into the jute-bungling during the Muslim League regime to punish those found responsible for it;
4. To introduceco-operative farming in agriculture and to develop cottage industries with full government subsidies;
5. To start salt industry (both small and large scale) to make East Bengal self-sufficient in the supply of salt, and to investigate into the salt-bungling during the Muslim League regime to punish the offenders;
6. To rehabilitate immediately all the poor refugees (displaced by thePartition) belonging to the artisan and technician class;
7. To protect the country from flood and famine by means of digging canals and improving irrigation system;
8. To make the country self-sufficient by modernising the method of cultivation and industrialisation, and to ensure the rights of the labourer as perILO Convention;
9. To introducefree andcompulsory primary education throughout the country and to arrange for just pay and allowances to the teachers;
10. To restructure the entire education system, introduce mother tongue as the medium of instruction, remove discrimination between government and private schools and to turn all the schools into government aided institutions;
11. To repeal all reactionary laws including those of theDhaka andRajshahi Universities and to make them autonomous institutions; to make education cheaper and easily available to the people;
12. To curtail the cost of administration and to rationalise the pay scale of high and low paid government servants. The ministers shall not receive more than 1000 taka as monthly salary;
13. To take steps to eradicate corruption, nepotism and bribery, and with this end in view, to take stocks of the properties of all government officers and businessmen from 1940 onward and forfeit all properties the acquisition of which is not satisfactorily accounted for;
14. To repeal all Safety and Preventive Detention Acts ofAyub Khan and release all prisoners detained without trial, and try in open court persons involved in anti-state activities; to safeguard the rights of the press and of holding meetings;
15. Toseparate the judiciary from the executive;
16. To locate the residence of the chief minister of the United Front at a less costly house, and to convertBurdwan House (a palatial residence once owned by theMaharajas of Burdwan) into a students hostel now, and later, into aninstitute for research on Bangla language and literature;
17. To erect a monument in memory of the martyrs of theLanguage Movement on the spot where they were shot dead, and to pay compensation to the families of the martyrs;
18. To declare21 February as 'Shaheed Day' and a public holiday;
19. TheLahore Resolution proposed full autonomy of East Bengal leaving defence, foreign affairs and currency under the central government. In the matter of defence, arrangements shall be made to set the headquarters of the army in West Pakistan and the naval headquarters in East Bengal and to establish ordnance factories in East Bengal, and to transformAnsar force into a full-fledged militia equipped with arms;
20. The United Front Ministry shall on no account extend the tenure of the Legislature and shall resign six months before the general elections to facilitate free and fair elections under an Election Commission;
21. All casual vacancies in the Legislature shall be filled up through by-elections within three months of the vacancies, and if the nominees of the Front are defeated in three successive by-elections, ministry shall resign from office.
In the elections of East Bengal Legislative Assembly held in March 1954, the United Front won 223 seats out of 237 Muslim seats, whereas the ruling Muslim League managed to bag only 9 seats.
The United Front ministry was sworn in on 3 April 1954 and the cabinet was expanded on 15 May in order to include members of the Awami League. However, on that very day, deadly clashes broke out betweenBengali-speakingBengali Muslim andUrdu-speakingBihari Muslim labourers at theAdamjee Jute Mills, leaving 1500 dead. TheCommunist Party of Pakistan, with which the United Front government had a close relationship, was blamed for causing this incident by the government.[3] Hence, on 30 May, within weeks of assuming power, the newly elected provincial legislature was dismissed by Governor-GeneralGhulam Muhammad,[4] upon accusations of mismanagement and secession against A K Fazlul Huq, who was placed under house-arrest. The central government of Pakistan was alarmed at the United Front's victory, and while it instituted Governor General's rule in East Pakistan, the central government instituted theOne Unit plan in West Pakistan, where they amalgamated all of Pakistan's provinces into one giant province calledWest Pakistan to try to prevent the smaller provinces from coordinating with East Bengal to offsetPunjab's overwhelming power in the military and civil government of Pakistan. The One Unit scheme was essentially an anti-democratic provocation meant to stop East Bengal from taking advantage of its numerical superiority. It also alienated the smaller provinces of West Pakistan by robbing theSindhis,Baluchis andPashtuns of their provincial identities. The overthrow of the United Front government and the creation of the One Unit of West Pakistan alienated the Bengalis and caused them to demand maximum autonomy or even to secede from Pakistan.[citation needed]
The dismissal of the United Front was a key turning point in aggravating East Pakistan's grievances in the Pakistani union, and led Maulana Bhashani to openly call for separation and independence in 1957, in hisSalaam, Pakistan (Farewell, Pakistan) speech.[5]
