Maulvi Tamizuddin Khan

Maulvi Tamizuddin Khan (1889 - 19 August 1963)^[1], was the President (speaker) of Pakistan's first Constituent Assembly.

He was born in 1889 in a humble peasant family of Faridpur, Bengal. He obtained an MA degree in English in 1913 and a law degree in 1915 and settled for legal profession in Faridpur.

Tamizuddin created history when the Constituent Assembly was dismissed by Governor General Ghulam Mohammad in 1954. Tamizuddin challenged the dismissal in the court and the case was filed in the morning of 7 November 1954, by Advocate Manzar-e-Alam.^[2] Although the High Court agreed and overturned it, the Federal Court under Justice Muhammad Munir upheld the dismissal. He had been president of the Basic Principles Committee set up in 1949.

"Justice A. R. Cornelius was the sole dissenting judge in the landmark judgment handed down by the Supreme Court in the Maulvi Tamizuddin case. That judgment altered the course of politics in Pakistan forever and sealed the fate of democracy. The law had guided him as he had interpreted it and his conscience." ^[3].

The decision to uphold the dismissal of the constituent assembly was to mark the beginning of the overt role of Pakistan's military and civil establishment in Pakistani politics.

Tamizuddin Khan, for some time, kept aloof from politics after the verdict in 1954. He came back to active politics again and was elected an MNA under the 1962 constitution. He was elected the Speaker of the Pakistan National Assembly, the position he held till his death on 19 August 1963.

See also

• Doctrine of necessity
• Constitutional Coup

References

External links

• History of National Assembly
• Banglapedia: A profile of Tamizuddin Khan