The letter came for Justice Mohammed Ismail while he was in Raigarh, setting up the judicial system of what was then the Eastern States Agency. The Agency was an odd amalgamation of the princely states of Orissa and Chhattisgarh, which had, at first, resisted incorporation into India. Vallabhai Patel, India’s first Home Minister, and his able Secretary at the Ministry of States, met with the feudatory chiefs in December 1947 and hammered out a resolution. Patel had a fairly clear idea of what he wanted the Indian State to look like, and he recruited people like Justice Ismail, a former High Court judge at Allahabad, to build the systems that would keep such a State running. Justice Ismail, though, was not merely a former judge; his past was far more complicated.

Justice Ismail’s father, Munshi Khalil sahib of Gorakhpur, was eight years old when the 1857 Uprising took place. Gorakhpur had come under British governance only in 1810, and it had been a difficult few decades beset by power struggles before the dust settled. Caught up in the Anglo-Gorkha wars and then the pacification of the forest tribes, the British never really managed to assert themselves, and then came the brushfire of 1857, and their rule was thwarted. For a year or so, Gorakhpur was a liberated area, under the administration of Mohammed Hassan of Jaunpur and the generalship of Bandhu Singh. After Lucknow was taken and Delhi overthrown, the British, assisted by the Sikhs and Gorkhas, had their revenge upon the Purabias (people from modern-day east UP and adjoining areas of Bihar). For two long years thereafter, the great tree next to the Jama Masjid was used as a hanging tree for “rebels”. Munshi Khalil, as young as he was, became the eldest surviving male in the family and was disallowed from setting foot outside his house for years. Later, when his sons grew up, Khalil understood that formal education was the only way to acquire a ‘position’ in British India, and so he sent his sons to study in England, where his eldest, Ismail, studied law, and his youngest, Moezuddin, medicine.

Mohammed Ismail was in great demand as a lawyer when he returned, and private practice would have rewarded him well, but Munshi Khalil counselled a different path. Therefore, when Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi performed his first great train yatra across north India, Mohammed Ismail was the government prosecutor. He wanted to welcome Gandhi, but his position wouldn’t allow it, so he sent his buggy. The horse was removed from the harness, and people pulled the buggy by the power of their limbs to the site where Gandhi made his first great public speech in north India, moving Premchand, who was in the audience, to give up his government job and become a writer. For Mohammed Ismail, the outcome was different. The Chauri Chaura riots that followed a year later, in 1922, forced him to prosecute people he did not wish to, and it was the first case in which he recused himself.

Sucked in, despite himself, into the politics of the times, Mohammed Ismail became a member of the Zamindar Party, something like the Unionist Party of Punjab, in that it did not wish to follow the line of either the Indian National Congress or the Muslim League. Liaquat Ali Khan, who would one day become the Prime Minister of Pakistan, and be assassinated, allegedly because he wanted to curtail the powers of the zamindars, served as the Secretary of the Zamindar Party when Mohammed Ismail was the President. As the political tensions heightened, Mohammed Ismail was called to the High Court at Allahabad and became Justice Ismail, watching the events of the mid-’30s and early ’40s unfold from behind the bench.

After retirement, he got a strange request. The Radcliffe Award had been announced, India and Pakistan were to be divided, but a Commission was needed to decide outlying issues. Patrick Spens, the last chief justice of British India, served as the head of the Commission. Harilal Jekisundas Kania, who would go on to be independent India’s first Chief Justice, represented India’s interests. The Republic of Pakistan asked Justice Ismail. He did not wish to shift to Pakistan at his age. He had lived a full life, with many contacts in his homeland. Mountbatten, Jinnah and Nehru all accepted this condition. So he served his term, and then when Patel asked, he went to Raigarh.

And then came the letter: “Justice Ismail, will you be the Pakistani High Commissioner to India?” There had been the Partition massacres, the refugee problem, the war in Jammu and Kashmir, and Pakistan wanted to communicate with India through somebody the latter would trust. Justice Ismail asked Nehru, who replied, “I would much rather you would have joined my Cabinet.” “On what basis?” asked Justice Ismail, “Who has elected me? If I were part of your Cabinet, I would only represent you, since you would have selected me.” Nehru agreed, and Justice Ismail became the second Pakistani High Commissioner to India, serving from 1948 to 1952, never surrendering his Indian citizenship, and returning to Gorakhpur to live out his last days.

Omair Ahmad is an author. His last book was on Bhutan

Follow him on Twitter >@OmairTAhmad

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