Asaf Ali

He was born on 11 May 1888 at Seohara, a town in Bijnor district in British India ¹². He was educated at St. Stephen's College, Delhi, and was called to the Bar from Lincoln's Inn in England ¹.

In 1914, Britain's declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire had a large effect on the Indian Muslim community; Asaf Ali supported the Ottomans, resigned from the Privy Council as an act of non-cooperation, and returned to India in December 1914 to throw himself into the nationalist movement ¹. He was elected to the Central Legislative Assembly in 1935 as a member of the Muslim Nationalist Party, then became significant as a Congress member and deputy leader ¹. The last of his several imprisonments came after the Quit India resolution of August 1942, when he was detained at Ahmednagar Fort with Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress Working Committee ¹.

He rose to become one of the most respected lawyers in the country ¹. He defended Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt over the 1929 Central Legislative Assembly bomb case, and in 1945 he was convener of the INA defence team established by Congress for the officers of the Indian National Army charged with treason ¹.

He was in charge of Railways and Transport in the Interim Government headed by Nehru from September 1946, and served as the first Indian ambassador to the United States from February to mid-April 1947 ¹. He was then Governor of Odisha for two terms, from 1948 to 1952, and afterwards ambassador to Switzerland ¹.

In 1928 he married Aruna Ganguly, a marriage that raised eyebrows on grounds of religion — the article states that Asaf Ali was a Muslim while Aruna was a Hindu — and of the twenty-year age difference ¹. His wife is widely remembered for hoisting the Congress flag at Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay during the Quit India movement of 1942 ¹.

He died in office in Bern on 2 April 1953, while serving as ambassador to Switzerland ¹; the Arabic article and Wikidata give 1 April instead ³². India Post issued a stamp in his honour in 1989 ¹.

The English article's text attests him personally as a Muslim, in the marriage passage quoted above ¹, and the Urdu article says the same in its rendering of that account ⁴. The Arabic article leaves its infobox religion field empty and files him by category under Indian Muslims ³, and Wikidata records his religion as Islam only ². No source names a school for him, so the museum's data record leaves his school unknown and sets out the evidence exactly.

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