Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed (1905 – 1977) was an Indian lawyer and politician who served as the fifth President of India from 1974 to 1977.
Ahmed, who was the second Muslim to become the president of India, was also the second president to die in office.
As President, Ahmed imposed the Emergency in August 1975 and gave his assent to numerous ordinances and constitutional amendments that severely restricted civil liberties and allowed Indira Gandhi to rule by decree.
Lampooned in an iconic cartoon by Abu Abraham, Ahmed’s legacy is tarnished by his support for the Emergency and he has been described as a rubber stamp president.
 | |||
| From The Games Of Emergency - Abu Abraham |
Ahmed died in February 1977, was accorded a state funeral and is buried in a masjid near Parliament House in New Delhi.
Born in Delhi, Ahmed studied in Delhi and Cambridge and was called to the bar from the Inner Temple, London in 1928. Returning to India, he practiced law in Lahore and then in Guwahati where he went on to become the Advocate General of Assam in 1946. Beginning a long association with the Indian National Congress in the 1930s, Ahmed was finance minister of Assam in the Gopinath Bordoloi ministry in 1939 and again from 1957 to 1966. He has been accused of allowing the steady influx of Muslims from East Pakistan who became a vote bank for the Congress Party. Salman Khurshid has identified this strategy, which he attributes to Ahmed, as one of the factors that led to the Nellie Massacre.
The Nellie massacre was put down as a long-term result of the late Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed's (who hailed from Assam) strategy to import Muslim vote banks, and the government's shortsighted capitalizing on that resource.
He was made a Cabinet Minister by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1966 and was in charge of ministries including Power, Irrigation, Industries and Agriculture until 1974 when he was elected President of India.