Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed

Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed (13 May 1905 – 11 February 1977) was an Indian lawyer and politician who served as the fifth president of India from 1974 to 1977. Long a Congress figure in Assam — twice its finance minister and once its advocate general — and then a Union cabinet minister, he became the second Muslim to hold the presidency and died in office. ^{1 2}

Ahmed was born in Delhi, studied in Delhi and at Cambridge, and was called to the bar from the Inner Temple in 1928. He practised law at Lahore and then at Guwahati, entered the Indian National Congress in the 1930s, and was finance minister of Assam in the Gopinath Bordoloi ministry in 1939. He became advocate general of Assam in 1946 and was finance minister again from 1957 to 1966. Indira Gandhi brought him into the Union cabinet in 1966, where over the following years he held portfolios including power, irrigation, industries and agriculture. ^{1 3}

Ahmed was sworn in as president on 24 August 1974, the second Muslim to hold the office and the first person elevated to it directly from the Union cabinet. In June 1975, on the prime minister's advice, he proclaimed the Emergency, and his assent to the ordinances and constitutional amendments of that period fixed his reputation as a rubber-stamp presidency. He died of a heart attack in office on 11 February 1977 and, after a state funeral, was buried in a mosque near Parliament House in New Delhi. No source read for this record names a religious school for him, and none is recorded. ^{1 4 2}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.