Kamal Hossain

Kamal Hossain (born 20 April 1937) is a Bangladeshi jurist and politician, a principal drafter of the Constitution of Bangladesh of 1972 and widely styled the father of that constitution. He served as law minister (1972–1973) and foreign minister (1973–1975) in the first governments of independent Bangladesh, later founded the Gano Forum party, and led the Jatiya Oikya Front opposition coalition into the 2018 election. He retired from active politics in October 2023 and remains his party's emeritus president. ¹

Hossain was born at Calcutta on 20 April 1937. His family claimed descent from Ali, and his father, Ahmed Hossain, was an early Bengali Muslim physician in Calcutta. The family moved to Dhaka in 1949, after Partition. He studied law at Oxford, where he later taught constitutional and international law at Queen's College (1957–1959), and he also taught at the University of Dhaka (1962–1967). ¹

A close associate of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Hossain was elected to the Pakistan National Assembly in 1970 and became a leading negotiator of the Awami League during the crisis of 1971. After independence he chaired the committee that drafted Bangladesh's first constitution, adopted in 1972, and served as the country's first law minister and then as foreign minister, representing the new state abroad in its first years. ¹

After the upheavals of 1975 Hossain returned to law, building one of Dhaka's leading chambers and arguing major constitutional cases, while remaining a public voice on constitutionalism. In 1992 he founded the Gano Forum. In 2018, at eighty-one, he fronted the Jatiya Oikya Front, an opposition alliance that brought together parties across the spectrum against the ruling Awami League. Press coverage of that campaign habitually described him as an icon of secular democracy and the conscience of the nation. ^{1 2}

In October 2023 Hossain stepped back from active politics and was elected emeritus president of the Gano Forum. He married Hameeda Hossain in 1963; his daughters include the civil-rights lawyer Sara Hossain. He is a living person, and this entry records only well-sourced public facts. ¹