As the KPP president A K Fazlul Huq took office as the first prime minister of Bengal, after the 1937 provincial elections, Ahmad became one of his closest confidantes.
He realised that Pakistan is inevitable and urged the KPP workers to join the Muslim League, fearing a feudal elite and clergy domination in its leadership.
As a journalist and politician, Ahmad observed and was involved in many crucial political events of Bengal and India at large.
At different stages of his career, he was a confidante to many leading political figures of Bengal, including A K Fazlul Huq, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy.
[4][a] Frequented by the local Wahhabi leaders, his paternal home served as the preaching centre of Wahhabism in that area.
There he entered the Mrityunjay School,[7] from where he matriculated in 1917, securing first division and a scholarship,[8] and moved to Dhaka, the principal town in East Bengal, for further studies.
[9] Inspired by the professor of Logic, Umesh Chandra Bhattacharya, he began studying philosophical texts of John Stuart Mill, Ramendra Sundar Tribedi, Hiren Dutta, Brajen Seal, Annie Besant, etc.
[17] Ahmad visited Kolkata in mid-1922 to attend a provincial Khilafat Committee conference and also to find a job in a newspaper.
[18] Advised by his friend Shamsuddin, who had returned to Kolkata and was editing the Moslem Jagat, he started publishing articles in the 'Muslim newspapers', mainly in the Sultan and the Mohammadi, and frequenting their offices.
Shamsuddin's Moslem Jagat published his long serial treatise Diarchy in Civilisation, criticising the Government of India Act 1919.
[21] As Ahmad joined Sultan, Chittaranjan Das brought about the Bengal Pact, a scheme for increasing Muslim representation in the public employments by reserving quotas for them.
[21] As a result, communal Hindu political and intellectual leaders lampooned Das in speeches and newspaper articles.
A delegation, with Ahmad as a member, was charged with forging an electoral alliance between the KPP and the Muslim League prior to the election.
The delegation met with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the president of the All-India Muslim League, several times in Kolkata.
[34] As a result, the KPP took office in coalition with the Muslim League, dominated by feudal elites and rich merchants.
[40] Huq, who had realised that Bengal's interest was being harmed by the central Muslim League leadership and was seeking a way out of it, gave Ahmad the express mission to support him in the process through Navayug.
[43] At that time Subhas Bose, former president of the Congress, was seeking alliance between the Bengal provincial Muslim League and his newly founded Forward Bloc.
However, Bose escaped house arrest and left India in 1941 in a bid to organise an armed resistance against the British rule with foreign help.
[49] Ahmad joined the Renaissance Society, founded by Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, editor of the Azad newspaper, and others, devoted to popularise the Pakistan movement.
Ahmad remained in Kolkata, largely inactive in politics, mainly busy editing the Ittehad, owned by Suhrawardy, starting from January 1947[51] and practicing law.
Ahmad was the proponent of the Jukta Front coalition between the Awami Muslim League and the Krisak-Sramik Party (KSP), founded by A K Fazlul Huq, in the 1954 provincial assembly election of Pakistan.
[58] He was the provincial education minister in the Awami League coalition cabinet, formed on 6 September 1956, led by Ataur Rahman Khan.
[59] Only six days later, he took office of the commerce and industries ministry in the central government, led by Prime Minister Suhrawardy, and relocated in Karachi, the then capital of Pakistan.
[62] As general Ayub Khan seized power in a coup d'état and declared Martial Law in October 1958, Ahmad was imprisoned with many other Awami League leaders[63] and was released in June 1959.
He ghost wrote the booklet titled Our Right to Live elaborating the six-points in 1966 for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
He believed that the peasant movement was predominantly a 'Muslim organisation' devoted to ensuring social dignity of the Muslims of East Bengal.
[73] Ahmad criticised the 'fusionist' Hindu-Muslim unity approach, which, according to him, sought to fuse both communities into one, taken by the Hindu political and intellectual leadership.
[74] He identified Chittaranjan Das and Sarat Chandra Bose as the notable exceptions who took the right approach to the problem and as a result made enemy with the central Congress leadership.
[76] Ahmad viewed Bengal's politics as distinct from that of India and admired its exponents, such as Chittarajnan Das, Subhas Bose, and Fazlul Huq.
He believed that the Congress's refusal to form the coalition cabinet with KPP after the 1937 elections precipitated western dependence in the politics of Bengal.