Mian Fazl-i-Husain was born at Peshawar in 1877, read for the bar at Cambridge, practised at Lahore, and co-founded the Unionist Party with Chhotu Ram in 1923.
As education minister he expanded rural schooling and introduced reservation in government employment and in education for what he called backward classes, which in Punjab meant the rural Muslim and Jat populations against the urban Hindu commercial classes who dominated both.
That policy is one of the earliest systematic reservation programmes in India and it made him bitterly opposed by the urban Hindu press.
He served on the Viceroy's Executive Council and opposed the Muslim League's direction, holding that Punjab's Muslims were better served by a cross-communal agrarian party than by a communal one.
He died in 1936. Within ten years the party he built had lost its Muslim base to the League and Punjab was on the road to partition.
The Unionist experiment is the strongest evidence that Punjab's division was not inevitable, and its collapse is the evidence for how fast that ceased to matter.
He built the Unionist Party as a cross-communal coalition of landholders and made it the governing force in Punjab from the 1920s.
His education and recruitment policies deliberately shifted places toward rural and Muslim candidates and away from the urban professional classes, and the resentment that produced shaped Punjab's politics for twenty years.
The Unionist arrangement kept the province out of the communal politics of the rest of India until 1946. Its collapse is the immediate political cause of what happened in 1947.