Sikandar Hyat Khan was Premier of Punjab from 1937 to 1942 at the head of the Unionist ministry, and he was the most powerful Muslim politician in India in that period who was not in the Muslim League leadership.
In 1937 he signed the Sikandar-Jinnah pact, under which Punjab's Unionist Muslims would join the Muslim League as individuals while the Unionist ministry continued as a cross-communal coalition. It was an attempt to keep both.
He supported the Lahore Resolution of 1940, which is generally read as the demand for Pakistan, while continuing to argue for a united Punjab within a loose Indian federation, and he said in the Punjab Assembly that he did not want a partitioned Punjab.
He died suddenly in December 1942 at fifty.
His death removed the one figure with the standing to hold the Unionist position, and the party's Muslim base moved to the League within four years.
Every account of Punjab in 1947 turns on what happened between 1942 and 1946, and the single largest event in that span is a heart attack.
The Unionist Party was built by Fazl-i-Husain and Chhotu Ram on the rural landholder across all three communities, and its programme was agrarian: the Alienation of Land Act, debt relief legislation, cooperative credit and canal water. It beat the urban parties in the countryside every time it was tested.
He put the province behind the war effort from 1939, and Punjab supplied a share of the Indian Army out of all proportion to its size for the second time in twenty five years. The Unionist bargain with the government rested on that, and so did a good deal of the resentment against them.
Khizar Hyat Khan Tiwana held the ministry until March 1947 and resigned rather than govern a province he could no longer hold. What followed his resignation, in Lahore and Amritsar and then in Rawalpindi and Multan, was the beginning of the summer.