Perhaps no single episode from these years captures Sajjad Husain's character more precisely than what happened when Pakistan established its formal process for compensating migrants who had abandoned property in India.
It was, in principle, a straightforward administrative mechanism: migrants submitted claims detailing what they had left behind, and the new government, working from a finite pool of abandoned property on its own side of the border, allotted compensation accordingly. In practice, the process was rife with exactly the kind of exaggeration one would expect from a system built on unverifiable self-reporting during a period of total social upheaval — claims inflated, sometimes wildly, by people who reasoned, not unreasonably, that a chaotic new state auditing a flood of competing claims would struggle to catch every embellishment.
Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan — by then Pakistan's first Prime Minister, and a man who had once been fed and hosted at Sajjad Husain's own table in his district-town days — personally encouraged him to file a generous claim, evidently aware of the scale of what Sajjad Husain had genuinely lost in Delhi and inclined, out of old friendship and evident respect, to see him properly compensated for it.
Sajjad Husain refused to claim more than he believed corresponded honestly to what he had actually lost.
It is worth dwelling on the size of that temptation, because it was not a small one. He had sacrificed for the Muslim cause across three decades. He had given money to the Khilafat fund, to the Muslim League, to schools and Masjids and hospitals and earthquake relief for a city he had never visited. He had hosted the very leaders now governing the country he had helped bring into existence. He had endured a bureaucratic assault on his own legal standing, propelled by rumors he had done nothing to deserve. A less scrupulous man — even an entirely reasonable man, by the ordinary standards most people apply to their own self-interest — could have told himself, with real justification, I have more than earned this. The Prime Minister himself was practically inviting him to claim it.
He drew the line anyway, and the reasoning behind it, as the family has preserved and repeated it for three generations since, was simple almost to the point of severity: a new Muslim country could not be built honorably on an exaggerated personal claim, however defensible that claim might have looked on paper, however encouraged it had been by a friend now sitting in the highest office in the land. It may well have been the finest political act of his life, precisely because no one but his own family would ever have known if he had chosen otherwise. There was no audience for that particular integrity. He practiced it anyway, in a small government office, filling out a form honestly when almost everyone around him understood, and would have forgiven him, for filling it out otherwise.