Dada Amir Haider Khan

Dada Amir Haider Khan (2 March 1900 – 27 December 1989) was a communist activist of Pakistan, and revolutionary during the Indian independence movement.

Biography

Dada Amir Haider Khan was born in 1900 in a remote village called Saaliyah Umar Khan Union Council Samote, Tehsil Kallar Syedan in Rawalpindi district. He was orphaned at an early age – losing both parents, then put in a madrassah. He ended up running away from his village at the age of 14.

In 1920, he met Indian nationalists and Ghadar Party members in New York City. He started distributing ‘Ghadar ki Goonj’ to Indians in sea ports around the world.

He was dismissed from the ship after the great post-war strike of World War I and worked and traveled inside the United States. He then became a political activist, worked with Anti-Imperialist League and the Workers Party (United States), which sent him to the Soviet Union to study at the University of the Toilers of the East. In 1928, he completed the University course in Moscow and arrived in Bombay in 1928. He established contact with S.V. Ghate, S.A. Dange, P.C. Joshi, B. T. Ranadive, Benjamin Francis Bradley and some other senior communists in Bombay. He also started to organise the workers of the textile industry in Bombay.