Muhammad Ali Jinnah

• 1. Introduction

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  Muhammad Ali Jinnah was born on the 25th of December 1876 in a rented apartment on the second floor of Wazir Mansion near Karachi, and he died on the 11th of September 1948 as the founder and first governor-general of Pakistan. In between those two dates lies one of the most improbable careers in modern political history: a boy from a merchant family in a city riding an economic boom after the opening of the Suez Canal, who became the only Muslim barrister practicing at the Bombay High Court, then the self-described ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, and finally the man who broke the Indian subcontinent in two.

  His biographer Stanley Wolpert called him Pakistan's greatest leader. In his own country he is known by two titles: Quaid-e-Azam, meaning Great Leader, and Baba-e-Qaum, meaning Father of the Nation. His birthday is a national holiday. And yet the questions his life raises are anything but settled. How does a man who spent his early decades arguing for a united, self-governing India end up creating a separate Muslim state? What drove the transformation? And what kind of nation did he actually intend to build in the final months before his death?

• 2. The Making of a Barrister

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  In 1892, a business associate of Jinnah's father named Sir Frederick Leigh Croft offered the young Jinnah a London apprenticeship with Graham's Shipping and Trading Company. His mother consented only on the condition that he first enter an arranged marriage with his cousin Emibai Jinnah, from the ancestral village of Paneli. Both his mother and his first wife died while he was in England.

  Jinnah abandoned the shipping apprenticeship almost immediately and enrolled at Lincoln's Inn to study law. He later explained that he chose Lincoln's Inn specifically because the names of great lawgivers, including Muhammad, were inscribed above the main entrance. His biographer Wolpert was skeptical of this story: there is no such inscription, though a mural inside does depict Muhammad among other lawgivers. Wolpert speculated that Jinnah may have adjusted the memory to avoid acknowledging a pictorial representation, which many Muslims would find offensive.

  By 1895, at age 19, he had become the youngest British Indian to be called to the bar in England. During those student years he was drawn to 19th-century British liberalism, reading Bentham, Mill, Spencer, and Comte, and he watched from the visitors' gallery of the House of Commons as Dadabhai Naoroji, the first British MP of Indian extraction, delivered his maiden speech after winning his seat by a majority of just three votes.

  The time in England also left a permanent mark on Jinnah's sense of dress. He came to own over 200 suits, wore heavily starched shirts with detachable collars, and as a barrister took pride in never wearing the same silk tie twice. Even as he was dying, he refused to travel in his pyjamas. In his later years a Karakul hat became his signature look, and that style of hat came to be called the Jinnah cap.

• 3. Confidence at the Bar

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  At the age of 20, Jinnah began practicing in Bombay as the only Muslim barrister in the city. His first three years, from 1897 to 1900, brought few cases, but the acting Advocate General of Bombay, John Molesworth MacPherson, invited him to work from his chambers, opening doors that had been closed.

  When a Bombay presidency magistrate named P. H. Dastoor temporarily vacated his post in 1900, Jinnah secured the interim position. At the end of his six-month appointment, he was offered a permanent post at 1,500 rupees per month. He declined, saying he intended to earn 1,500 rupees a day. He eventually did. As governor-general of Pakistan, he would fix his own salary at one rupee per month.

  The 1908 Caucus Case made his name. Indians alleged that a European caucus had rigged Bombay municipal elections to keep Sir Pherozeshah Mehta off the council. Jinnah led the case for Mehta, and the esteem he earned helped build the reputation for advocacy that followed him through his career. That same year, his factional rival in the Congress, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, was arrested for sedition. Tilak hired Jinnah before unsuccessfully representing himself at trial. Though Jinnah did not secure bail, he did obtain an acquittal for Tilak when Tilak faced sedition charges again in 1916.

  A fellow barrister at the Bombay High Court recalled Jinnah telling a judge who had admonished him: "My Lord, allow me to warn you that you are not addressing a third-class pleader." Another described him as possessing a sixth sense, the ability to see around corners, driving his points home word by word with slow delivery and exquisite selection.

• 4. Champion of Unity

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  Jinnah attended his first Congress meeting, the organisation's twentieth annual session in Bombay, in December 1904. His political hero at that point was Gopal Krishna Gokhale, a Hindu moderate who later said of Jinnah that he had "true stuff in him, and that freedom from all sectarian prejudice which will make him the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity."

  Sarojini Naidu went further, describing Jinnah directly as an "ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity," a title earned in large part through his role in brokering the 1916 Lucknow Pact. With Jinnah serving as president of the Muslim League, the Congress and the League signed an agreement that set quotas for Muslim and Hindu representation across the provinces. The Aga Khan later wrote that it was "freakishly ironic" that Jinnah, who would eventually lead the League to independence, had once come out in "bitter hostility" toward the separate electorates that the Aga Khan and his colleagues had proposed.

  Jinnah also played a central role in founding the All India Home Rule League in 1916, joining Annie Besant and Tilak in demanding dominion status for India, comparable to the self-governing status held by Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. British Cabinet minister Edwin Montagu described him in his memoirs as "young, perfectly mannered, impressive-looking, armed to the teeth with dialectics, and insistent on the whole of his scheme."

  When moderate Congress leaders Mehta and Gokhale both died in 1915, and Naoroji remained in London until his death in 1917, Jinnah's natural political base inside the Congress eroded. But the decisive break came in 1920, when the Congress endorsed Gandhi's satyagraha campaign at its session in Nagpur. Jinnah regarded satyagraha as political anarchy and believed self-government should be won through constitutional means. He was shouted down by the delegates. He resigned from the Congress, keeping only his Muslim League membership.

• 5. The Fourteen Points and Exile

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  After leaving the Congress, Jinnah worked within the Central Legislative Assembly, where he was elected in September 1923 as Muslim member for Bombay. He showed skill as a parliamentarian, and in 1925 Lord Reading offered him a knighthood. Jinnah declined: "I prefer to be plain Mr Jinnah."

  The Simon Commission, dispatched by the British government in 1928 to review Indian policy, arrived in India in March of that year to a boycott by virtually all of India's political leaders. A minority of Muslims, however, broke away from the League to welcome the commission, and Jinnah's authority inside the League was challenged. At a League meeting in December 1927 and January 1928, he told delegates that "a constitutional war has been declared on Great Britain," and that the appointment of an exclusively white commission amounted to a declaration of Muslim unfitness for self-government.

  When the Viceroy's Secretary of State, Lord Birkenhead, challenged Indians to produce their own constitutional proposal, the Congress convened a committee under Motilal Nehru. The Nehru Report backed geography-based constituencies; Jinnah, though he personally was willing to compromise on separate electorates, proposed instead mandatory Muslim representation in legislatures and cabinets. These became known as his Fourteen Points. He could not get the League meeting in Delhi to adopt them; the session dissolved into argument.

  From around 1930 to 1934, Jinnah spent most of his time in England, practicing before the Privy Council. His biographers differ on why he stayed so long. Wolpert believed Jinnah would have remained in Britain for life had he been appointed a Law Lord, while early biographer Hector Bolitho called the period his "years of order and contemplation, wedged in between the time of early struggle, and the final storm of conquest." In 1931, his sister Fatima joined him in England. From that point on she lived and traveled with him, becoming his closest personal advisor as the lung ailments that would eventually kill him began to take hold.

• 6. Iqbal, the Lahore Resolution, and the Road to Pakistan

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  In a speech at Allahabad in 1930, the poet and philosopher Sir Muhammad Iqbal had called for a Muslim state within British India. Jinnah and Iqbal exchanged letters in 1936 and 1937, and in subsequent years Jinnah credited Iqbal as his mentor, drawing on Iqbal's imagery and rhetoric in speeches. Scholars have described Iqbal's influence on Jinnah as "significant," "powerful," and even "unquestionable." Iqbal died in 1938, but two years later Jinnah stated publicly: "If I live to see the ideal of a Muslim state being achieved in India, and I was then offered to make a choice between the works of Iqbal and the rulership of the Muslim state, I would prefer the former."

  The provincial elections of 1937 had shaken Jinnah deeply. Despite two decades of work to protect Muslim rights within a united India through separate electorates and provincial boundaries, the League had failed to win a majority of Muslim seats in any Muslim-majority province. In the North-West Frontier Province, where almost all residents were Muslim, the League won no seats at all. Historian Jaswant Singh described the effect as "traumatic," noting that Congress's ability to form governments on the strength of general seats alone confronted non-Congress Muslims with the reality of near-total political powerlessness.

  The Lahore Resolution followed on the 23rd of March 1940, passed at a League session Jinnah led. It embraced the two-nation theory and called for a union of Muslim-majority provinces in the northwest with complete autonomy, along with similar protections in the east. Gandhi called it "baffling." Nehru dismissed it as "fantastic proposals." During the Second World War, while Congress leaders were imprisoned, the League consolidated support. In the December 1945 elections for the Constituent Assembly, the League won every seat reserved for Muslims. In the provincial elections of January 1946, it took 75% of the Muslim vote, up from 4.4% in 1937.

• 7. Independence, Partition, and the New State

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  Mountbatten arrived as Viceroy on the 24th of March 1947, having been briefed that Jinnah would be his "toughest customer." The two men met over six days beginning on the 5th of April. At one point Jinnah, photographed between Mountbatten and his wife Edwina, quipped "A rose between two thorns." Mountbatten was not charmed. He repeatedly expressed frustration to his staff about Jinnah's insistence on Pakistan. By May he had concluded, and told Prime Minister Attlee and the Cabinet, that the Muslim League would resort to arms if Pakistan in some form were not conceded.

  On the 2nd of June, the final plan was delivered: on the 15th of August, Britain would hand over power to two dominions. On the 3rd of June, Mountbatten, Nehru, Jinnah, and Sikh leader Baldev Singh made the formal announcement by radio. Jinnah closed his address with the words "Pakistan Zindabad" - long live Pakistan - which were not in the script. Some listeners misheard his Urdu and thought he said "Pakistan's in the bag!"

  On the 7th of August, Jinnah flew from Delhi to Karachi in Mountbatten's plane with his sister and close staff. As the plane taxied, he was heard to murmur, "That's the end of that." On the 11th of August, he addressed the new Pakistani constituent assembly in Karachi: "You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan... You may belong to any religion or caste or creed - that has nothing to do with the business of the State."

  The Radcliffe Commission, which had divided Bengal and Punjab, reported on the 12th of August. Mountbatten held the maps until the 17th, not wanting to spoil independence celebrations. Christopher Beaumont, Radcliffe's private secretary, later wrote that Mountbatten "must take the blame - though not the sole blame - for the massacres in the Punjab" in which between 500,000 and a million men, women, and children perished. Eight million people migrated to Pakistan. Jinnah, by then over 70 and frail from lung disease, traveled across West Pakistan and personally supervised the establishment of refugee camps.

• 8. Illness, Final Months, and Legacy

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  From the 1930s, Jinnah had been suffering from tuberculosis. Only his sister Fatima and a small number of people close to him knew. In a 1938 letter he told a supporter that any health difficulties during his tours had nothing to do with anything wrong with him, blaming only "irregularities of the schedule and over-strain." Mountbatten stated years later that if he had known how physically ill Jinnah was, he would have delayed negotiations, hoping Jinnah's death might avert partition.

  Jinnah was also a heavy smoker. He worked with a tin of Craven A cigarettes at his desk, having smoked more than 50 cigarettes a day for the previous 30 years, alongside Cuban cigars. Fatima later wrote: "even in his hour of triumph, the Quaid-e-Azam was gravely ill. He worked in a frenzy to consolidate Pakistan. And, of course, he totally neglected his health."

  In March 1948, despite his declining health, he made his only post-independence visit to East Bengal. Before a crowd estimated at 300,000, he declared in English that Urdu alone should be Pakistan's national language, believing a single language was essential for national unity. The Bengali-speaking people of East Pakistan strongly opposed the policy, and in 1971 the language issue was among the factors that led to the secession of the region and the formation of Bangladesh.

  Jinnah died on the 11th of September 1948, just over a year after Pakistan gained independence. He was 71. Several universities and public buildings in Pakistan carry his name, and his birthday is observed as a national holiday. His daughter Dina, who had become estranged from him after marrying the Parsi businessman Neville Wadia, did not visit Pakistan during his lifetime. She came only for his funeral.