Mohammed Ali Jinnah

Indian political leader

• Born: December 25, 1876
• Birthplace: Karachi, India (now in Pakistan)
• Died: September 11, 1948
• Place of death: Karachi, Pakistan

Jinnah led the movement that resulted in the establishment of Pakistan as a Muslim-majority state when the British granted the Indian subcontinent home rule in 1947. Jinnah served briefly as Pakistan’s governor-general, and as Qā՚īd-e Aՙẓam (great leader) he represented the Muslim voice in British Indian affairs as Mahatma Gandhi had represented the Hindus.

Early Life

Future political leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah (moh-HAWM-ehd ah-LEE JIHN-ah) was born into a wealthy Shia Muslim family in Karachi, India. Although his first school record shows he was born in 1875, he later claimed to have been born on December 25, 1876, the official birth date celebrated throughout Pakistan. The Arabic name Jinnah means “wing,” as of a bird or army. He adopted this form of his family name Jinnahbhai while in London in 1893. Jinnah was the eldest of seven children, and his family belonged to a minor sect within Islam, the Khojas, representing a successful merchant community in South Asia. He early realized that he was part of the Muslim minority in India, which made up about 20 percent of that British colony’s population.

As a young man, Jinnah was not a diligent student, and his tolerance for formal education was never high, but his natural intelligence caught the attention of one of his father’s British business associates, Sir Frederick Leigh Croft. Croft recommended Jinnah for an apprenticeship at the Douglas Graham and Company home office in London. Barely sixteen, Jinnah left for England in January, 1893, after a hastily arranged marriage demanded by his mother. Both his bride and his mother died before his return from London.

The drudgery of his apprenticeship caused Jinnah to apply for admission to Lincoln’s Inn during the spring of 1893. There he completed the process of legal certification and on May 11, 1896, at the age of twenty, was admitted to the bar as a barrister welcome to practice in any British court.

While in London, Jinnah had almost followed a theatrical career and also became fascinated by the glamorous world of politics. Because of this political exposure, he returned to India as a Liberal nationalist. He enrolled as a barrister in Bombay’s high court on August 24, 1896, and joined advocate-general John M. MacPherson’s firm in 1900 as the first native Indian lawyer. He sat on the municipal bench for a six-month interim term in 1901.

Life’s Work

Involvement in India’s congress politics was an integral by-product of Jinnah’s flourishing legal career. He favored Indian home rule through a gradual, constitutional process that would ensure unity of the various communities, especially Hindu and Muslim. Jinnah attended the twentieth Indian Congress in December, 1904. At this point, he opposed the formation of the Muslim League in 1906 and was a leading moderate voice during the nine years between 1907 and 1915 when congress divided into angrily conflicting parties, all claiming to be the heir to India’s nationalist movement.

On January 25, 1910, Jinnah took his seat on the expanded sixty-member legislative council, which offered a voice to the Indian public regarding British colonial policy. Jinnah finally joined the Muslim League in 1913 but insisted that it did not overshadow his larger loyalty to an independent, unified India. He understood but did not share the Muslims’ apprehension about their role in a Hindu majority population when self-government on Western parliamentary lines came to India. Jinnah was confident that he could safeguard the future of the Muslims by constitutional provisos.

It was during this period, at the beginning of World War I, that Jinnah met Mahatma Gandhi, who returned to India in 1915. From the very beginning, their relationship was one of deep tensions and mistrust underlying superficially polite manners. Jinnah believed that Gandhi’s Hindu ideology could never support a common Indian nationalism. In the push for Hindu-Muslim unity, Jinnah supported the general demands of congress for reforms from the British Raj. These reforms focused on equal military treatment, extension of self-government, and development of local commerce and industry. It was during this period that Jinnah was able to negotiate with congress the 1916 Lucknow Pact , which guaranteed separate electorates and weighted representation for the Muslims in any future constitution. Hindu-Muslim unity declined when Gandhi supported British recruitment of Indian soldiers for World War I, and Jinnah opposed such a move without guarantees of equal citizenship in the Empire. Nevertheless, there was a brief honeymoon between congress and the Muslim League after World War I.

During the World War I era, between 1916 and their marriage on April 19, 1918, Jinnah courted the young daughter of a wealthy Parsi merchant. Ratanbai Petit was eighteen and Jinnah more than forty when they wed. The marriage lasted until her death in February, 1929, but it caused her to be disowned by her family; during the last five years of Ratanbai’s life, she was virtually estranged from Jinnah as well. A daughter, Dina, was born to the union, and she, like her mother, married outside her family’s religious community. The marriage of Dina to a Parsi who had converted to Christianity led to an almost complete break between her and Jinnah. Fatima Jinnah, Jinnah’s adoring sister, served as housekeeper, host, and nurse to Jinnah until his death.

A period of discontent and withdrawal began for Jinnah in 1919 and lasted until 1934, when he undertook leadership of a reconstituted Muslim League and moved toward acceptance of the idea of Pakistan . During the 1920’s, the Rowlatt Act, the Amritsar Massacre, the Khilafat Pan-Islamic movement, and Gandhi’s growing following for nonresistance, satyagraha, caused division over methodology among advocates of home rule. Therefore, Jinnah’s earlier successes at Lucknow and the desire for moderate nonconfrontational programs were rejected, and he withdrew from not only the Legislative Council but also the Muslim League and congressional leadership. Jinnah’s goal was to bring independence to India through a unified Hindu-Muslim state, so he led a Muslim League faction that opposed the radical Khilafat movement. He gradually regained positions of prominence in political circles and went to London in 1930 to participate in the Round Table conferences on India. These conferences ended without tangible results. Disillusioned over the failure to achieve communal unity in India or even unity among his Muslim colleagues, Jinnah moved to England in 1930 and transferred his law practice entirely to appeals before London’s Privy Council, the highest court in the Empire. Jinnah returned to Bombay in 1934 and began to help rebuild the Muslim League, planning appeals to congress to support Muslim demands and to present a common front against the British.

These unity efforts failed, and in October, 1937, Jinnah moved toward leadership of the All-India Muslim League and set off on a path that would lead to the formation of Pakistan. At this point, he became known as Qā՚īd-e Aՙẓam (great leader), changed to native dress, and soon adopted the black Persian lamb cap that would be known throughout the world as a “Jinnah cap.” By the spring of 1940, in an address at Lahore, Jinnah lowered the final curtain on any prospect for a united India. This early advocate of unity had transformed himself into Pakistan’s great advocate and became the founder of that nation based on Muslim solidarity.

For the next seven years, until success came in August, 1947, Jinnah devoted himself to the establishment of Pakistan and the division of India. He resisted all compromise, whether offered by the British, the Hindus, or his fellow Muslims. He determined Pakistan a necessity, because he feared Muslims would be excluded from power or prospects of advancement in the close-knit structure of Hindu social organization and their majority state. Even during World War II, there was constant vying for position so that home rule for the Indian subcontinent would be quickly granted afterward. Jinnah upheld Muslim demands for Pakistan and bitter communal struggle characterized the whole process. With few options left, the British and Hindus acquiesced, and Pakistan was born, a divided state with the Bengali area in the east and the larger region on the western border.

With independence, Jinnah was the supreme authority and the symbol of the new state. He was governor-general of the dominion, while uniting in himself the ceremonial functions of a head of state and the effective power of a chief executive. He often presided over the deliberations of the cabinet or sent it directives and was president of the constituent assembly as well as its legal adviser. Provisions in the India Independence Act of 1947 and the Government of India Act of 1935 were adapted to give his office wide powers of discretion and special responsibility. Jinnah’s leadership, however, lasted only thirteen months, and during that time he was seriously ill. He died September 11, 1948, in Karachi, the place of his birth, but now the city was a part of the state of Pakistan, carved from the India of the British raj for its Muslim citizens.

Significance

The founding of Pakistan as a Muslim majority state was the crowning glory of Jinnah’s life. He first devoted himself to the goal of an independent, unified India with communal harmony achieved between Hindus and the various minorities by constitutional guarantees. Eventually he realized that his professional success as a leading barrister in colonial India and the high economic and social position he thus achieved would never allow him to participate fully in the Indian congress movement, because his status as a Muslim always provided an invisible barrier.

Jinnah’s logical, precise, and self-disciplined mind rejected communal violence and supported constitutional guarantees for all Indians. By 1940, however, Jinnah had determined that those guarantees would not protect Muslim interests in a Hindu-dominated state and that separate states must be formed when the British granted India home rule. Jinnah’s position reflects the use of religious identification as a foundation of nationalism, a major force in the modern world. The rise of Islam as a nationalistic unifier was early evidenced in the Indian struggle. Although not particularly devout himself, Jinnah became the Qā՚īd-e Aՙẓam of Pakistan and headed a nationalistic movement that succeeded in dividing the Indian subcontinent based on religious identification. The bitter struggle and communal hatred engendered by that division has had long-lasting political and diplomatic repercussions.

Pakistan’s founding in August, 1947, gave Jinnah the task of guiding the infant state through its earliest difficulties. He had devoted so much effort to the struggle for independence that a detailed plan of action for the new government had to be formulated after the fact. He survived only thirteen months, but he affixed his own indelible seal to the ideals of the new nation as he advocated law and order, elimination of bribery and corruption, and equal rights for all citizens regardless of religion. Achieving these goals presented problems for Pakistan, and the internal conflict that resulted in the eastern Bengali region, now Bangladesh , seceding from Pakistan altered the dream he had for the future.

Jinnah spent his life as a freedom fighter: first, for freedom from British colonial rule; then, for civil freedom for the Muslim minority in India; and, finally, for guaranteed freedoms in the new state of Pakistan. He used his skills as a barrister to serve as the Muslim voice in India, to found the nation-state of Pakistan, and to build its early structure as the first governor-general. He is revered today as Pakistan’s founding father, and he alone retains the title Qā՚īd-e Aՙẓam.

Bibliography

Ahmad, Jamil-ud-Din, comp. Historic Documents of the Muslim Freedom Movement. Lahore, Pakistan: United, 1970. The documents in this collection focus on the resolutions, speeches, and writings of the Islamic Indian community. They are in chronological order and provide an overview of the move toward home rule and partition.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Quaid-i-Azam, as Seen by His Contemporaries. Lahore, Pakistan: United, 1966. Jinnah’s work, personality, and influence are examined from several points of view by former associates. The recollections are generally positive but provide telling personal insights that reveal Jinnah and his relationships.

Ali, Chaudhri Muhammad. The Emergence of Pakistan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. This historical study of the creation of Pakistan focuses on 1946-1948, but it also provides an examination of the social, economic, and political background. Jinnah is portrayed as a calm, logical, astute politician protecting Muslim rights, while the role of Hindus and Sikhs is criticized.

Ispahani, M. A. H. Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah as I Knew Him. Karachi, Pakistan: Forward Publication Trust, 1966. The memoirs of one of Jinnah’s closest personal friends represent the wealthy commercial and financial voice of Calcutta and the Bengali faction of the Muslim League. Jinnah’s role in the East Pakistan region is particularly explored.

Jaffrelot, Christophe, ed. A History of Pakistan and Its Origins. Translated by Gillian Beaumont. London: Anthem Press, 2002. Includes an essay about the efforts of Jinnah and others to create a separate Pakistan.

Kazimi, M. R., ed. M. A. Jinnah Views and Reviews. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Collection of articles and essays about Jinnah written by scholars and historians, including analyses of his role in the partition of India.

Merriam, Allen Hayes. Gandhi Versus Jinnah: The Debate over the Partition of India. Calcutta: Minerva, 1980. The leading figures in the Indian independence movement evidence the differing philosophies, conflicting methodology, and tense antagonism between the two who are heroic figures within their own communities.

Pandey, Bishwa Nath. The Breakup of British India. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969. This study analyzes the origins of nationalism in the British Raj and then examines the growing movement of Muslim separatism. There is a focus on religious and social issues while noting the strong influence of the leaders on each side.

Wolpert, Stanley A. Jinnah of Pakistan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. This objective, well-documented, comprehensive biography of the life of Jinnah portrays the complexity of his personality and his dedication to the Muslim voice in India. While always acknowledging his role as a major leader in twentieth century Indian affairs, his enigmatic character is evidenced.

Ziring, Lawrence. Pakistan: At the Crosscurrent of History. Oxford, England: Oneworld, 2003. This history of Pakistan begins with a discussion of Jinnah’s efforts to create and separate Pakistan and his leadership during the nation’s early years.