Muhammad Ali Jinnah (25 December 1876 – 11 September 1948) was the founder of Pakistan, one of the most pivotal and controversial figures of the Indian Subcontinent. His life is full of contrasts since his political thought and ideas evolved quite drastically over the course of his life. Jinnah in his early political career was a champion of Hindu-Muslim unity, and was a major leader of the Congress, and welcomed and respected by many who would later demonize and reject him. By the end of his life he had become Quaid-e-Azam (father of the nation) of Pakistan, a nation founded on the principle of Muslims constituting a separate nation, a revered statesman in Pakistan but a controversial figure south of the Indo-Pak border.
He was born in Karachi, at the time part of the Bombay Presidency of the British Raj, to a family of upwardly mobile upper-middle class Gujarati textile weavers, who belonged to the Nizari Twelver Shia sect. The fact that the founder of Pakistan was raised a Shia Muslim would be a matter of embarrassment and denial for post-independence Pakistan which was majority Sunni (rumors would circulate decades later of a secret conversion from Shia to Sunni but no evidence was found and the provenance of this claim is considered suspect). A bright and well-educated young man, Jinnah eventually went to London and fully embraced the Western way of life, and was known for being an aesthete and a dandy. He favored Western suits, from Savile Row, wore monocles, and was almost exaggeratedly aristocratic in the English manner in personal interactions. In this Jinnah was no different from other Indians of his generation, part of a middle-class cultivated by the Raj in the hope that they would support British rule. What actually happened was that exposure to British liberalism in London (most independence activists often remarked that British people in London were considerably less racist and more supportive than the British in India, who were incredibly toxic by comparison), made Jinnah feel that there was no reason why such liberalism couldn't foster in the Subcontinent itself, and that the people of India deserved self-government the way that the British granted self-government to itself. After he studied law, Jinnah became a barrister and started a successful legal practice in Bombay (Mumbai) at the age of 20. He was the city's only Muslim barrister at the time. Bombay was the city that he loved more than most and it was a city in which he was often considered a popular figure, with his handling of the 1908 Caucus Case making him a local hero. He would later purchase a fabulous mansion in Malabar Hills, that was known in its time for being one of the best in interior decor and design. He had to abandon it on the founding of Pakistan but he left it in the care of Nehru and even hoped to use it as a vacation retreat (the violence of Partition and its breakdown in social fabric prevented this from happening). Said mansion is still under government of India control in the 21st Century, falling into legal limbo, being unoccupied for decades.
Jinnah was active in the early years of the Indian National Congress. He was an admirer of Dadabhai Naoroji, and was a friend of Gopal Krishna Gokhale and he defended Bal Gangadhar Tilak in his trial for sedition. In 1913, he joined the All-India Muslim League but he still maintained membership and ties with the Congress. The League at the outset was merely a party that advocated for representation of rights for Muslims across the subcontinent and were largely liberal in outlook, seeing to engage Islamic society with Western ideas on its own terms. Jinnah became a figure who mediated and bridged Congress with the League, and he would be acknowledged by Tilak (an upper-caste Chitpavin Brahmin) as a builder of Hindu-Muslim unity. Jinnah was personally moderate in his political approach. He believed that India should become a secular liberal society like the English, with leaders drawn from representative elites who had the education and refinement that the vast majority of rural India lacked. He favored Home Rule and autonomy, but always with the ultimate goal of independence in the years to come. This was the moderate consensus vision of the Indian Independence Struggle until World War I.
The arrival of Mahatma Gandhi changed and transformed the Independence movement from an elite political event to a mass political movement. Jinnah and Gandhi had met at a party once in London (most members of the Congress were part of the same social circles, it was a fairly small social world) and both were Gujarati lawyers with a great deal of self-confidence. Gandhi's populist approach involved religious syncretism and an appeal to Hindu traditions such as "Rama Rajya" (Ram's Kingdom but think Camelot in terms of a mythical Golden Age). This approach was personally alienating to Jinnah because he saw in it the seeds of Hindu majoritarianism, and the slow shift of the independence struggle from a secular political movement to a socio-cultural movement which created polarization among classes and castes. Gandhi's attitude was also personally abrasive to Jinnah, not by intent so much as carelessness. At the 1920 Nagpur Congress, Jinnah appeared in a joint-press conference with Gandhi during which he addressed him as "Mr. Gandhi". The crowd however shouted out that Jinnah should call their leader "Mahatma". In other instances, Gandhi had expressed opposition to the 'Mahatma' title himself but in this moment he refused to shout down the crowd and instead defended Jinnah as a noble exemplar of Hindu-Muslim unity, a statement that Jinnah found condescending and "othering". At that time Jinnah was a Congress veteran for a decade and had been part of the Independence movement far longer than Gandhi had. Jinnah also objected to some of Gandhi's policies. Namely Gandhi lending support to the Khilafat Movement, a protest movement in the subcontinent that Gandhi amplified to a national cause. It involved Indian Muslims objecting to the Republic of Turkey deposing the last Caliph of the Ottoman Empire. Jinnah pointed out that the Khilafat Movement was largely composed of conservative Muslims of the kind that the Muslim League sought to reform and that Gandhi was elevating and platforming Hindu and Muslim religious movements in a combustible concept of religious tolerance at the expense of true secular leadership.
Jinnah shortly left the Congress party, feeling marginalized by its Gandhian turn and then returned to civilian law practice for more than a decade. He was politically active in Bombay, taking up causes in local government and trade unions. By the end of the 1920s, many in the Muslim League became sympathetic to the calls for a separate nation of Pakistan (a word that was an acronym for Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan). The party was internally divided however and it became clear to them that Jinnah, the only Muslim leader of the Freedom Struggle with name recognition, was the obvious choice for leading the movement. Seeing his own overtures and calls for reform rejected by the Congress, Jinnah eventually agreed and from 1934-1948, to the very end of his life, the cause of Pakistan would take up all of his time. The rest of his career is also subject of sharp debate and polarization both inside India and inside Pakistan. Both sides credit Jinnah as the man who singularly brought about the separation of India and Pakistan, which groups inside India and Pakistan blame or credit him with for different reasons. Indian Nationalists regard Jinnah as a boogeyman who stabbed them in the back and swindled land from India, while Pakistani nationalists praise him for being an Islamic supremacist who wanted to create an ethnostate and was right to have done so. Neutral historians, from across the spectrum such as Ayesha Jalal in Pakistan, Stanley Wolpert in USA, Patrick French in UK, and strangely enough India's Jaswant Singh (a moderate member of the right-wing Hindu nationalist BJP party) all reject these extremes in their assessments of Jinnah in the primary sources and the private correspondences of the man.
Jinnah was personally not at all a doctrinaire Muslim, or even an especially observant Muslim. He wasn't an atheist but for most of his life religion was not a matter he gave much thought to. He spoke English for most of his life, and barely spoke Urdu and Gujarati well. He married a Parsi (Zoroastrian) socialite, Rutie Petit (daughter of one of the most prominent Parsi families in Bombay) and was part of the jet-set of Bombay's high life. Jinnah was known to drink alcohol and eat pork, not observing halal. He also had a major tobacco habit (which is what finally killed him). More pertinently, Jinnah was Shia (who constituted about 10% of India's Muslim demographics) in a community that was largely Sunni. Jinnah started out as a committed secularist and politically acted as one for most of his career until the final 15 years of his life. Even then, Jinnah said many times that he saw "Muslim" and "Hindu" as ethnic categories and not religious ones. He said that in India, simply having a Persian or Sanskrit last name was enough to mark you as out of place in one community, regardless of actual theological views about the existence of God. Both groups were often segregated with their own restaurants, diets, places of worships, and community halls. There was no social development that eroded these distinctions that were more analogous to the middle ages of Europe. His daughter noted that Jinnah was especially impressed with Kemal Atatürk, leader of Turkey and his top-down reform of Turkey and Islamic social practices to more liberal and occidental standards. Jinnah many times said he would have favored a federal state with separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims, or alternatively a union in which the two nations of "Pakistan" and "Hindustan" could co-exist with "India". For Jinnah "India" referred to the Subcontinent and to him symbolized a category on the level of "Europe" or even "Great Britain" which was a union compromised of the nations of Scotland, England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. He often resented independent India for claiming the term, he notably always used "Hindustan" in reference to the state south of the Indo-Pak border. He expected that independent India and Pakistan could co-exist with open borders and trade and exist side-by-side. He also said that such an arrangement needn't be permanent. He expected Hindu and Sikh minorities to remain in Pakistan, and Muslim minorities to remain in India. In his speech of August 14, 1947 he stated:
- "You are free. Free to go to your temples, mosques, churches or any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed, that has nothing to do with the business of the state. Thank God, we are not starting in those days. We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle: that we are all citizens, and equal citizens, of one State. What exists now is that every man is a citizen, an equal citizen and they are all members of the Nation. Now I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal, and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus, and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as equal citizens of the State. In any case, Pakistan will never be a theocracy to be ruled by clergy, with a divine mission".
Jinnah even hinted that some time in the future with social developments in both sides, it could be that Pakistan and India rejoin into a single state. In either case, it didn't turn out according to plan, not his plan nor that of the Independence movement. The Muslim League in the 1930s sought to represent all Muslims but suffered a humiliating defeat in the 1937 elections installed by the Raj in the colonial era so as to allow more representation. The voter turnout was low as was the number of eligible voters but even so the League failed to achieve representation as an opposition party to the Congress and Congress even won in the Muslim majority areas that later became Pakistan (such as North-West Frontier Province). Nehru would brag that he represented far more Muslims than Jinnah did and that he was far more their leader by comparison. The League however consolidated support and learnt its lessons, and Jinnah reformed the party to achieve more name recognition. Even then the Partition of India was far from inevitable. During World War II, Governor-General Lord Linlightgow made the decision to enter World War II without consulting the Congress, aka the newly elected representatives. Congress offered support but demanded conditions for independence after the war, which Linlithgow refused. In response, Gandhi launched the Quit India movement which kept him and the Congress imprisoned during the war. This mistake by the Congress was largely to the Muslim League's benefit since they stepped into the vacuum and entered government across many of the states where they failed to gain a mandate. Ironically, it was often the case that the Muslim League governed alongside the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, right-wing Hindu fundamentalists of the kind that wanted a majoritarian Hindu state. Jinnah got name recognition and acknowledgement from the British government for his critical support (i.e. he opposed British imperialism but supported the war effort against Nazism). After the war, fresh elections were called with the Congress Party released from prison. This time the Muslim League won 75% of the vote in Muslim majority states, seemingly vindicating a mandate for a separate Muslim state. In actual fact, only 10% of the population counted as registered voters and voted, which still made it the largest elections until that time but in no way indicated that a majority of India's population, in any demographic, wanted secession.
After that there were two years of negotiations between the Muslim League, the Congress and the British, and exactly what went wrong in those debates, is a subject to debate and polarization entirely colored by the perspectives of different commentators. People sympathetic to Jinnah would claim that he was moderate and offered reasonable terms to which the Congress only presented the back of their hand, while the Congress framed Jinnah as a rigid inflexible man who refused to compromise. Historians closer to his position, argue that Jinnah only used the partition of India and Pakistan as a proffer and that he expected the Congress to offer a reasonable compromise such as separate electorates for the sizable Muslim minority. For the Congress, the Muslim League's mandate was entirely unearned and down to the conditions of the war and opportunism. They were emotionally embittered by independence and irritated at the League gaining recognition from the British as a major political party, and Jinnah for his part didn't entirely read the room to take their emotions to account. Nor for that matter did the Congress take his to account to either. This was a small clique who spoke English, moved in similar circles, and for the most part had far more in common with one another than with the great majority of the population they claimed to represent. Grudges and resentful feelings had a disproportionate effect. In the end, both sides agreed to a partition, with the last Governor-General, Louis Mountbatten, taking on the task of appointing a civil servant named Cyril Radcliffe to draw a line of division separating the borders. While Congress and the Muslim League deserve mutual blame for the separation of the two nations, the role of the British in heightening the social breakdown and resultant violence was far more significant. Mountbatten moved up the day of independence from 1948 to months earlier in 1947. Radcliffe meanwhile drew the map without any survey work, without any on-the-ground research. Both Jinnah and Nehru declared and celebrated independence without knowing exactly what they had agreed to. The map of partition was only unveiled on August 17, 1947 for the whole world to see.
Jinnah described the settlement as a "truncated, mutilated, moth-eaten Pakistan" with Punjab partitioned into two territories of West and East Punjab, with a non-contiguous state in East and West Bengal. The violence of the Partition across both sides of the border appalled and shocked the world, with the newly formed nations dealing with refugees and survivors pouring in from two directions. In addition there was the question of Kashmir, the princely state with a majority Muslim population but with a Hindu king. The news of Kashmir's accession to India shocked Jinnah, and that led to the first border war between the two nations, which Pakistan lost but ended up claiming a part of Kashmiri territory which is till holds on to. On August 14, 1947, Jinnah became the country's first Governor-General. Not Prime Minister that would have to wait for elections where Liaquat Ali Khan claimed victory. Jinnah served until his death in 1948 at the age of 71. He is known as the Quaid-e-Azam ("Great Leader"), his birthday is observed as a national holiday and his face can be seen on Pakistani banknotes. Despite the fact that he only ever ruled Pakistan for a short time, unlike India's Nehru who governed for the first 15 years of Independent India, Jinnah is still regarded as Pakistan's greatest leader.
Historical assessments of Jinnah are often mixed and have changed over a period of time, on both sides of the Subcontinent. Jinnah hoped for Pakistan to become a liberal representative democracy. Later decades would see Pakistan grow more and more captured by religious fundamentalist forces and be subject to multiple periods of military dictatorship. Not a single elected PM would ever complete a term in office or participate in a peaceful transfer of power. Many would be assassinated, imprisoned, impeached, and subject to military coups. Jinnah claimed that Pakistan would be a homeland for all Indian Muslims and yet half of India's Muslim population stayed in India where many of them were regionally integrated and subsequently earned higher incomes and social respect than in Pakistan. Pakistan itself would be further partitioned when the non-contiguous East Pakistan (which was East Bengal with far greater population than West Pakistan) became Bangladesh while also coping with inter-sectarian conflict in the post-war period with Baluchi and Pashtun groups. The most tragic fact is that Jinnah, while aiming to protect the Muslim population of the subcontinent undertook policies that made it subject to greater violence. The majority of the victims of Partition were of Muslim ethnicity and belief, on both sides of the border, including voluntary refugees, forced refugees (i.e. ones who wanted to stay in India but were forced out of homes by Hindus and Sikhs and others who were simply murdered). Meanwhile the status of minorities in Pakistan has similarly degraded over time, including Hindus and Sikhs brutalized during partition and other Hindus and Christians who remained in Pakistan and became subject to increasing violence in the years that followed. Furthermore, the migration of the Muslim League meant that the Muslim community lost its most educated liberal and moneyed classes, leaving Muslims inside India disenfranchised and without representation, and subject to greater vulnerability.
On the other hand, many have noted that Jinnah's fears about a majoritarian Hindu-dominated India were vindicated in later decades. Post-Independence India has seen many Muslim politicians in the state and center but there's never been a major national Muslim leader with the prominence of Jinnah, leaving many Muslims feel unrepresented by the Indian state, even with parties that profess secularism. The threat of communal violence unleashed in Partition became a periodic fact in later decades, leading to the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the entrance to political power by Hindu nationalist parties. Economically, many in India's business community, even among Hindus, have noted that Jinnah might well have been a better Prime Minister since he was more on the side of free markets than Nehru's mixed economy, albeit Jinnah also supported trade unions and worker's protections. Jinnah also formed a crucial alliance with the United States, putting Pakistan on the Western Side of the Cold War which made it an important geopolitical ally and made it diplomatically significant, often out of step with the state of its economy. In that respects, Jinnah remains a defining figure with his policies and decisions shaping lives and debates on both sides of the sub-continent. And many have come to regard his views on a federal state for India with more support even in India, which had many separatist movements after independence not concerned with Pakistan (such as Khalistan, and the Naxalite insurgency) with some arguing that perhaps Jinnah's objection to a centralist state with majoritarian hold on powers was in fact a valid critique of India's government structure after independence.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah in fiction
Films — Live-Action
- Gandhi, Jinnah is portrayed by Indian actor Alyque Padamsee in the 1982 film. He's generally portrayed quite negatively, something for which many historians, both in India, Pakistan, and UK would criticize. The actor himself would later state that his portrayal was not historically accurate and more than a little unfair in angling Gandhi's political adversaries and rivals as "bad people" rather than simply individuals with valid political disagreements.
- Jinnah, a 1998 film directed by Jamil Dehlavi, a British-Pakistani film-maker (whose previous work was banned by the Zia-Ul Haq dictatorship). It controversially featured a while British actor Christopher Lee as Jinnah, a man much taller and more imposing than Jinnah. The casting was controversial in Pakistan, not because of the Brown Face but because Lee had previously portrayed Count Dracula in several horror films. Nonetheless, the film was a commercial success in Pakistan and is considered fair and accurate and until his final years, Lee said that Jinnah was the best performance of his career and the most important film he ever did. The movie differs from the typical Biopic formula by having fantastic scenes set in the afterlife, including a scene where Nehru, Gandhi, and Jinnah watch the scene of the Babri Masjid destruction and mutually lament how their political disagreements paved the way for it.
- Viceroys House, Anglo-Indian actor Denzil Smith portrays Jinnah in this 2017 film.
- Quaid E Azam Zindabad, a 2022 Pakistani action comedy film that revolves around Jinnah's legacy.