Muhammad Ali Jinnah
| ||
| office: | 1st Governor-General of Pakistan | |
| Term of office: | August 14, 1947 – September 11, 1948 | |
| Succeeded by: | Khawaja Nazimuddin | |
| Date of birth: | December 25, 1876 | |
| Place of birth: | Wazir Mansion, Karachi | |
| Wives: | Emibai, Rattanbai Petit | |
| Children: | daughter Dina | |
| Date of Death: | September 11, 1948 | |
| Place of Death: | Karachi | |
| Political party: | Muslim League(1913-1947), Indian National Congress (1906-1920) | |
Mahomed Ali Jinnah (Urdu: محمد علی جناح) (referred to in Pakistan as Quaid-e-Azam (Urdu: قائد اعظم), or "Great Leader", which is a legally defined title) (December 25, 1876 - September 11, 1948) was a Muslim nationalist in British India, who led the movement demanding a separate homeland for Muslims in South Asia and served as Pakistan's first Governor-General.
Early life and family history
Jinnah's birthplace and date of birth are disputed; however, it is generally believed that he was born in Wazir Mansion, Karachi, and raised in Mumbai (then Bombay). His father was Jinnahbhai Poonja, from Gujarat (the younger Jinnah dropped 'bhai' from his name, in 1894). Jinnah's father lived from 1857-1901. Jinnah's family had Hindu, Ismaili, Shia and Sunni ancestry; and the family was primarily Ismaili. Jinnah was educated at the Sind Madrasatul Islam and the Christian Society High School, in Karachi. In 1893, he went to London to work for Graham's Shipping and Trading Company, which his father did business with. He had been married to a 16-year old (distant) relative named Emibai; but, she died shortly after he moved to London. Around this time, his mother died as well. In 1918 he would marry Rattanbai Petit and they had a daughter, Dina. In 1929, his second wife died.
He had 3 sisters, Fatima Jinnah, Shirin Bai, and Rehmat Bai..
Law
In 1894, Jinnah quit his job in order to study law at Lincoln's Inn; from which he became the youngest Indian to graduate (1896). It is believed that Jinnah decided to study there as he was impressed by a mural in the main dining hall, one which depicted Moses and Muhammad. Jinnah would briefly work with Dadabhai Naoroji, the first MP of Indian origin in the British House of Commons. By the end of 1896, Jinnah was a member of the Indian National Congress and practicing law with the Bombay bar (as the only Muslim barrister). There he earned a reputation regarding his lack of respect for the British Empire. In one incident, a judge kept interrupting Jinnah by saying, "Rubbish!" Jinnah eventually responded by saying, "Your honour, nothing but rubbish has passed your mouth all morning." Shortly after this incident, in 1901, Sir Charles Ollivant offered to hire Jinnah at 1,500 rupees per month. Jinnah refused, believing he could earn that much on a daily basis. (By the early 1930s, Jinnah was earning about 40,000 rupees a month.) In 1906, Jinnah served as secretary to Naoroji, who was then serving as president of the National Congress. In 1906, Bal Gangadhar Tilak would ask Jinnah to represent him, during his trial for sedition.
Political Career
Jinnah joined the Indian National Congress and soon became its most prominent Muslim leader. At the time, the Congress Party was a collection of well-educated Indians who espoused moderate views and sought discussions and negotiations as a way to obtain increased self-government for Indians within the British Empire.
On January 25, 1910, Jinnah became the "Muslim member from Bombay" on the 60-man Legislative Council of India, which many contemporary historians criticize as a rubber-stamp of the Viceroy of India. In 1913, Jinnah joined the Muslim League and, in 1914, would support Indian participation in World War I. In 1916, Jinnah became the president of the Lucknow Muslim League session and again in 1920; and later, from 1920-30 and from 1937-47, would serve as the League's president.
Jinnah was the chief architect of the 1916 Lucknow Pact between the Congress Party and the League to cooperate on all national issues, and became the president of the All India Home Rule League founded with Annie Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak and other prominent Indian nationalists. Known to be an ardent admirer of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Jinnah strived to become the Muslim Gokhale, as he himself termed it. Indian poet and nationalist Sarojini Naidu penned the first-ever autobiography of Jinnah: The Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity, in 1916.
Jinnah's alienation from the Congress began with the ascent of Mohandas Gandhi in 1918, who espoused non-violent civil disobedience as the best means to obtain Swaraj (independence, or self-rule) for all Indians. Gandhi was unlike most Congress leaders - he did not wear western-style clothes, did his best to use an Indian language instead of English, and was deeply spiritual and religious. Gandhi's Indianized style of leadership appealed to rank and file Congressmen, and gained extreme popularity with the Indian people. By 1920, he and thousands of his fans and disciples were dominating the Congress Party.
Jinnah's conflict with Gandhi's leadership was not unusual for that time. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Annie Besant, Bipin Chandra Pal and other prominent nationalists had all opposed and criticized Gandhi's ideas on mass, non-violent civil resistance. Even the prominent Muslim Khilafat leaders like Maulana Mohammad Ali and Maulana Shaukat Ali would soon be estranged from Gandhi. However, Gandhi had the backing of the Indian people, numbering over 300 million, and a new generation of young, red-blooded nationalists.
By 1921, Jinnah had resigned from the Indian National Congress and voiced his support for separate Muslim negotiations with Britain over the future of India. "We maintain", he wrote to Gandhi, "that Muslims and Hindus are two major nations by any definition or test of a nation. We are a nation of a 100 million. We have our distinctive outlook on life and of life. By all the cannons of international law, we are a nation".
But Jinnah was also frustrated with the disunity of the All India Muslim League in the 1920s, and left India to practise law in England.
By 1930, Jinnah was back. Prominent Muslims like the Aga Khan, Choudhary Rahmat Ali and Allama Iqbal convinced him to take charge of a now-reunited Muslim League party. Jinnah participated in the Round Table Conference (1930-1931) but was frustrated at the failure to achieve any tangible results; he announced his retirement from politics. By then, however, he was a leader of the local Muslim population, and despite his ostensible retirement, he was voted as President for Life of the League in 1934.
Adopting what some have interpreted as a "divide and conquer" policy, the British initially supported Jinnah, hoping that he would be a powerful counterbalance to the Indian National Congress. Jinnah was more amenable to British interests: he supported Indian participation in World War II while the Indian National Congress opposed the war.
Partition and Pakistan
See Also: Partition of India, Pakistan movement, V.P. Menon, Lord Louis Mountbatten
The ideological fathers of the partition of India were Allama Muhammad Iqbal, the great Muslim poet, and Choudhary Rahmat Ali, an England-based activist. Iqbal, in his 1930 presidential address had first discussed the idea of a Muslim country in northwest India, and Rahmat Ali is famously attributed with the coining of the term Pakistan.
After the 1937 provincial and central elections, the League won a good share of the Muslim seats, and Jinnah made an offer for alliance with the Congress. Both bodies would face the British unitedly, but the Congress had to share power, accept the separate electorates and the League as the real representative of India's Muslims. The latter two terms were unacceptable to the Congress, which had its own national Muslim leaders and membership, and demanded that the League merge with the Congress. The deal fell flat.
Jinnah first raised the issue of partition at the Lahore Conference (1940). He was however not the first to declare that Hindus and Muslims constituted two distinct peoples, a view he arrived at reluctantly, adding that if partition was not achieved the subcontinent would erupt in civil war. On July 26, 1943, a member of the Khaksars attempted to assassinate Jinnah by stabbing; Jinnah was wounded.
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The partition question at first produced unanimous denunciation from the Congress Party, and the British considered it politically powerless. But India in the 1940s was already politically divided. Subhas Chandra Bose was leading a military force to liberate India with the help of Nazi Germany and Japan. Almost all Indian parties, including the League, the Communist Party of India and the League's Hindu rivals, the Hindu Mahasabha had rejected Gandhi and the Congress's Quit India Movement, which while was considered the most powerful Indian revolt ever, was suppressed ruthlessly by the British. The Muslim League formed provincial governments all over India, and prominent Jinnah supporters like Muhammad Zafrulla Khan and Liaquat Ali Khan were in the top echelons of power in British India. The viceroy, Lord Wavell began to respect Jinnah's stature.
When the interim Government of India was formed in 1946, Jinnah's rejection of both the May 16 plan (a Congress-League coalition) and the June 16 plan (partition) for India's independence, the League was left out of power. Jinnah alleged manipulation by the British and the Congress. He launched Direct Action Day on August 16, 1946, to protest and voice the Muslim demand for Pakistan. Although Jinnah asserted that now Muslims would stop at nothing to achieve Pakistan, he did not desire the bloodbath which finally erupted across the country. Over 10,000 Hindus and Muslims were killed. However, the League engineered the collapse of the Hindu-Muslim coalitions governing the provinces of Punjab and Bengal, and won inclusion in the central interim government. Jinnah stayed out of the ministries, allowing Liaquat Ali Khan to head the League ministers. It was an astounding political victory for Jinnah in an India now sorely divided than ever.
But the League-Congress coalition could not function properly, and fearing that Jinnah's indications of civil war would materialize after the riots of August 1946, Congress leaders Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel obtained the Congress agreement to a plan to partition India into two separate countries - a plan devised by Lord Louis Mountbatten, the new viceroy and V.P. Menon, an Indian civil servant. Patel and Nehru obtained the reluctant assent of Gandhi, who feared both civil war and partition.
Between June and August of 1947, Jinnah represented Pakistan side on the Partition Council, negotiating the partition of government assets and machinery, and simultaneously constructing the new Government of Pakistan.
Governor General of Pakistan
Jinnah was the new nation's first Governor-General and president of its legislative assembly. He put forward a clear vision for a Secular State, saying in his speech opening to the Constituent Assembly:
- You may belong to any religion caste or creed- that has nothing to do with the business of the state. In due course of time, Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.
The speech however has become an embarrassment for Pakistani politicians who want to Islamise his legacy. The democratic experiment, too, has had a troubled history in Pakistan, with the country being under military rule for half or more of its history.
The post of Governor General simply meant being the King of England's representative; a ceremonial head of state while Pakistan remained a dominion in the British Empire. However, the young state had to cope with bloody religious violence and the influx of over 10 million Muslims from India.
Jinnah played a very active role in government till the day he died. In the months after independence, he worked to curb religious violence, provide relief to millions of refugees and attempted to protect religious minorities and convince them to remain in Pakistan. He crafted Pakistan's economic policy and currency, established military, government and educational institutions.
When the Indian Army entered the Himalayan kingdom of Kashmir in October 1947 in response to an invasion of Pakistani tribesmen and soldiers, Jinnah responded by increasing military aid for the invaders while strongly criticizing the Maharaja of Kashmir's accession to India, when his original aim to send the Pakistani Army in was thwarted by its British commanders.
However, he did not live very long to see the new country take further shape. He died on September 11, 1948, from tuberculosis. A mausoleum was built to honour Jinnah in Karachi.
Modern Views on Jinnah
Mohammad Ali Jinnah is revered in Pakistan as the Father of the Nation, and honored on his birthday on December 25th each year, on Pakistan's independence day on August 14th and on Pakistan Day, March 23rd.
Jinnah's work and legacy is however intensely controversial, and has provoked emotive criticism not only from people in India, but also within Pakistan.
Criticism
The fact that over 1 million people died in the partition riots, and that over 10 million Muslims and 10 million Hindus and Sikhs had to leave their ancestral homes has made the partition intensely emotional.
Jinnah is held single-handedly responsible for the suffering of the Hindus and Sikhs by many people in India today. He is seen by many as a hate-monger, communalist and a treacherous political wizard. Pakistan to these critics is a creation of his ego, of his inability to live in a nation led by Gandhi's Congress. Mainstream Indians feel partition was unnecessary, given India's modern success as a secular nation with a Muslim population of 120 million rivalling the prosperity and freedom of Pakistan's Muslims.
Jinnah's tubercolosis is also the center of debate. Jinnah went to lengths to keep his suffering from the serious disease a secret. In 1944, Liaquat Ali Khan was accused of making a deal with some Congress leaders on a coalition and power-sharing behind Jinnah's back. It is said that Khan thought Jinnah was dying and wanted to grasp as much political power for the League as he could. Some Indians feel that if the Congress had held out longer, Jinnah would have died and Pakistan would never have materialized.
On the Kashmir issue, Jinnah is criticized by Indians for secretly backing the tribal invasion of Kashmir in 1947, while acting innocent before the world. Jinnah's secretary Khursheed Ahmed was in Srinagar, awaiting the tribal take-over and to prepare for Jinnah's triumphant entry. All this was foiled by the Indian Army, which promptly sent Ahmed back to Pakistan.
Jinnah's Pakistani critics, famously Choudhary Rahmat Ali, blame him for accepting a truncated Pakistan. The vision of Pakistan was to include all of Bengal, Punjab and Kashmir, but before it was created, East Punjab and West Bengal were separated from the Muslim-majority portions, and Kashmir is a hotly disputed region between the two nations. To his critics, this Pakistan is constantly under threat from India's size and strategic power.
His tenure as Pakistan's Governor General is criticized as well by contemporary historians, as having sown the seeds for a weak culture of democracy, and for authoritarianism and military take-overs in Pakistan. Although the Governor's post was largely ceremonial and only as the King's representative in the dominion, Jinnah's aura as national leader was unequivocal. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, leaders of the Pakistan Muslim League and other Pakistani political parties were completely overshadowed in function and authority. Jinnah dominated every economic, social and political sphere of government in his time.
Jinnah is also criticized for his intense backing Urdu as the national language of Pakistan, sowing the seeds for the Pakistan Civil War (1969-71) and the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, where with the help of India's military forces, East Pakistan was vanquished by Bengali nationalists.
A Secular Jinnah
In his speech to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, he said: 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.
Personally, he always advocated what today would be described as secular views. In his first speech in Pakistan he expressed an outlook that was to be a secular republic and an Islamic theocracy, after which his political career came to a sudden halt. Born Agha Khani Ismaili Shiite Muslim, Jinnah was once asked whether he was a shia or a sunni and he said if Prophet Muhammad was a shia, then he (Jinnah) was a shia and if the Prophet was a sunni then he was a sunni, but as the Prophet was neither of the two and was but a muslim then so is he. He also declared that any Muslim who professed to be a Muslim was a Muslim, responding to demands by some quarters to declare Ahmadis as non-Muslims. Pakistan however declared the Ahmaddiya Islamic sect, which had been very close to Jinnah during partition, out of the fold of Islam in 1974, through a constitutional amendment.
The reality of Jinnah might be in the shades of grey , as Ayesha Jalal and some other historians agree that Jinnah neither wanted a partition nor bloodshed. Jinnah was after partition seen as the "protector general of the Hindus" for his role in protecting them. He also appointed a Hindu as the first law minister of Pakistan and the first national anthem of Pakistan was written by a Hindu poet on Jinnah's behest which was later replaced by the current version written by a Muslim poet Abu-Al-Asar Hafeez Jullandhuri.
Jinnah also has some admirers in modern India. Hindu nationalist leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a former Indian Prime Minister, and Lal Krishna Advani have recently commented that Jinnah was a respectable statesman and noble Muslim leader, who must not be blamed for the violence of partition or the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan. Some historians and journalists acknowledge Jinnah's work to protect Pakistani Hindus, efforts to maintain a liberal democracy there and his emotional attachment to the city of Mumbai, where he had lived for most of his life.
Quotes
- Stanley Wolpert on Jinnah -- "Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three."
- 1942 -- "I have lived as plain Mr. Jinnah and I hope to die as plain Mr. Jinnah. I am very much averse to any title or honours and I will be more than happy if there was no prefix to my name."
- "We have to hope for the best, but be ready for the worst."
- "Unity Faith and Discipline should be followed in Pakistan"
- The last chief justice of India Lord Patrick Spencer opined
- There is no man or woman living who imputes anything against his honour or honesty. He was the most upright person, I know.
- Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the penultimate Secretary of State for India said;"Gandhi died at the hands of an assassin; Jinnah died by his devotion to Pakistan".
- President Harry S. Truman of USA said;"Quaid-i-Azam was the originator of the dream that became Pakistan, architect of the State and father of the world's largest Muslim Nation. Mr Jinnah was the recipient of a devotion and loyalty seldom accorded to any man".
Trivia
- One of the largest streets of Ankara, the capital of Turkey, is named Cinnah Caddesi after him.
- Jinnah's famous portrait appears on the Pakistani rupee denominations of 10 and above.
- Jinnah was portrayed by the British actor Christopher Lee in the 1998 film of the same name.
- In Attenborough's Gandhi[1], Jinnah was portrayed by the ad-baron Alyque Padamsee.
- First governor general of Asian birth in the history of the British Empire and Commonwealth.
References
- Jinnah, Pakistan, and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin by Akbar S. Ahmed (1997)
- Jinnah of Pakistan by Stanley Wolpert Oxford University Press (2002)
- Liberty or Death by Patrick French, Harper Collins, 1997
- . ISBN 969-413-036-0.
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