Jinnah and the Making

of Pakistan
By Ian A. Talbot

The ability of Jinnah to unite a series of political expediencies

with the popular appeal of Islam to demand a separate state for
the Muslim people, has brought him the accolade 'the founder of
Pakistan'.
The worldwide Islamic revival of the 1970s has overshadowed the attempts made by Muslims earlier in
the century to unite religious and political authority. Muslims led the revolt against the colonial West
throughout much of the Middle East, Africa and South and South-East Asia. In India especially, the
Muslim urge to political power was clearly demonstrated. As British rule there drew to an end, many
Muslims demanded, in the name of Islam, the creation of a separate Pakistan state. Its emergence in
August 1947 remains one of the major political achievements of modern Muslim history. It resulted
mainly from the efforts of one man, Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
The Muslims of British India were not a united community. They were divided by ethnic background,
language and sect. The main ethnic division was between the descendants of the Arab and Turkish
invaders of India and those whose ancestors had been converted from the indigenous Hindu
population. There was no common Muslim language in India. Instead, Muslims shared with their Hindu
neighbours the main regional languages Bengali, Punjabi, Gujazati and Tamil. Rivalries between the
Sunni and Shia sects of Islam were another factor limiting Muslim unity. Many Muslims also shared
economic interests with their Hindu counterparts, particularly the cultivators of the Punjab and the
large landowners of the United Provinces known as the taluqdars . Finally, as the British introduced
elected councils and assemblies in the twentieth century, a division of political priorities and interests
emerged between the Muslims who lived in regions such as the Punjab and Bengal, where they formed
a majority of the population, and those who inhabited areas such as the United Provinces, where they
were outnumbered by the Hindus. In these circumstances Jinnah's uniting the Muslims behind the
demand for Pakistan in the 1940s was an outstanding achievement.
Despite this remarkable accomplishment, Jinnah remains an enigmatic and controversial figure.
Although he began his career as a respected leader of the Indian National Congress, he ended it as its
most implacable opponent. Although he was not a devout Muslim (he drank alcohol and ate pork), he
demanded in the name of Islam the creation of Pakistan. Although he could not speak most of the main
Indian Muslim languages, he captivated audiences of millions during the campaign for Pakistan.
Jinnah's background and his character are almost as enigmatic as his political motivations and the
reasons for his success. His family background is obscure: little is known other than that he came from
a merchant family of recent converts to Islam which had settled in Karachi. There is even uncertainty
about his date of birth, although he always maintained that it was on Christmas Day, 1876. Throughout
his life Jinnah was a remote and inscrutable figure. He had no true friends and was rarely seen relaxed
and off guard, whether in private or in public. The final Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, felt far more
at ease with the sociable Jawaharlal Nehru, who was Jinnah's leading Congress Party opponent. Jinnah's
inscrutability and stubborn support for his Pakistan demand frequently frustrated Mountbatten during
the series of meetings which took place between them early in April 1947. After one marathon session
during which Jinnah appeared not to have been listening to any of his arguments, Mountbatten wrote
in exasperation that 'Jinnah must be a psychopathic case'.
When Jinnah was sixteen, his father sent him to London to study law; He pursued his studies at
Lincoln's Inn with great devotion. Whilst in London, he met several Indian politicians including
Dadabhai Naoroji, MP for Central Finsbury and leading member of the Indian National Congress. It was
during this period that Jinnah acquired the English manner and appearance and the belief in the
effectiveness of parliamentary democracy which were to become his political hallmarks.
Jinnah returned to India in 1896 as a qualified barrister. He faced three years of uphill struggle before
he established himself as Bombay's leading Muslim lawyer. It was only when his career was thus
assured that he entered politics. His first appearance was at the 1906 Calcutta session of the Congress
in which he acted as private secretary to its President, Dadabhai Naoroji. There he established links
with several Congress leaders, most notably with the influential Gopal Krishna Gokhale, whom he
accompanied on a visit to England in April 1913; by that date Jinnah had emerged as one of the
leading Muslim figures in the Congress and was regarded by many as its future leader.
Until 1913 Jinnah had steered well clear of the main Muslim political organisation, the Muslim League.
This had been founded in 1906 in order to safeguard Muslim political rights. Its outlook was
conservative and loyal to the British and it reflected in the main the priorities of the Muslim educated
elite of the United Provinces, from where it drew its leaders and its greatest support. Elsewhere in India
it had little influence. In April 1913 Jinnah agreed to lead the Muslim League in the hope of bringing its
views into line with the Congress. He arranged its 1915 session to coincide with the Congress' and
played a leading role in the negotiations which took place between the two parties. They resulted in
the famous Lucknow Pact of 1916, the only occasion in modern lndian history in which the Muslim
League and the Congress came to a voluntary agreement about the political future of India. The Pact
granted the Muslims many of the safeguards which they had demanded, including separate
electorates and 'weightage' in the Legislative Councils of those provinces in which they formed a
minority of the population. However, despite the hopes which it raised, the Lucknow Pact had only a
temporary effect on Muslim-Hindu relations.
It only represented the agreement of the tiny political elite of the two communities and was therefore
vulnerable to the emergence into politics of new social groups and classes. Jinnah and many others
who believed in a liberal constitutional approach to the communal and national issues, felt ill at ease
when Gandhi launched his first Civil Disobedience Campaigns against the British in the aftermath of
the First World War. Jinnah refused to abandon his traditional approach to politics and resigned from
the Indian National Congress shortly after Gandhi had gained control of it at the December 1920
Nagpur session.
The new political environment created by the British constitutional reforms of 1919 represented,
however, a far greater setback to Jinnah's career than Gandhi's temporary radicalisation of Indian
politics. As a result of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, such subjects of provincial administration as
education, local self-government and public works were transferred to the control of ministers
responsible to elected assembly members. This system, known as dyarchy, offered great opportunities
for politicians with strong local support. For those like Jinnah, who had no landed or tribal powerbase, it
spelt disaster: throughout his career he had operated at the All-India level of politics; under dyarchy,
however, real power and influence lay at the local level. For a time he attempted to soldier on as
leader of an independent group in the Central Assembly and as a broker between the powerful local
Muslim politicians and the Congress during constitutional negotiations. Even this role was denied him
after the rejection of his proposals by the Congress and the all-party scheme produced by Motilal
Nehru in 1928. His mediatory role was increasingly taken over by Mian Fazl-i-Husain, the Punj abi
Muslim leadez whose strong provincial powerbase and membership of the Viceroy's Executive Council
gave him much greater authority in negotiating on behalf of the Muslims.
Jinnah settled once more in London in 1931, determined to retire from politics and to concentrate on
his legal career. He was only left in peace, however, until 1933 when Nawab Liaqat Ali Khan, his future
right-hand man and Premier of Pakistan, visited him in his Hampstead house. Liaqat stressed the
Indian Muslims' need for Jinnah's experienced leadership. Jinnah was given a further indication of the
importance which was attached to this in October 1934, when the Muslims of Bombay elected him in
his absence as their representative for the Central Legislative Assembly. However, it was not these
entreaties which decided Jinnah to return but rather that the 1935 Government of India Act presented
him with an opportunity to regain his former influence. Jinnah arrived back in Bombay in October 1935.
Within twelve years he was to become the Governor-General of an independent state of Pakistan.
Numerous questions arise concerning Jinnah's role in the Pakistan movement. How did he make the
transition from being an able debater in the refined atmosphere of the Central Legislative Council to
that of the Quaid-i-Azam , the great leader beloved throughout the thousands of villages of Muslim
India? Did he create the desire for Pakistan within the Muslim community or merely guide it, using his
legal talents to plead its case before the British and the Indian National Congress? Did he really believe
in the possibility of achieving Pakistan at all, or was his demand for it merely a bargaining counter
which he adopted to safeguard Muslim rights as British rule drew to its close? Finally, was he in control
of events or was he merely swept along by the tide of an Islamic revolution?
The opening of government and private archives in India, Pakistan and Britain has enabled historians
to answer at least some of these questions which so perplexed Jinnah's contemporaries. The picture
which emerges of him is not that of a charismatic leader guiding his people to the promised land, but
rather that of an able, single-minded political tactician who took full advantage of the dramatic political
changes which occurred after India's entry into the Second World War.
In 1937 elections were held throughout India for control of the autonomous provincial assemblies
which had been created by the 1935 Government of India Act. Despite its reorganisation by Jinnah, the
Muslim League won only 109 out of the 482 Muslim seats. This stemmed from its poor showing in the
two major centres of Muslim population, the Punjab and Bengal. It had fared dismally in the former
province, losing all but one of the eighty-six Muslim constituencies to the Unionist Party. The Unionist
Party owed its success to the support of the large landowners who controlled the votes of the
overwhelmingly rural electorate. Sikander Hayat Khan had succeeded Mian Fazl-i-Husain as its leader
in 1936. Like his late predecessor he used his strong provincial powerbase to dominate All-India Muslim
politics. Jinnah wisely recognised his own dependence on the Punjabi leader by allowing him to control
the Muslim League organisation in his province from October 1937 onwards, in return for his support in
national politics.
By 1939 the Muslim League had considerably increased its influence, thanks to the blunders of the
Congress, whose success in the 1937 elections had enabled it to form ministries in seven of India's
eleven provinces. For the first time large numbers of Muslims came under Hindu rule. The provincial
Congress governments made no effort to understand and respect their Muslim populations' cultural
and religious sensibilities. The Muslim League's claims that it alone could safeguard Muslim interests
thus received a major boost. Significantly it was only after this period of Congress rule that it took up
the demand for a Pakistan state, although the idea of a separate Muslim homeland in north-west India
had been aired by the poet Sir Muhammad Iqbal as early as 1930 and the actual word 'Pakistan' had
been coined in 1933 by Rahmat Ali, a Cambridge undergraduate. (The word 'Pakistan' is made up of
the initial letters of Punjab Asghania the North-West frontier province Kashmir and Sind, and the
ending stan land. Pak , an Urdu word, also means 'spiritually pure, or clean.)
The outbreak of the Second World War transformed this undergraduate dream into an issue of practical
politics: the war not only accelerated the British departure from India but built up the Muslim League
into a position of equality with the Congress. Just one day after the declaration of war, Jinnah was
invited to see the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, on an equal footing with Gandhi. When Linlithgow made his
statement on war aims on October 18th, 1939, he dubbed the Congress a Hindu organisation, whilst
implicitly accepting the Muslim League's claim that it spoke for all India's Muslims. The Viceroy's
famous 1940 August Offer declared that the British could not contemplate the transfer of their present
responsibility for the peace and welfare of India to any system of Government whose authority is
directly denied by large and powerful elements in India's national life.
The Cripps Mission which arrived in India in March 1942 to offer India self-government in return for
wartime support went even further to meet Jinnah's demands and conceded in theory the future
partition of India.
The Muslim League's rise in importance stemmed not only from the British Govemment's genuine
desire to secure communal co-operation before it embarked on further constitutional reform, but also
from its need to create a counterweight to the Indian National Congress which refused to co-operate
with the war effort. Jinnah adroitly exploited to the full the fortuitous circumstances in which the
Muslim League now found itself: it grew in importance following the resignation of the Congress
Ministries in October 1939 and the growing wartime confrontation between the Congress movement
and the British. Their repression of the Quit India movement which Gandhi had launched in 1942
shattered the Congress' organisation and resulted in most of its leaders spending the final three years
of the war in jail.
Jinnah was thus free to concentrate on consolidating the Muslim League's position and, most important
of all, to move against his rivals in the Punjab who stood in the way of Pakistan. Despite the impatience
of many of his supporters there, Jinnah waited until April 1944 before moving against the Unionist
Party. By biding his time he was able to take maximum advantage of the divisions which Sikander's
sudden death in December 1942 had created within it. He was also able to fully exploit the Unionist
Government's increasing wartime unpopularity. Large numbers of its traditional rural supporters
transferred their loyalty to the Muslim League from 1944 onwards. Their exodus was hastened by
Jinnah's political success at the expense of Gandhi in September 1944 and the Viceroy Lord Wavell in
July 1945: he manoeuvred Gandhi during their negotiations in Bombay into accepting the Partition of
India in theory; at the July 1945 Simla Conference he successfully resisted all Lord Wavell's efforts to
include a Unionist in the proposed Interim Government.
The Muslim League thus approached the crucial 1946 elections in the Punjab in a greatly strengthened
position. By the end of 1945 it had captured the support of a third of the Unionist Party's Assembly
members. It included in its ranks most of the leading landlords and rural religious leaders. They all
controlled large numbers of votes which, for the first time in 1946, were placed at the Muslim League's
disposal. The League was thus able to secure victory in all but a handful of the rural constituencies,
and it repeated this success throughout the subcontinent. Although more research is required before it
can be fully explained, particularly in the other major centre of Muslim population in Bengal, at the
time Jinnah maintained in 1946 that the Muslim community's support for Pakistan had been affirmed.
In fact many of those who had voted for the Muslim League had done so more out of personal loyalty
to its candidates than out of support for Pakistan. Indeed, what Pakistan stood for in 1946 was by no
means clear. Many of the Muslim League's recent converts from the Punjab, for example, hoped that
the concession of Pakistan in name would be the means of approximating most nearly to a united India
in fact. Jinnah had deliberately said little about where Pakistan's boundaries would lie, or about the
form of government it would have. He was perceptive enough to realise that only if the Pakistan
scheme was kept vague could it appeal to all sections of the Muslim community. He thus concentrated
almost solely on winning the acceptance of Pakistan in principle.
Although the Muslim League's victories in 1946 owed as much to local discontents and loyalties as the
widespread support for the Pakistan demand, Jinnah succeeded in convincing both the Congress and
the British that he had been given a mandate on this issue. This 'confidence trick' must rank as one of
his greatest political achievements. In the constitutional negotiations which followed the elections
Jinnah made full use of his strengthened position. His success was greatly assisted by the continued
blunders of the Congress leaders. Their greatest mistake occurred in June 1946, when they rejected
the Cabinet Mission's proposals for a federal solution to India's communal problem, after Jinnah and
the Muslim League had already reluctantly accepted it. Although Jinnah seemed prepared to agree to
less than a fully sovereign Pakistan, provided Muslim interests were safeguarded, the Congress
leadership appeared intent on hastening its emergence through its own errors. Once the Cabinet
Mission had failed, the partition of India became virtually inevitable.
The final year of British rule was not a happy one for Jinnah: he believed that the new Labour
Government and the new Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, favoured the Congress Party. His anger at the
British invitation to Nehru in August 1946 to form an Interim Government led him to abandon his
strictly constitutional approach to politics. His calling for direct action by the Muslim League resulted in
horrific communal riots in Calcutta on August16th. The violence quickly spread to other areas and by
the end of the summer India appeared on the brink of civil war. In the tense months of negotiations
which followed Jinnah appeared even grimmer and more determined than usual. Agreement was not
finally reached until June 3rd, 1947: the Pakistan which emerged from it was not the big Pakistan of
Jinnah's dreams but a 'moth-eaten Pakistan' shorn of the rich agricultural districts of the East Punjab
and of Calcutta and West Bengal. Although he could not have realistically expected to achieve more,
Jinnah was so bitterly disappointed that he would not record his acceptance in writing but merely
nodded his assent in the presence of the Hindu and Sikh leaders.
Once the plan for June 3rd had been agreed, Lord Mountbatten carried out the final complex
arrangements with lightning speed. India and Pakistan received their freedom at midnight on August
14th, 1947. That same day violent communal clashes broke out in the Punjab. They continued until
November by which time at a conservative estimate 200,000 people had died and five-and-a-half
million had been made homeless.
The massive influx of refugees added to the problems which faced the Pakistan Constituent Assembly
as it attempted to secure agreements with India over the division of the subcontinent's assets and
administrative services and as it negotiated for the accession of the surrounding Princely States. Most
of this burden fell on Jinnah who, besides being Governor-General, acted as President of the
Constituent Assembly and final authority in Muslim League matters. He also assumed responsibility for
the newly created ministry of State and Tribal Affairs. He was by now seventy and appeared frailer and
more emaciated than ever. In June 1948 his doctors ordered him to leave Karachi for the healthier
climate of Ziarat in Baluchistan. He insisted however on returning to Karachi to take part in the
opening of the State Bank of Pakistan. The summer heat proved too much for him and he was forced to
return almost immediately to Quetta. There he showed signs of improvement, but following an attack
of influenza and bronchitis, complications set in. On September 12th, 1948, Pakistan awoke to the
news that its founding father had died peacefully the previous evening.
Many writers have argued that if Jinnah had lived longer, Pakistan would not have suffered from the
political instability which has dogged it since independence. Jinnah certainly stood head and shoulders
above his successors as a national leader. Nevertheless, Pakistan's political weakness had its roots in
the way in which the Muslim League had won power in the main centres of Muslim population. It had
mainly functioned there as a grand coalition of the leading landlord factions. Once Pakistan had been
achieved, their traditional rivalries surfaced once more. This led to the Muslim League's rapid decline
as it was also handicapped by the lack of popular powerbase in these areas. The disintegration of the
Muslim League was accompanied by a general decline in Pakistani political life which soon became
sunk in corruption and factionalism. Even if Jinnah had lived longer it is unlikely that he could have
done more than delay its onset.
Despite Pakistan's post-independence problems, Jinnah's place in history is assured because of his
supreme contribution to its creation. He is still revered in Pakistan as the Quaidi-Azem whose
charismatic leadership enabled the Muslim community to achieve its goal of an independent
homeland. His achievement in fact was far greater than such Pakistani propaganda can easily admit.
For the Muslims of British India were not a nation awaiting only Jinnah's leadership to assert this fact.
Nor was Pakistan swept into existence by the tide of an Islamic revolution. Rather, Jinnah manipulated
the popular appeal of Islam and the political conditions created by the Second World War and the
British departure from India in order temporarily to unite most Muslims behind the demand for
Pakistan. In reality, however, this remained the priority only of a small Muslim elite.

Ian A. Talbot is a lecturer in history at Royal Holloway College, University of London.