Biography of Quaid-e-Azam (Father of Nation)

 

Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah

The achievement of the Father of the Nation Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the founder of Pakistan dominates everything else he did in his long and illustrious public life spanning 42 years. Nonetheless, by any standard, his life was eventful, his personality multidimensional, and his achievements in other fields were numerous, if not equally significant. Indeed, he had played several roles with distinction: he was an 'ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, a great constitutionalist, a distinguished parliamentarian, a top-notch politician, an indefatigable freedom-fighter, a dynamic Muslim leader, a political strategist, and, above all, one of the great nation-builders of modern times. What distinguishes him from similar other leaders is that, while they assumed the leadership of traditionally well-defined nations and espoused their cause or led them to freedom, he created a nation out of an inchoate and oppressed minority and established a cultural and national home for it. And all of this in less than a decade. For more than three decades prior to the successful culmination of the Muslim struggle for freedom in the South Asian subcontinent in 1947, Jinnah provided political leadership to Indian Muslims: initially as one of the leaders, but later, since 1947, as the sole prominent leader- the Quaid-i-Azam. He had guided their affairs for over thirty years; he had given expression, coherence, and direction to their legitimate aspirations and cherished dreams; he had formulated these into concrete demands; and, above all, he had striven all the while to get them conceded by both the ruling British and the numerous Hindus, India's dominant segment of the population. And he had fought for the inherent rights of Muslims to an honorable existence in the subcontinent for over thirty years, relentlessly and inexorably. Indeed, his life story is akin to the phoenix-like rebirth of the Muslims of the subcontinent and their spectacular rise to nationhood.

Early Life

Born on December 25, 1876, in Karachi to a prominent mercantile family and educated at the Sindh Madrassat-ul-Islam and the Christian Mission School, Jinnah joined the Lincoln's Inn in 1893, three years later becoming the youngest Indian to be called to the Bar. Starting out in the legal profession with nothing but his native ability and determination, young Jinnah rose to prominence and became Bombay's most successful lawyer within a few years, as few did. Jinnah formally entered politics in 1905, after gaining a firm foothold in the legal profession, on the platform of the Indian National Congress. In that year, he traveled to England with Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866-1915) as part of a Congress delegation to advocate for Indian self-government during the British elections. A year later, he was appointed Secretary to Dadabhai Noaroji (1825-1917), the then-President of the Indian National Congress, which was considered a great honor for a young politician. He also delivered his first political speech in support of the resolution on self-government at the Calcutta Congress session (December 1906).

Political Career

Jinnah was elected to the newly formed Imperial Legislative Council three years later, in January 1910. Throughout his four-decade parliamentary career, he was probably the most powerful voice in the cause of Indian freedom and rights. Jinnah, who was also the first Indian to pilot a private member's Bill through the Council, quickly rose to the top of a faction within the legislature. At the end of World War I, Mr. Montagu (1879-1924), Secretary of State for India, described Jinnah as "perfect mannered, impressive-looking, armed to the teeth with dialectics..." Jinnah, he thought, "is a very clever man, and it is, of course, an outrage that such a man should have no chance of running his own country's affairs."

Jinnah worked tirelessly for Hindu-Muslim unity for nearly three decades, beginning with his election to politics in 1906. Gokhale, the foremost Hindu leader prior to Gandhi, said of him, "He has the true stuff in him and that freedom from all sectarian prejudice which will make him the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity: And, to be sure, he did become the architect of Hindu-Muslim Unity: he was responsible for the Congress-League Pact of 1916, popularly known as the Lucknow Pact- the only pact ever signed between the two political organizations, the Congress and the All-

This pact's Congress-League scheme would become the foundation for the Montagu-Chemlsford Reforms, also known as the Act of 1919. In retrospect, the Lukhnow Pact was a watershed moment in Indian politics. For example, it granted Muslims the right to a separate electorate, reserved seats in legislatures, and weightage in representation both at the Centre and in minority provinces. As a result, their retention was guaranteed in the next phase of reforms. For another, it represented a tacit recognition of the All-India Muslim League as the Muslim representative organization, reinforcing the trend toward Muslim individuality in Indian politics. All of this is attributed to Jinnah. By 1917, Jinnah had earned the respect of both Hindus and Muslims as one of India's most outstanding political leaders. He was not only a member of the Congress and the Imperial Legislative Council, but he was also the President of the All-India Muslim League and the Home Rule League's Bombay Branch. More importantly, he was hailed as the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity due to his key role in the Congress-League entente at Luckhnow.

Constitutional Struggle

However, in later years, he became dismayed by the infusion of violence into politics. Jinnah, as a supporter of "ordered progress," moderation, gradualism, and constitutionalism, believed that political violence was not the path to national liberation, but rather a dark alley to disaster and destruction..

There was plenty of room for extremism in the midst of the masses' growing dissatisfaction with colonial rule. But, as Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) felt, Gandhi's doctrine of non-cooperation was at best one of negation and despair: it might lead to the accumulation of resentment, but nothing constructive. As a result, he fought tooth and nail against Gandhi's tactics of exploiting the Khilafat and wrongful tactics in the Punjab in the early 1920s. On the eve of its adoption of the Gandhian programmed, Jinnah warned the Nagpur Congress Session (1920): "you are making a declaration (of Swaraj within a year) and committing the Indian National Congress to a programme, which you will not be able to carry out".He believed that there was no shortcut to independence and that any extra-constitutional methods would only result in political violence, lawlessness, and chaos, rather than bringing India closer to freedom.

The course of events would not only confirm Jinnah's worst fears, but also prove him correct. Although Jinnah left the Congress soon thereafter, he continued his efforts towards bringing about a Hindu-Muslim entente, which he rightly considered "the most vital condition of Swaraj". However, his efforts were futile due to the deep distrust between the two communities, as evidenced by the countrywide communal riots, and because the Hindus failed to meet the genuine demands of the Muslims. The formulation of the Delhi Muslim Proposals in March 1927 was one such effort.To bridge Hindu-Muslim differences on the constitutional plan, these proposals waived the Muslim right to separate electorate, the most basic Muslim demand since 1906, which, while recognised by the Congress in the Luckhnow Pact, had become a source of friction between the two communities once again. Surprisingly, the Nehru Report (1928), which represented the Congress-sponsored proposals for India's future constitution, rejected the Delhi Muslim Proposals' minimum Muslim demands. 

In vain, Jinnah argued at the 1928 National Convention of Congress, "What we want is for Hindus and Muslims to march together until our goal is achieved... These two communities have got to be reconciled and united and made to feel that their interests are common". The Convention's flat refusal to accept Muslim demands was the most devastating setback to Jinnah's life-long efforts to achieve Hindu-Muslim unity; it was "the last straw" for Muslims and "the parting of the ways" for him, as he admitted to a Parsee friend at the time. Jinnah's disillusionment with the state of affairs in the subcontinent drove him to migrate to and settle in London in his early thirties.On the pleadings of his co-religionists, he was to return to India in 1934 and assume their leadership. However, the Muslims provided a sad spectacle at the time. They were a horde of disgruntled and demoralised men and women, politically disorganised and lacking a clear political agenda.

Muslim League Reorganized

As a result, Jinnah's task was far from simple. The Muslim League was dormant: its provincial organisations were mostly ineffective and only nominally controlled by the central organisation. Until the Bombay session (1936), which Jinnah organised, the central body had no coherent policy of its own. To make matters worse, the provincial scene resembled a jigsaw puzzle, with various Muslim leaders establishing their own provincial parties in the Punjab, Bengal, Sindh, the North West Frontier, Assam, Bihar, and the United Provinces.As frustrating as the situation was, Jinnah's only solace at the time was Allama Iqbal (1877-1938), the poet-philosopher who stood by him and helped to chart the course of Indian politics from behind the scenes.

Undaunted by the bleak situation, Jinnah devoted himself entirely to organising Muslims on a single platform. He began touring across the country. He urged provincial Muslim leaders to put aside their differences and join forces with the League. He urged the Muslim masses to band together and join the League.On the Government of India Act, 1935, he provided coherence and direction to Muslim sentiments. He argued that the Federal Scheme should be scrapped because it contradicted India's cherished goal of complete responsible government, whereas the Provincial Scheme, which granted provincial autonomy for the first time, should be worked for what it was worth, despite some objectionable features. He also drafted a viable League manifesto for the upcoming election in early 1937. He appeared to be racing against the clock to make Muslim India a force to be reckoned with.

Despite the numerous odds stacked against it, the Muslim League won 108 (approximately 23%) of the 485 Muslim seats in the various legislatures. Though not particularly impressive in and of itself, the League's partial success took on added significance because it won the most Muslim seats and was the country's only all-India Muslim party. Thus, the elections marked the first milestone on the long road to putting Muslim India on the subcontinent's map. With Congress in power in 1937, the most momentous decade in modern Indian history began.The provincial part of the Government of India Act, 1935, went into effect that year, granting Indians autonomy in the provinces for the first time.

The New Awakening

As a result of Jinnah's tireless efforts, Muslims were awakened from what Professor Baker refers to as their "unreflective silence" (in which they had been complacently basking for long decades) and to the "spiritual essence of nationality" that had existed among them for a long time. As a result of the impact of successive Congress hammerings, Muslims "searched their social consciousness in a desperate attempt to find coherent and meaningful articulation to their cherished yearnings," according to Ambedkar (principal author of independent India's Constitution). To their great relief, they discovered that their sentiments of nationality had flamed into nationalism".Furthermore, they had not only developed "the will to live as a "nation," but they had also been endowed with a territory that they could occupy and establish a State as well as a cultural home for the newly discovered nation. These two prerequisites provided the intellectual justification for Muslims to claim a distinct nationalism (as opposed to Indian or Hindu nationalism). As a result, when the Muslims finally expressed their innermost desires, they were in favour of a separate Muslim nationhood and a separate Muslim state.

Demand for Pakistan

"We are a nation", they claimed in the ever eloquent words of the Quaid-i-Azam- "We are a nation with our own distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, names and nomenclature, sense of values and proportion, legal laws and moral code, customs and calendar, history and tradition, aptitudes and ambitions; in short, we have our own distinctive outlook on life and of life. We are a nation under all canons of international law". In 1940, the Muslim demand for Pakistan had a huge impact on the nature and course of Indian politics. On the one hand, the British exit from India shattered Hindu dreams of a pseudo-Indian, in fact, Hindu empire; on the other hand, it heralded an era of Islamic renaissance and creativity in which Indian Muslims would be active participants. The Hindu reaction was swift, venomous, and vindictive.

The British were equally hostile to the Muslim demand, their hostility stemming from their belief that India's unity was their most important achievement and contribution. The irony was that neither the Hindus nor the British had anticipated the outpouring of support for the Pakistan demand from the Muslim masses. Above all, they were oblivious to how a hundred million people had suddenly become supremely aware of their distinct nationhood and high destiny. None played a more decisive role in channelling the course of Muslim politics towards Pakistan, nor in directing it towards its culmination in the establishment of Pakistan in 1947, than Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah.It was his powerful advocacy of Pakistan's case, as well as his remarkable strategy in the delicate negotiations that followed the formulation of the Pakistan demand, that made Pakistan inevitable, particularly in the post-war period.

Cripps Scheme

While the British response to the Pakistan demand was the Cripps offer of April 1942, which granted the principle of self-determination to provinces on a territorial basis, the Rajaji Formula (named after the eminent Congress leader C.Rajagopalacharia, and which became the basis of the lengthy Jinnah-Gandhi talks in September 1944) represented the Congress alternative to Pakistan. The Cripps offer was rejected because it did not fully concede the Muslim demand, whereas the Rajaji Formula was rejected because it offered a "moth-eaten, mutilated" Pakistan and the too was accompanied by a slew of pre-conditions that made its emergence in any shape remote, if not entirely impossible.The most delicate and tortuous negotiations, however, took place during 1946-47, following elections that revealed that the country was sharply and somewhat evenly divided between two parties—the Congress and the League—and that Pakistan was the central issue in Indian politics.

These talks began in March 1946, with the arrival of a three-member British Cabinet Mission. The Cabinet Mission was tasked with developing, in consultation with various political parties, constitution-making machinery and establishing a popular interim government. However, because the Congress-League schism could not be bridged, despite the Mission's (and the Viceroy's) persistent efforts, the Mission was forced to make its own proposals in May 1946. These proposals, known as the Cabinet Mission Plan, called for a limited centre that would be supreme only in foreign affairs, defence, and communications, as well as three autonomous groups of provinces.Two of these groups were to have Muslim majorities in the subcontinent's north-west and north-east, while the third, which included the Indian mainland, was to have a Hindu majority. Jinnah, the consummate statesman that he was, saw his opportunity. He interpreted the clauses relating to a limited centre and grouping as "the foundation of Pakistan," and persuaded the Muslim League Council to accept the Plan in June 1946, much to the chagrin of the Congress.

Tragically, the League's acceptance was attributed to its supposed weakness, and the Congress adopted a defiant posture designed to overwhelm the League into submitting to its dictates and interpretations of the plan. Faced with this situation, Jinnah and the League had no choice but to withdraw their earlier acceptance, reiterate and reaffirm their original stance, and decide to launch direct action (if necessary) to wrest control of Pakistan. The manner in which Jinnah manoeuvred to turn the tide of events at a time when all seemed lost demonstrated, above all, his mastery of the situation and his ability to make strategic and tactical moves.

Partition Plan

Plan of Partition By the end of 1946, communal riots had reached murderous proportions, engulfing nearly the entire subcontinent. The two peoples appeared to be in a fight to the death. The time for a peaceful transfer of power was rapidly approaching. Understanding the gravity of the situation. Lord Mountbatten was dispatched to India by His Majesty's Government. His lengthy negotiations with various political leaders resulted in the 3 June (1947) Plan, under which the British decided to partition the subcontinent and hand over power to two successor states on 15 August 1947. The plan was unanimously approved by the three Indian parties involved in the dispute: the Congress, the League, and the Akali Dal (representing the Sikhs).

 Leader of a Free Nation

In recognition of his singular contribution, the Muslim League nominated Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah as Pakistan's first Governor-General, while the Congress appointed Mountbatten as India's first Governor-General. It is true that Pakistan was born in virtual chaos. Indeed, few countries in the world have begun their careers with fewer resources and in more perilous circumstances. The new nation received no central government, capital, administrative core, or organised defence force. The Punjab holocaust had destroyed vast areas and disrupted communications. This, combined with the mass migration of Hindu and Sikh business and managerial classes, nearly destroyed the economy.

The treasury was empty, as India had denied Pakistan the majority of its cash reserves. On top of that, the still-unorganized nation was asked to feed approximately eight million refugees who had fled the insecurity and barbarism of the north Indian plains that long, hot summer. If all of this was symptomatic of Pakistan's administrative and economic weakness, the Indian annexation of Junagadh (which had originally acceded to Pakistan) through military action in November 1947, and the Kashmir war over the State's accession (October 1947-December 1948), exposed her military weakness. Thus, Pakistan's survival was nothing short of a miracle in the circumstances.Its survival and progress was largely due to one man—Muhammad Ali Jinnah. At that critical juncture in the nation's history, the country desperately needed a charismatic leader, and he more than met that need. After all, he was more than just a Governor-General: he was the Quaid-i-Azam who had founded the State.

The Quaid’s last Message

was, therefore, with a sense of supreme satisfaction at the fulfilment of his mission that Jinnah told the nation in his last message on 14 August, 1948: "The foundations of your State have been laid and it is now for you to build and build as quickly and as well as you can". Jinnah had worked himself to death in order to complete the task he had set for himself on the day Pakistan was born, but he had "contributed more than any other man to Pakistan's survival," according to Richard Symons. He passed away on September 11, 1948.A man like Jinnah, who had fought for his people's inherent rights his entire life and had taken up the somewhat unconventional and largely misunderstood cause of Pakistan, was bound to generate violent opposition, excite implacable hostility, and be widely misunderstood. But what is most remarkable about Jinnah is that he received some of the highest tributes paid to anyone in modern times, including some from those who held diametrically opposed views.The Aga Khan considered him "the greatest man he ever met", Beverley Nichols, the author of 'Verdict on India', called him "the most important man in Asia", and Dr. Kailashnath Katju, the West Bengal Governor in 1948, thought of him as "an outstanding figure of this century not only in India, but in the whole world". While Arab League Secretary General Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha called him "one of the greatest leaders in the Muslim world," Palestine's Grand Mufti called his death a "great loss" to the entire Muslim world. Surat Chandra Bose, leader of the Forward Bloc wing of the Indian National Congress, was given the task of summarising his personal and political achievements."Mr Jinnah was great as a lawyer, once great as a Congressman, great as a Muslim leader, great as a world politician and diplomat, and greatest of all as a man of action," he said after his death in 1948. With Mr. Jinnah's death, the world has lost one of its greatest statesmen, and Pakistan has lost its life-giver, philosopher, and guide". Such was Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the man and his mission, and such was the breadth of his accomplishments.