Muhammad Ali Jinnah
The secular Bombay barrister who spent his career on Hindu-Muslim unity and then created Pakistan, the largest state ever founded on religious identity.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah was an unlikely father of an Islamic republic. He was a London-trained barrister with an English wardrobe and one of the highest legal incomes in India, he drank, he ate pork, he spoke little Urdu and argued in English, and he had no visible interest in theology. For the first half of his career the Indian nationalist Gopal Krishna Gokhale called him the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. For the second half he was the man who insisted that Hindus and Muslims were two nations who could not live in one state. Understanding how the first Jinnah became the second is the central question of the partition of India.
The constitutionalist
Jinnah joined the Indian National Congress in 1906 and the Muslim League in 1913, and held both memberships without contradiction. His signature achievement of that era was the Lucknow Pact of 1916, which he brokered between the two organizations: Congress accepted separate electorates and guaranteed seats for Muslims, and in exchange the League backed Congress's demand for self-government. It was a lawyer's solution, a deal in which minority security is written into the constitutional machinery rather than left to goodwill.
That approach was overtaken. When Gandhi took over Congress after 1920 and turned it into a mass movement of non-cooperation, civil disobedience, and religious idiom, Jinnah objected on principle and lost. He thought mass agitation was a route to disorder and that independence should be negotiated in constitutional conferences. He resigned from Congress, spent much of the 1930s practicing law in London, and looked finished.
The two-nation argument
He came back to a changed situation. The 1937 provincial elections, held under a broad new franchise, gave Congress power in most provinces and left the Muslim League with almost nothing, including in the Muslim-majority provinces. Congress governed as a majority party and declined to form coalitions with the League. For Jinnah that year settled the constitutional question: in a democratic united India, a permanent Hindu majority would rule, and no clause on paper would restrain it.
At Lahore on March 23, 1940, the League adopted the resolution demanding that the Muslim-majority areas of the northwest and east be constituted as independent states. Jinnah's argument was not primarily religious. It was that Muslims were a nation by every test of the word, with their own history, law, culture, and sense of self, and therefore entitled to self-determination rather than to minority protections. The Second World War gave the demand leverage: the British needed cooperation, Congress had resigned its ministries and launched Quit India, and the League offered support in exchange for standing.
The endgame was ugly. When the 1946 Cabinet Mission plan for a loose federation collapsed, Jinnah called for Direct Action Day on August 16, 1946. In Calcutta it produced several days of massacre, and the killings spread across the north. After that no one could govern a united India. Partition was announced in June 1947 and executed in ten weeks, with a boundary line published after the transfer of power. Somewhere between ten and twenty million people moved and hundreds of thousands died.
What he left
Jinnah became Pakistan's first Governor-General on August 14, 1947. Three days earlier he told its constituent assembly that citizens were free to go to their temples, mosques, or any other place of worship, that religion had nothing to do with the business of the state, and that in time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense but in the political sense as citizens. He was dying of tuberculosis, which he had concealed for years, and he lasted thirteen months, dying on September 11, 1948.
Everything about him is contested. Pakistan calls him Quaid-i-Azam, the great leader, and quotes the August 11 speech when arguing for a secular state and ignores it when arguing for an Islamic one. Indian historians debate whether he wanted partition or was using the demand as a bargaining chip for a federation with real Muslim autonomy, and was trapped when the British and Congress accepted the maximal version. What is not in doubt is that a single man with no army, no mass following of his own, and a party that had been irrelevant a decade earlier redrew the map of a subcontinent by legal argument and hard bargaining, and did not live long enough to be blamed for the state he got.