Muhammad Ali Jinnah

A Karachi-born barrister who began his political life as a champion of Hindu–Muslim unity, Muhammad Ali Jinnah ended it as the founder of Pakistan. As leader of the All-India Muslim League he pressed for a separate homeland for the Muslims of British India, achieved in August 1947, and he served as the new state's first governor-general until his death thirteen months later. In Pakistan he is honoured as Quaid-e-Azam, the "Great Leader".

Jinnah was probably born on 25 December 1876 in Karachi, then part of the Bombay Presidency, into a Gujarati merchant family; his birth name was Mahomedali Jinnahbhai. In 1892 he went to London for a business apprenticeship but switched to law at Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar in 1895 at the age of 19. He set up practice in Bombay, where he became one of the city's most successful advocates, famously turning down a salaried post of 1,500 rupees a month because he meant to earn that much a day.

Jinnah entered politics through the Indian National Congress in 1904, as a moderate who opposed separate electorates for Muslims. Elected to the Imperial Legislative Council in 1909, he joined the Muslim League in 1913 while remaining in the Congress, and in 1916, as League president, helped broker the Lucknow Pact, which set out shares of representation for the two communities. He broke with the Congress in 1920 when, under Mahatma Gandhi, it adopted mass non-co-operation, which Jinnah considered political anarchy.

In the 1920s Jinnah sat in the Central Legislative Assembly and after the Congress-sponsored Nehru Report of 1928 put forward his Fourteen Points for Muslim safeguards, which failed to win agreement. Disillusioned, he spent most of 1930 to 1934 practising law in London, cared for by his sister Fatima. Persuaded to return and revive the League, he saw it do badly in the 1937 provincial elections, which the Congress dominated. He rebuilt the League into a mass party, and the poet Muhammad Iqbal, who had called for a Muslim state in 1930, became a strong influence on him.

On 23 March 1940, at Lahore, the League adopted a resolution, based on the idea that Muslims and Hindus formed two nations, calling for autonomous states in the Muslim-majority regions of the north-west and east. During the Second World War Jinnah cooperated with the British while most Congress leaders were jailed after the 1942 Quit India campaign, and his standing grew. In the elections of 1945–46 the League won every seat reserved for Muslims in the central elections and about three-quarters of the Muslim vote in the provinces. Talks on a loose federation under the British Cabinet Mission collapsed, communal violence spread, and in June 1947 the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, announced the partition of India into two dominions, with Punjab and Bengal divided.

Pakistan became independent on 14 August 1947 with Jinnah as governor-general. Days earlier he had told its constituent assembly that citizens were free to follow any religion and that this was no business of the state. Partition brought mass killing and migration; Jinnah toured the west of the country supervising relief for some eight million refugees. He clashed with India over the princely states, including Junagadh and Kashmir, where fighting led to the war of 1947. In March 1948 he told a vast crowd in East Bengal that Urdu alone should be the national language, a stance bitterly resented by Bengali speakers.

Jinnah had concealed for years that he had tuberculosis, and by 1948 he also had advanced lung cancer. He died in Karachi on 11 September 1948, aged 71, and is buried in a great marble mausoleum there. His birthday is a public holiday in Pakistan. Scholars still debate whether he envisaged Pakistan as a secular or an Islamic state.

Our 1938 map shows the British Raj as Jinnah turned towards the Pakistan demand, and the 1960 map shows Pakistan in its original two wings on either side of India.