Personalities

Jinnah, Muhammad Ali (1876-1948), politician and statesman of the Indian subcontinent, long-time leader of the Muslim League in British India, who articulated Indian Muslim demands for a separate Muslim state, before becoming the founding father of Pakistan and its first Governor-General (1947-1948).

Jinnah’s precise place and date of birth, normally given as Karachi on December 25, 1876, are disputed. One of eight children, he was educated in the Sindh Madrassah and the Christian Missionary High School, Karachi. At the age of 17 he went to England and studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, London. He returned to India in 1896 and started a law practice in Bombay (now Mumbai), as the only Muslim barrister practising there.

Turning to politics, Jinnah joined the Indian National Congress in 1906, and in 1910, already a highly regarded Congress member, he was elected to the Indian Legislative Council in Delhi. He only joined the Muslim League in 1913, becoming its president for the first time in 1916. That year marked the highpoint of his efforts to establish a common Congress-Muslim League platform.

Jinnah resigned from Congress in 1920 when he became disillusioned with the violence and communal passions associated with the non-cooperation campaigns of Mohandas Gandhi, despite Gandhi’s own staunch advocacy of non-violence. Jinnah was still committed to settling Hindu-Muslim differences, but the divisions widened in 1928 when the Nehru Report rejected his 14-point constitutional compromise proposal. However, he attended three round-table conferences (1930-1932) in London.

Frustrated in his efforts, Jinnah remained in London to practise law, only returning permanently to India in October 1935, when elected permanent President of the Muslim League. The League lost heavily in the provincial elections of 1937, while Congress, led by Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, won a majority in 7 of the 11 provinces. Congress’s refusal to form coalition governments with the Muslim League, particularly in the United Provinces, proved to be the final Hindu-Muslim break. From 1940 onwards, Jinnah propounded the demand for a separate Muslim state, which had been raised in the Lahore Resolution of that year. He also exerted an unquestioned moral authority over the fractious politics of the Muslim League. Simultaneously, he deployed his legal skills in the complex constitutional negotiations with the British and Congress.

Jinnah’s claim to be the sole speaker for Muslim India at the Simla Conference of July 1945 was recognized unquestioningly, greatly strengthening the demand for a state of Pakistan. Nevertheless, Jinnah accepted the British Cabinet plan of 1946, which envisaged regional autonomy for Muslims within a territorially united India. The breakdown of this proposal resulted in communal riots that threatened civil war. The partition of the Indian subcontinent was finally agreed on June 3, 1947. Pakistan emerged as a state physically divided into two unconnected halves, one of which later split off to become Bangladesh. Recent revisionist scholarship has controversially speculated that partition was the unintended result of Jinnah’s use of the demand for an independent Pakistan as a bargaining counter in the negotiations for the final constitutional form of a united India.

Jinnah became both Governor-General and President of the Constituent Assembly of the new state of Pakistan, and assumed much of the burden of laying its foundations. His death in Karachi on September 7, 1948, robbed Pakistan of its leading political figure.

Iqbal, Sir Muhammad (1873-1938), Pakistani philosopher, poet, and political leader, born in Sialkot, India (now Pakistan). In 1927 he was elected to the Punjab provincial legislature and in 1930 became president of the Muslim League. Initially a supporter of Hindu-Muslim unity in a single Indian state, Iqbal later became an advocate of Pakistani independence. In addition to his political activism, Iqbal was considered the foremost Muslim thinker of his day. His poetry and philosophy, written in Urdu and Persian, stress the rebirth of Islamic and spiritual redemption through self-development, moral integrity, and individual freedom. His many works include Asar-ekhudi (The Secrets of the Self, 1915), a long poem; Payam-e Mashriq (A Message from the East, 1923); and The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1934). Although Iqbal did not live to see the creation of an independent Pakistan in 1947, he is nevertheless regarded as the symbolic father of that nation, where the date of his death, April 21, is a national holiday.[1]

Liaquat Ali Khan (1895-1951), Pakistani politician and first prime minister of Pakistan after independence. Born into a wealthy family in 1895, Liaquat Ali Khan was educated at the MAO College, and also studied at Allahabad and Oxford universities before becoming a barrister in London in 1922. In 1923 he returned to India and joined the All-India Muslim League, which became the main political party representing Muslims in India before independence. From 1926 to 1940 Liaquat held a variety of positions in local politics, working closely with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the League. He helped persuade Jinnah to return to India from London in 1933 and was acknowledged as Jinnah's “right hand” from 1943. From 1940 onwards he worked to popularize the “Pakistan Resolution” around India and to build support for an independent Pakistan, separate from India. He was closely involved in the negotiations over the form of independence to be granted to India after World War II and was finance minister in the Interim Government of 1946-1947. Liaquat was the obvious choice to become prime minister of independent Pakistan in 1947 and became the country's senior leader after Jinnah's death in 1948. His period in office was marked by difficult relations with India, following the Indo-Pakistan War of 1947-1948, but also did much to define and consolidate the new state both internationally and domestically. It was Liaquat who drafted the “Objectives Resolution” of 1949 that charted a course for the country. He did not, however, go far enough in satisfying religious extremists who wanted to base laws on the Koran and was assassinated in 1951, in circumstances which are still obscure