ANDREW WHITEHEAD
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FOOC: Jinnah, Pakistan's
Quaid-e-Azam - 1997

This is a piece I wrote for - and broadcast on - BBC radio's 'From Our Own Correspondent': you can see all my FOOC  pieces here. AW
Picture

JINNAH: PAKISTAN'S QUAID-E-AZAM - January 1997

Later this year, India and Pakistan will be marking the fiftieth anniversary of independence - and many people in both countries will be reassessing the role of the founders of the two neighbouring nations. No figure is more controversial in South Asia than Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the man who - as head of the Indian Muslim League - successfully held out for a separate Muslim nation. Andrew Whitehead has been talking to Jinnah's associates and descendants and offers this assessment of the man and his lasting legacy.

His gaunt, thin lipped, unsmiling face features in every Pakistani currency note; on postage stamps; his portrait hangs in government offices; in shops and businesses. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam, is revered as Pakistan's founding father. The man who through his strength of will and legal tenacity delivered on his promise of founding a sovereign nation for India's Muslims.

Almost half-a-century after he achieved the independence of Pakistan - carved out of the bloodied entrails of British India - his role and achievements cannot be openly questioned in that country. He is sacrosanct; a secular saint. His white marble burial shrine in Karachi is a place of quiet pilgrimage.

By the time Pakistan was created, Jinnah - a chain smoker - was dying of lung disease. He lasted a little more than a year into the post-colonial era - though long enough to see the partition of British Indian he advocated cost the lives of between two- and six-hundred thousand Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs and force one of the biggest migrations in history - ten-million people moved to and fro across the sub-continent within a matter of months.

He's a man of many contradictions. Kind, intelligent, indeed one of the best barristers of his day, he slowly came to believe that Muslims would never achieve full political and cultural equality as a minority within a Hindu-dominated united India. Yet the nation he created is now home to just one-in-three of South Asia's Muslims.

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan has not followed Jinnah's much more secular prescription. But the religious identity which was the country's foundation stone has eroded so greatly that even the muhajirs - the main champions of Pakistan, those who migrated from across North India to their new homeland - now place ethnic identity above religion.

Jinnah was one of the few nationalist leaders who never went to jail. He was not observant and indeed had a liking for sherry and pork sausages. He was a Muslim who married outside his religion - his glamorous, much younger wife was a Parsee. Yet when his daughter also married a Parsee, he made clear his deep disapproval. He lived much of his life in Bombay. When at partition he locked up his mansion on Bombay's Malabar Hill to head for Karachi and the post of Pakistan's first Governor-General, he asked that the house be kept ready for his return.

Curiously, not one of Jinnah's direct descendants has ever chosen to settle in the nation he founded. His daughter, an only child, is still living - in New York.His one grandson is in Bombay - the head of an India-based business empire.

That grandson has never seen Jinnah's burial place. Indeed, he's been to Pakistan just once. By accident. Flying out from Bombay back to school in Britain forty years ago, the plane he was on developed a technical fault, and made an unscheduled touchdown in Karachi.

When Pakistan celebrates fifty years of independence in August, it's unlikely that any of Jinnah's direct descendants will be at the ceremonies.

Jinnah's grandson says he's proud of his forbear and believes he has been unfairly maligned. If in Pakistan Jinnah is above criticism, in India he has been demonised.The government sponsored films looking back at the independence period paint Jinnah as at best intransigent and, at worst, evil. The man who undid Mahatma Gandhi's campaign for communal unity.

It's difficult to reconcile that with the accounts of Jinnah's friends and colleagues. They talk of a shy man with a formidable intellect, a sophisticate who enjoyed good food. Of a man whose life was marred by anxiety and ill-health, and overshadowed by an unsuccessful marriage and the early death of his wife.

He remains one of the most enigmatic personalities of this century. There will, in the course of this year, be much soul-searching about whether partition fifty years ago really was the best solution. Much apportioning of blame.

That's for others to do. What can be said with confidence is that Mohammed Ali Jinnah changed the map of the Indian sub-continent. And tens of millions of people are still living with the consequences of an independence settlement he helped shape.
​

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    • 'What's Left of Communism?'
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    • From Our Own Correspondent >
      • FOOC: Working at Westminster 1990
      • FOOC: Ulster's Talking Shop 1991
      • FOOC: House Rules at Westminster 1992
      • FOOC: India's Red Fort State
      • FOOC: Keeping Kosher in Cuba
      • FOOC: Italy's Gourmand Communists 1992
      • FOOC: Scoundrel Politicians - 1993
      • FOOC: Kashmir's New Puritans 1993
      • FOOC: The Rajah of Bihar 1993
      • FOOC: Bringing the Gospel to Mizoram 1993
      • FOOC: Netaji, India's Lost Leader 1994
      • FOOC: A Self-Respect Wedding 1994
      • FOOC: The Miseries of Manipur 1994
      • FOOC: Village Bangladesh 1994
      • FOOC: Indian Beauty 1995
      • FOOC: Calcutta's Communists Discover Capitalism 1995
      • FOOC: Localism in Ladakh 1995
      • FOOC: Bhutan, not quite Paradise
      • FOOC: Crime and Indian Politics 1995
      • FOOC: Sonia Gandhi 1995
      • FOOC: Sri Lanka's Missing Leaders 1995
      • FOOC: India Votes 1996
      • FOOC: Communism Revisited 1996
      • FOOC: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan 1996
      • FOOC: Kerala's Jewish Community 1996
      • FOOC: India's Corruption Scandals 1996
      • FOOC: The Maldives Crowded Capital 1996
      • FOOC: India's Polluted Capital 1996
      • FOOC: Jinnah, Pakistan's Quaid 1997
      • FOOC: Mauritius, an Indian Ocean melting pot
      • FOOC: The Hijras Blessing 1998
      • FOOC: Massacre at Baramulla 2003
      • FOOC: An Old Photo from Kashmir 2007
      • FOOC: Prosperity Driven from Detroit 2008
      • FOOC: An Atheist in MLK's Atlanta2013
      • FOOC: San Francisco's City Lights 2014
      • FOOC: Kashmir Revisited 2014
      • FOOC: By Ferry in Burma 2014
      • FOOC: Toyah's Grave 2017
      • FOOC: The Tibetan Colony in Kashmir 2017
      • FOOC: Stars of Tamil Politics 2018
      • FOOC: Koreans in Chennai 2018
      • FOOC: Epitaph to Empire 2019
      • FOOC: Armenians in India 2019
      • FOOC: Lahore's Bradlaugh Hall 2020
      • FOOC: Chennai and the British Empire 2023
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