Jinnah Born: Founder of Pakistan and Its Only Leader

Muhammad Ali Jinnah transformed from a secular constitutionalist into the driving force behind the partition of British India, arguing that Hindus and Muslims constituted two separate nations that could not coexist within a single democratic state. Born on December 25, 1876, in Karachi, he studied law in London, was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn at twenty, and returned to India as a rising political figure. He initially worked to unite Hindus and Muslims within the Indian National Congress, earning the title "Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity" for his efforts to find constitutional compromises. His break with Congress came gradually during the 1920s and 1930s as he became convinced that Muslim interests would be permanently subordinated in a Hindu-majority democracy. He revived the Muslim League from near-irrelevance and launched the Pakistan movement with the Lahore Resolution of 1940, which demanded an independent Muslim state. His political campaign was relentless and effective. He argued the case for Pakistan not on religious grounds alone but on the principle of national self-determination, the same principle that Congress used to demand independence from Britain. The British, exhausted by World War II and facing the impossibility of governing a subcontinent in revolt, agreed to partition in 1947. Pakistan was created on August 14, 1947, and Jinnah became its first Governor-General, the Quaid-e-Azam or Great Leader. He governed the new state for barely a year before dying of tuberculosis on September 11, 1948, at seventy-one. The country he created through sheer political will had no administrative infrastructure, no capital city, and millions of displaced refugees fleeing communal violence that killed between one and two million people.