Jinnah: Pakistan's founding father
"Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all the three.�- Stanley Wolpert praised Jinnah in his book. Jinnah, a man of dignity and power, who is a leader in eyes of thousands today.
To Pakistanis, Muhammad Ali Jinnah is revered, known as Quaid-e-Azam, or 'Great Leader.' He is their George
Washington, their de Gaulle, their Churchill.
A brilliant lawyer by trade, he rose to the forefront
of the struggle for a Muslim nation as India negotiated its independence from Britain.
But his insistence on a separate Muslim state to be
carved out of the former British India earned him many enemies.
Today, many in the West view Jinnah through the eyes
of Richard Attenborough's movie 'Gandhi,' in which the Muslim leader was portrayed
as a cold villain who wanted a separate Pakistan only for his own political aggrandizement.
Born in 1876, the son of a wealthy Karachi merchant,
Jinnah was not a man of the people like Indian nationalist Mahatma Gandhi.
Jinnah studied law in England, and after his return
to India in 1896 as an advocate for the Bombay High Court, the slender, well-dressed
and well-spoken attorney quickly made a name for himself.
According to one contemporary, quoted in a Time Magazine
profile, Jinnah was "the best showman of them all. Quick, exceedingly clever, sarcastic
and colorful. His greatest delight was to confound the opposing lawyer by confidential
asides and to outwit the presiding judge in repartee."
In 1906, Jinnah joined the All India Congress. In 1913,
while still serving in the Congress, he joined the Muslim League, prompting a leading
Congress spokesman of the day to call him the "ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity."
With time, that would change.
Early in his political career, Jinnah was chiefly concerned
with achieving independence for a unified India. Increasingly, however, he worried
that British oppression would be replaced by Hindu oppression and continued subjugation
of India's Muslim
In 1919, Jinnah resigned from the Congress and turned his focus to Muslim interests. Over the next two decades he would become the architect of a dream first voiced by Muslim poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal that Indian Muslims would someday have their own nation.
By the late 1930s, Jinnah, who had become leader of the Muslim League, was convinced that a partition of India along religious lines was the only way to preserve Muslim political power.
n 1940, the Muslim League adopted the 'Lahore Resolution' calling for separate autonomous states in majority-Muslim areas of northeastern and eastern India.
In 1946, violence between Hindus and Muslims broke out after Jinnah called for demonstrations opposing an interim Indian government in which Muslim power would be compromised.
The riots spread. In the first weeks of the uprising, more than 3,000 people were killed and thousands wounded.
Against the rising tide of ethnic unrest, Jinnah demanded partition of India. Britain, eager to make a clean break with India, finally relented and Pakistan was born.
Jinnah, who by most accounts was not a particularly religious man, called for equal rights for all Pakistani citizens without regard to their religion.
n his inaugural speech as first governor general of Pakistan, Jinnah said:
'You will find that in the course of time, Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state."
But Jinnah would not live to see the development of his fledging country. He died of tuberculosis just 13 months after the formation of Pakistan. His vision of a secular government was never fully realized, either, with disputes between religious groups marring much of Pakistan's brief history. And later, many of his followers disputed the degree to which he was committed to a secular government.
Reference : cnn.com
"We have a desire to live honourably and let others live honourably."
Jinnah
