Mohammad Ali Jinnah

Education in England

In 1892, Sir Frederick Leigh Croft, a business associate of Jinnahbhai Poonja, offered young Jinnah a London apprenticeship with his firm, Graham's Shipping and Trading Company. He accepted the position despite the opposition of his mother, who before he left, had him enter an arranged marriage with his cousin, two years his junior from the ancestral village of Paneli, Emibai Jinnah. Jinnah's mother and first wife both died during his absence in England. Although the apprenticeship in London was considered a great opportunity for Jinnah, one reason for sending him overseas was a legal proceeding against his father, which placed the family's property at risk of being sequestered by the court. In 1893, the Jinnahbhai family moved to Bombay.

Soon after his arrival in London, Jinnah gave up the business apprenticeship to study law, enraging his father, who had, before his departure, given him enough money to live for three years. The aspiring barrister joined Lincoln's Inn, later stating that the reason he chose Lincoln's over the other Inns of Court was that over the main entrance to Lincoln's Inn were the names of the world's great lawgivers, including Muhammad. Jinnah's biographer Stanley Wolpert notes that there is no such inscription, but inside is a mural showing Muhammad and other lawgivers, and speculates that Jinnah may have edited the story in his own mind to avoid mentioning a pictorial depiction which would be offensive to many Muslims. Jinnah's legal education followed the pupillage (legal apprenticeship) system, which had been in force there for centuries. To gain knowledge of the law, he followed an established barrister and learned from what he did, as well as from studying lawbooks. During this period, he shortened his name to Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

During his student years in England, Jinnah was influenced by 19th-century British liberalism, like many other future Indian independence leaders. His main intellectual references were peoples like Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Auguste Comte. This political education included exposure to the idea of the democratic nation, and progressive politics. He became an admirer of the Parsi British Indian political leaders Dadabhai Naoroji and Sir Pherozeshah Mehta. Naoroji had become the first British Member of Parliament of Indian extraction shortly before Jinnah's arrival, triumphing with a majority of three votes in Finsbury Central. Jinnah listened to Naoroji's maiden speech in the House of Commons from the visitor's gallery.

The Western world not only inspired Jinnah in his political life, but also greatly influenced his personal preferences, particularly when it came to dress. Jinnah abandoned local garb for Western-style clothing, and throughout his life he was always impeccably dressed in public. He came to own over 200 suits, which he wore with heavily starched shirts with detachable collars, and as a barrister took pride in never wearing the same silk tie twice. Even when he was dying, he insisted on being formally dressed, "I will not travel in my pyjamas." In his later years he was usually seen wearing a Karakul hat which subsequently came to be known as the "Jinnah cap".

Dissatisfied with the law, Jinnah briefly embarked on a stage career with a Shakespearean company, but resigned after receiving a stern letter from his father. In 1895, at age 19, he became the youngest British Indian to be called to the bar in England. Although he returned to Karachi, he remained there only a short time before moving to Bombay.

Background to independence

Until the late 1930s, most Muslims of the British Raj expected, upon independence, to be part of a unitary state encompassing all of British India, as did the Hindus and others who advocated self-government. Despite this, other nationalist proposals were being made. In a speech given at Allahabad to a League session in 1930, Sir Muhammad Iqbal called for a state for Muslims in British India. Choudhary Rahmat Ali published a pamphlet in 1933 advocating a state "Pakistan" in the Indus Valley, with other names given to Muslim-majority areas elsewhere in India. Jinnah and Iqbal corresponded in 1936 and 1937; in subsequent years, Jinnah credited Iqbal as his mentor and used Iqbal's imagery and rhetoric in his speeches.

Although many leaders of the Congress sought a strong central government for an Indian state, some Muslim politicians, including Jinnah, were unwilling to accept this without powerful protections for their community. Other Muslims supported the Congress, which officially advocated a secular state upon independence, though the traditionalist wing (including politicians such as Madan Mohan Malaviya and Vallabhbhai Patel) believed that an independent India should enact laws such as banning the slaughter of cows and making Hindi a national language. The failure of the Congress leadership to disavow Hindu communalists worried Congress-supporting Muslims. Nevertheless, the Congress enjoyed considerable Muslim support up to about 1937.

Events which separated the communities included the failed attempt to form a coalition government including the Congress and the League in the United Provinces following the 1937 election. According to historian Ian Talbot, "The provincial Congress governments made no effort to understand and respect their Muslim populations' cultural and religious sensibilities. The Muslim League's claims that it alone could safeguard Muslim interests thus received a major boost. Significantly it was only after this period of Congress rule that it [the League] took up the demand for a Pakistan state..."

Balraj Puri in his journal article about Jinnah suggests that the Muslim League president, after the 1937 vote, turned to the idea of partition in "sheer desperation". Historian Akbar S. Ahmed suggests that Jinnah abandoned hope of reconciliation with the Congress as he "rediscover[ed] his own Islamic roots, his own sense of identity, of culture and history, which would come increasingly to the fore in the final years of his life". Jinnah also increasingly adopted Muslim dress in the late 1930s. In the wake of the 1937 balloting, Jinnah demanded that the question of power sharing be settled on an all-India basis, and that he, as president of the League, be accepted as the sole spokesman for the Muslim community.

Political philosophy

Economic views

Jinnah's efforts to ensure the protection of Muslim rights in India—and later the creation of a sovereign Muslim state in the Indian subcontinent—resulted in his promotion of economic nationalism for Indian Muslims amidst the Pakistan Movement. In 1944, Jinnah created the Muslim League's Planning Committee in Karachi to prepare a five-year programme for economic development—primarily concerning industrialisation—in the Northwest provinces of British India that were expected to form the independent state of Pakistan. In the same year, he also formed the Federation of Muslim Chambers of Commerce to encourage greater Muslim entrepreneurship and involvement in trade and commerce in British India and abroad. Jinnah influenced several economic enterprises to strengthen Indian Muslim economic power in preparation for Pakistan's independence, including encouraging the Ispahani purchase of the Mogul Line Shipping Company, the establishment of MCB Bank, the founding of Orient Airways, and other similar ventures. He also promoted the expansion of Muslim banking enterprises outside of British India, particularly in Singapore.

According to historian Sharif al Mujahid, Jinnah negatively viewed the concept of capitalism as a "vicious" and "wicked" system that exploits the masses, which he would not permit as Pakistan's economic policy, instead favouring a system of Islamic economics. During a public reception in Chittagong in 1948, Jinnah declared that Pakistan should be based on social justice and Islamic socialism. However, Jinnah did not possess a singular economic ideology, instead favouring a mixed economy which would include both private and public enterprise to facilitate industrialisation, and an egalitarian system to provide equal opportunity. He suggested that only the defense and communications sectors should be public, with all other industries open to private enterprise.

During the Muslim League's 1943 Delhi session, Jinnah referred to himself as a communist if communism simply referred to the disestablishment of class divisions and the eradication of poverty. However, he declared his rejection for Karl Marx's communist philosophy and that he sought God's shelter from it. He regarded Western economic ideologies as incompatible with the Muslim world and Islamic economics as a middle ground in the conflict between capitalism and communism.

Vision for a welfare state

Jinnah's vision for Pakistan was heavily inspired by the first Islamic state created by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in Medina. According to Hector Bolitho, Jinnah was also inspired by British liberalism, particularly the nineteenth century reform movements by activists such as J. A. Hobson and R. H. Tawney, alongside the Fabian Society.

In 1937, Jinnah issued a socioeconomic manifesto for Muslims in British India during a session of the Muslim League, which suggested several reforms including the improvement of working hours in factories, the abolishment of usury, the enforcement of prohibition, and the removal of other "un-Islamic customs" in Muslim society.

Trade unionist

Jinnah was also a supporter of working class causes and an active trade unionist. He was elected President of All India Postal Staff Union in 1925 whose membership was 70,000. According to All Pakistan Labour Federation's publication Productive Role of Trade Unions and Industrial Relations, being a member of Legislative Assembly, Jinnah pleaded forcefully for rights of workers and struggled for getting a "living wage and fair conditions" for them. He also played an important role in enactment of Trade Union Act of 1926 which gave trade union movement legal cover to organise themselves.

Rising leader

In 1857, many Indians had risen in revolt against British rule. In the aftermath of the conflict, some Anglo-Indians, as well as Indians in Britain, called for greater self-government for the subcontinent, resulting in the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885. Most founding members had been educated in Britain, and were content with the minimal reform efforts being made by the government. Muslims were not enthusiastic about calls for democratic institutions in British India, as they constituted a quarter to a third of the population, outnumbered by the Hindus. Early meetings of the Congress contained a minority of Muslims, mostly from the elite.

Jinnah devoted much of his time to his law practice in the early 1900s, but remained politically involved. Jinnah began political life by attending the Congress's twentieth annual meeting, in Bombay in December 1904. He was a member of the moderate group in the Congress, favouring Hindu–Muslim unity in achieving self-government, and following such leaders as Mehta, Naoroji, and Gopal Krishna Gokhale. They were opposed by leaders such as Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai, who sought quick action towards independence. In 1906, a delegation of Muslim leaders, known as the Simla Delegation, headed by the Aga Khan called on the new Viceroy of India, Lord Minto, to assure him of their loyalty and to ask for assurances that in any political reforms they would be protected from the "unsympathetic [Hindu] majority". Dissatisfied with this, Jinnah wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper Gujarati, asking what right the members of the delegation had to speak for Indian Muslims, as they were unelected and self-appointed. When many of the same leaders met in Dacca in December of that year to form the All-India Muslim League to advocate for their community's interests, Jinnah was again opposed. The Aga Khan later wrote that it was "freakishly ironic" that Jinnah, who would lead the League to independence, "came out in bitter hostility toward all that I and my friends had done... He said that our principle of separate electorates was dividing the nation against itself." In its earliest years, however, the League was not influential; Minto refused to consider it as the Muslim community's representative, and it was ineffective in preventing the 1911 repeal of the partition of Bengal, an action seen as a blow to Muslim interests. Jinnah was also appointed to a committee which helped to establish the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun.

Although Jinnah initially opposed separate electorates for Muslims, he used this means to gain his first elective office in 1909, as Bombay's Muslim representative on the Imperial Legislative Council. He was a compromise candidate when two older, better-known Muslims who were seeking the post deadlocked. The council, which had been expanded to 60 members as part of reforms enacted by Minto, recommended legislation to the Viceroy. Only officials could vote in the council; non-official members, such as Jinnah, had no vote. Throughout his legal career, Jinnah practised probate law (with many clients from India's nobility), and in 1911 introduced the Wakf Validation Act to place Muslim religious trusts on a sound legal footing under British Indian law. Two years later, the measure passed, the first act sponsored by non-officials to pass the council and be enacted by the Viceroy. Jinnah was also appointed to a committee which helped to establish the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun.

In December 1912, Jinnah addressed the annual meeting of the Muslim League although he was not yet a member. He joined the following year, although he remained a member of the Congress as well and stressed that League membership took second priority to the "greater national cause" of an independent India. In April 1913, he again went to Britain, with Gokhale, to meet with officials on behalf of the Congress. Gokhale, a Hindu, later stated that Jinnah "has true stuff in him, and that freedom from all sectarian prejudice which will make him the best ambassador of Hindu–Muslim Unity". Jinnah led another delegation of the Congress to London in 1914, but due to the start of the First World War in August 1914, found officials little interested in Indian reforms. By coincidence, he was in Britain at the same time as a man who would become his great political rival, Mohandas Gandhi, a Hindu lawyer who had become well known for advocating satyagraha, non-violent non-co-operation, while in South Africa. Jinnah attended a reception for Gandhi where the two men met and talked with each other for the first time. Shortly afterwards, Jinnah returned home to India in January 1915.

Farewell to Congress

Jinnah's moderate faction in the Congress was undermined by the deaths of Mehta and Gokhale in 1915; he was further isolated by the fact that Naoroji was in London, where he remained until his death in 1917. Nevertheless, Jinnah worked to bring the Congress and League together. In 1916, with Jinnah now president of the Muslim League, the two organisations signed the Lucknow Pact, setting quotas for Muslim and Hindu representation in the various provinces. Although the pact was never fully implemented, its signing ushered in a period of co-operation between the Congress and the League. To applaud Jinnah's efforts, Sarojini Naidu described him as an ‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity.' But decades later, the 1946 Calcutta Riots fractured the relationship between the Congress and the Muslim League beyond repair. A few days later, when Wavell invited Sarojini Naidu to dinner, she spoke of Jinnah "rather as of Lucifer … a fallen angel, one who had once promised to be a great leader of Indian freedom but had cast himself out of the Congress heaven."

During the war, Jinnah joined other Indian moderates in supporting the British war effort, hoping that Indians would be rewarded with political freedoms. Jinnah played an important role in the founding of the All India Home Rule League in 1916. Along with political leaders Annie Besant and Tilak, Jinnah demanded "home rule" for India—the status of a self-governing dominion in the Empire similar to Canada, New Zealand and Australia, although, with the war, Britain's politicians were not interested in considering Indian constitutional reform. British Cabinet minister Edwin Montagu recalled Jinnah in his memoirs, "young, perfectly mannered, impressive-looking, armed to the teeth with dialectics, and insistent on the whole of his scheme".

In 1918, Jinnah married his second wife Rattanbai Petit ("Ruttie"), 24 years his junior. She was the fashionable young daughter of his friend Sir Dinshaw Petit, and was part of an elite Parsi family of Bombay. There was great opposition to the marriage from Rattanbai's family and the Parsi community, as well as from some Muslim religious leaders. Rattanbai defied her family and nominally converted to Islam, adopting (though never using) the name Maryam Jinnah, resulting in a permanent estrangement from her family and Parsi society. The couple resided at South Court Mansion in Bombay, and frequently travelled across India and Europe. The couple's only child, daughter Dina, was born on 15 August 1919. The couple separated prior to Ruttie's death in 1929, and subsequently Jinnah's sister Fatima looked after him and his child.

Relations between Indians and British were strained in 1919 when the Imperial Legislative Council extended emergency wartime restrictions on civil liberties; Jinnah resigned from it when it did. There was unrest across India, which worsened after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, in which British Indian Army troops fired upon a protest meeting, killing hundreds. In the wake of Amritsar, Gandhi, who had returned to India and become a widely respected leader and highly influential in the Congress, called for satyagraha against the British. Gandhi's proposal gained broad Hindu support, and was also attractive to many Muslims of the Khilafat faction. These Muslims, supported by Gandhi, sought retention of the Ottoman caliphate, which supplied spiritual leadership to many Muslims. The caliph was the Ottoman Emperor, who would be deprived of both offices following his nation's defeat in the First World War. Gandhi had achieved considerable popularity among Muslims because of his work during the war on behalf of killed or imprisoned Muslims. Unlike Jinnah and other leaders of the Congress, Gandhi did not wear western-style clothing, did his best to use an Indian language instead of English, and was deeply rooted in Indian culture. Gandhi's local style of leadership gained great popularity with the Indian people. Jinnah criticised Gandhi's Khilafat advocacy, which he saw as an endorsement of religious zealotry. Jinnah regarded Gandhi's proposed satyagraha campaign as political anarchy, and believed that self-government should be secured through constitutional means. He opposed Gandhi, but the tide of Indian opinion was against him. At the 1920 session of the Congress in Nagpur, Jinnah was shouted down by the delegates, who passed Gandhi's proposal, pledging satyagraha until India was independent. Jinnah did not attend the subsequent League meeting, held in the same city, which passed a similar resolution. Because of the action of the Congress in endorsing Gandhi's campaign, Jinnah resigned from it, leaving all positions except in the Muslim League.