Mohammed Ali Jinnah

Born Dec. 25, 1876, in Karachi; died there Sept. 11, 1948. Indian and Pakistani political leader.

Jinnah was the son of a Gujarati merchant of the Muslim Khoja caste. After receiving a law degree in Britain in 1896, he practiced law in Bombay until 1930. In 1906 he joined the Indian National Congress and was close to its moderate leaders G. Gokhale, D. Naoroji, and S. Naidu. Simultaneously a member of the Muslim League from 1912 on, Jinnah advocated unity between Hindus and Muslims on the eve of World War I. In 1921, at a time when the National Congress was becoming a mass party, he left the Congress, considering it too radical, and condemned M. Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaigns. When an Indian constitution was discussed at an all-party conference in 1928, Jinnah proposed that the Muslims be granted one-third of all the seats in government bodies, even though they constituted only one-fourth of India’s population, and that election districts be created according to religious criteria.

Jinnah lived in Britain from 1930 to 1934. He was a member of the Indian delegation to the Round Table Conference from 1930 to 1932 and became the leader of the Muslim League in 1934. While advocating India’s independence, Jinnah in his political activity essentially represented the interests of the Muslim elite, composed of landowners, the big bourgeoisie, and the intelligentsia. Jinnah was one of the ideologists of the theory that there are two nations in India, one Hindu and the other Muslim, a theory that defined a nation by a religious criterion. In 1940, Jinnah led the Muslim League in the demand that the regions with a predominantly Muslim population be separated from India and be unified as the state of Pakistan. Later he led the movement for the establishment of Pakistan. After the partition of India in 1947, he became governor-general of Pakistan. In Pakistan, Jinnah is considered the founder of the state and called Great Leader (Quaid-e-Azam) and Father of the Nation.