During his public life, spanning over four decades, Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah had filled in several roles, each one with distinction. At one time or another, he was one of the greatest legal luminaries India had produced during the first half of this century; and was considered Lord Simon of the Indian Bar; he was an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity.
He was a great constitutionalist, and a distinguished parliamentarian; he was a staunch advocate of human freedoms and the foremost spokesman on the sanctity of civic rights, he was a top notch politician, and an indefatigable freedom fighter; he was a dynamic mass leader, and a political strategist of Bismarkian calibre.
Excelling these roles was, however, his comprehensive and composite role as a nation-builder. In this, he invites comparison with some of the greatest names in modern times - names such as Washington and Lenin, Bismark and Cavour, Ataturk and Masaryk. Between them and him, however, there was one monumental difference that makes his achievement remarkable. Others had normally assumed the leadership of traditionally well defined nations and led them to freedom.
In contrast, Jinnah had resuscitated the long dormant sense of nationhood in an otherwise disorganised, disgruntled and frustrated people - a people which bereft of will and faith in itself, had long consigned itself, despite its numerical strength of ninety million, to the intolerable status of a minority and a "No-man's land". Additionally, he endowed that newly discovered nation with a territorial existence by making the Pakistan demand as Muslim India's supreme objective. Above all, he led that nation to freedom, and established a state for it. And, to cap it all, he secured that fledgling state's survival in rather treacherous circumstances.
Pakistan, it has been truly said, was born in chaos. Indeed, few nations in the world have started on their career with less resources and in more treacherous circumstances. The new nation did not inherit a central government, a capital, an administrative core, or an organised defence force. Her social and administrative resources were poor; there were little equipment and still less statistics. The Punjab holocaust, triggered by the formidable Sikh morcha, against partition, had left vast areas in a shambles, and communications disrupted.
This along with the en massei migration of the Hindu and Sikh business, managerial and entrrepreneural classes had left the economy almost shattered. The treasury was empty, India, having denied Pakistan the major share of her cash balances. On top of all this, the still unorganised nation was called upon to feed some seven million refugees, who had fled the insecurities and barbarities of the north Indian plains that long, hot summer.
If all this was symptomatic of Pakistan's administrative and economic breakdown, the Indian conquest, in November 1947, of Junagadh (which had originally acceded to Pakistan) and the Kashmir war over the state's accession (October 1947-December 1948) exposed Pakistan's inherent military weakness. In the circumstances, therefore, it was nothing short of a miracle that Pakistan survived at all.
That it did was mainly the handiwork of one man - Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah. The nation desperately needed a charismatic leader at that critical juncture, and he filled in that need profoundly. After all, he was, to quote The Times (London), "something more than Quaid-i-Azam, supreme head of the state; to the people who followed him, he was more even than the architect of the Islamic nation he personally called into being."
In the ultimate analysis, his very presence at the helm of affairs was responsible for enabling the new-born nation to survive the terrible crisis on the marrow of its cataclysmic birth. He deftly exploited the immense prestige and utmost loyalty he commanded among the people to energize them, to raise their morale, to canalise the profound surge in patriotism along constructive channels.
He was, of course, tired and in poor health, at least since the summer of 1946: he had become a skeleton, a walking shadow of his yesteryears. Yet he bore unremittingly the heaviest part of the burden in that first, crucial year. He laid down the policies of the new state; he identified the problems confronting the nation, he worked hard to get them resolved. He told the members of the Constituent Assembly, the civil servants and members of the armed forces what to do and what the nation expected of them.
He devised effective measures to enforce and maintain law and order at all costs, despite the provocation that the large-scale riots in north India had sparked. He shifted himself to Lahore for a while in October 1947 to study the explosive situation there, arising out of the huge refugee influx, and chart out plans to feed them, to house them, to get them rehabilitated and integrated - in short, to give them a sense of belonging.
In a time of fierce excitement, he did not lose his balance; he continued to remain sober, cool, and steady; he counselled forbearance to others. He advised his excited audience in Lahore to avoid retaliation, exercise restraint, and protect the minorities, and, instead to concentrate all their energies in the rehabilitation of the refugees. He assured the minorities of a fair deal, assuaged their injured sentiments, attended to their particular needs, and get them oriented towards the requirements of the new dispensation.
He enunciated the concept of a united, integrated nation, of equal citizenship for one and all, without any distinction of race, religion and colour. All who inhabited the territories of Pakistan, he told the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, would have equal rights, equal privileges, equal opportunities and equal obligations.
On the administrative side, he reversed the Forward Policy of the British in the Frontier, and ordered the withdrawal of troops from Waziristan - and that to make the Pathans feel themselves an integral part of Pakistan's body-politic, and endow them with a sense of belonging. He created a new Ministry of States and Frontier Regions, and summed responsibility for ushering in a new era in Balochsitan. He settled the controversial question of the status of Karachi; he secured the accession of states, especially of Kalat which seemed problematical; he entered into negotiations with Mountbatten for the settlement of the Kashmir issue.
He carried on correspondence with the Commonwealth Office, trying to induce it to take an active interest in ending the communal holocaust in East Punjab, in easing the situation between the two dominions, in bringing peace and normalcy to the subcontinent. He corresponded with the governors of the various provinces, met the ministers and political leaders, kept himself abreast of the situation in each of the provinces, and gave counsel and advice wherever needed. He toured all the provinces, even distant East Bengal, to acquaint himself with their problems first hand, consult the provincial governments, and extend the centre's assistance, wherever needed.
He attended to all the details of his office: he presided over cabinet meetings, and over all sorts of other meetings, even those of the Committee for Quaid-i-Azam Relief Fund for Refugee Rehabilitation, for hours on end. Even while stricken by a malady, which had sapped his energies beyond measure, he undertook the ardous trip from Quetta to Karachi to inaugurate the State bank of Pakistan - the supreme symbol of Pakistan's fiscal independence.
And all the while, he inspired and goaded the efficient team he had collected around himself, to grapple with the problems, build up a viable system of administration, reorganise the armed forces, and lay the foundations of a progressive, welfare state. It was, therefore, with a sense of supreme satisfaction at the fulfilment of his mission that Jinnah told the nation in his last message on August 15, 1948: "The foundations of your state have been laid, and it is now for you to build and build as quickly and as well as you can".
In accomplishing the task he had taken upon himself on the morrow of Pakistan's birth, Jinnah had worked himself to death, but, to quote Richard Symonds he "had contributed more than any other man to Pakistan's survival". He died on September 11, 1948. How true was Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the penultimate Secretary of State for India, when he said, "Gandhi died at the hands of an assassin; Jinnah died by his devotion to Pakistan."
The author, HEC distinguished national professor, has recently co-edited Unesco's History of humanity, Vol. VI, and edited In Quest of Jinnah (2007), the only oral history on Pakistan's founding father.
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