The nation celebrates the 144th birthday of Pakistan’s founder and sub-continent’s most prominent leader Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah today (December 25).
Since its creation in 1947 and the untimely death of the Quaid about a year later, Pakistan has looked for someone to become his successor and take the country towards the heights which the Quaid thought was the destiny of the newly formed country.
Quaid remains the uniting factor for the country 72 years after his death. His words are still sacred for all the parties and groups in the country which was formed to grant full rights to the Muslims of the sub-continent.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah was born on December 25, 1876 in Karachi, then part of British-controlled India. His father was a prosperous Muslim merchant.
Jinnah studied at Bombay University and at Lincoln’s Inn in London. He then ran a successful legal practice in Bombay. He was already a member of the Indian National Congress, which was working for autonomy from British rule, when he joined the Muslim League in 1913.
The league had formed a few years earlier to represent the interests of Indian Muslims in a predominantly Hindu country, and by 1916 he was elected its president.
In the early years, the Quaid advocated Hindu–Muslim unity, helping to shape the 1916 Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the All-India Muslim League.
Later he became a key leader in the All India Home Rule League, and proposed a fourteen-point constitutional reform plan to safeguard the political rights of Muslims. In 1920, however, he resigned from the Congress when it agreed to follow a campaign of satyagraha, which he regarded as political anarchy.
By 1940, Jinnah had come to believe that Muslims of the Indian subcontinent should have their own state to avoid the possible marginalised status they may gain in a Hindu-Muslim state. In that year, the Muslim League, led by the Quaid-e-Azam, passed the Lahore Resolution, demanding a separate nation.
During the Second World War, the League gained strength while leaders of the Congress were imprisoned, and in the elections held shortly after the war, it won most of the seats reserved for Muslims.
Ultimately, the Congress and the Muslim League could not reach a power-sharing formula for the subcontinent to be united as a single state, leading all parties to agree to the independence of a predominantly Hindu India, and for a Muslim-majority state of Pakistan.
As the first Governor-General of Pakistan, the Quaid-e-Azam worked to establish the new nation’s government and policies, and to aid the millions of Muslim migrants who had emigrated from the new nation of India to Pakistan after independence, personally supervising the establishment of refugee camps. The Quaid died at age 71 in September 1948, just over a year after Pakistan gained independence from the United Kingdom.
He left a deep and respected legacy in Pakistan. Innumerable streets, roads and localities in the world are named after the Quaid. Several universities and public buildings in Pakistan bear his name.