Jinnah, Mohammed Ali

Jinnah, Mohammed Ali (1876–1948). Jinnah, ‘the father of Pakistan’, was born in Karachi and trained as a barrister. Initially, he was sympathetic to the Indian National Congress and did not join the Muslim League until 1913. He helped to organize the Lucknow pact (1916) and the Khilafat movement (1919–22), by which the Muslim League ran campaigns of anti‐British resistance parallel to those of the Congress. However, he became suspicious that, especially under Gandhi's leadership, Congress was being taken over by a narrow Hindu nationalism. In 1934 he became president of the Muslim League and chaired its 1940 conference at Lahore when the demand for a separate Pakistan state was first made. In the 1946–7 negotiations, he stubbornly resisted proposals that India should be granted independence as a unitary nation state. Pakistan proclaimed its independence on 15 August 1947 with Jinnah as its first governor‐general.