If only Jinnah’s fatal disease not a well guarded secret…!

 

 

 

If only Jinnah’s fatal disease not a well guarded secret…!

Muhammad Ali Jinnah who gave the call for ‘Direct Action Day’ on 16 August 1946 and vowed that “we shall have India divided or we shall have India destroyed,” had ultimately succeeded in dividing India, carrying the negotiation with a fatal disease that no one knew about.  From the 1930s he was suffering from tuberculosis. He believed public knowledge of his disease would hurt him politically.

Both Gandhi and Jinnah belonged to the same region of Saurashtra in Gujarat. Jinnah considered Gandhi his arch rival. And if Gandhi secured independence for India and is called the father of the Nation, Jinnah created an independent Pakistan, and became its father of the Nation-‘Baba-i-Qaum’- and if Gandhi was the Mahatma, he was the’ Quaid-e-Azam’-Great Leader- who remained an unquestioned leader of the Muslim League.

This author has to his credit the book Quaid-e-Azan- a translation of a biographical novel  Pratinayak, based on the life of Jinnah. As stated in the book, Jinnah continued his parleys with Gandhi, while taking a very rigid inflexible stand on the creation of Pakistan, to avoid being accused of a puppet in the hands of the British government, as Prime Minister Churchill considered him and the Muslim League as the stumbling block to the independence of India.   After his release from prison on health ground in 1944, while the other  Congress leaders were  still  in jail, Gandhi began his parleys with Jinnah on the question of independence.  He was to meet Jinnah at his House in Bombay on 19 August 1944, but the meeting could not take place.   Jinnah had a high fever. He could hardy eat anything. He started coughing and vomiting blood.

At this time an eminent physician from Bombay Dr. Jal Patel, was treating Jinnah. He conducted a series of tests which revealed that Jinnah was in the last stage of tuberculosis. His lungs were damaged completely due to heavy smoking and drinking. He also had blood cancer. And when the Doctor told him about his fatal disease Jinnah extracted a promise from him that the condition of his health should remain between them, and that no third person should come to know about it.  The Indian Doctor ensured that., considering his professional duty as more important  at a time when the country entered the last critical phase of freedom struggle , and all the test reports, the X-rays, and the prescriptrions  remained  a closely guarded secret. Even Jinnah’s sister Fatima was not informed about the fatal disease.

Dominique Lapierre, co author of the book Freedom at Midnight had recorded in the section ‘Glimpses of an Unforgettable Research’:

‘One day we showed him (Lord Louis Mountbatten) a report of our meeting with the Indian doctor who, in 1947, had treated the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Reading it made him blanch suddenly.’

‘I can’t believe it!’ he gasped. ‘Good God!’

‘When he looked up again, the blue eyes that were usually so calm were shinning with intense emotion. He swiped the air several times with our sheets of paper. ‘If I’d only known all this at the time, the course of history would have been different. I would have delayed the granting of independence for several months. There would have been no partition. Pakistan would not have existed. India would have remained united. Three wars would have been avoided…’

The report described in detail a chest X-ray discovered with Jinnah’s doctor. The plate confirmed the advanced stages of tuberculosis. In the spring of 1947, Jinnah, the inflexible leader who subverted all efforts to preserve India’s unity knew that he had only a few months left to live. All this was kept a well guarded secret, no one knew about it.  Mountbatten and the Indian leaders-Gandhi, Nehru and Patel- didn’t know that Jinnah was suffering from such a fatal disease and that he was negotiating for Pakistan virtually counting his days. And knowing Jinnah was dying, Mountbatten would have waited for his death, rather than partitioning India in great haste; then an independent Pakistan would never have come into being and India that had one-fifth of the world population remained undivided. Jinnah himself believed ‘an impossible dream’, the birth of an independent Islamic nation on the soil of the Indian sub-continent.

In 1948, Jinnah was recuperating at Quetta, in the mountains of Baluchistan. By 9 September, his condition had deteriorated.  The doctors urged him to return to Karachi, where he could receive better care, and he was flown there on the morning of 11 September. The plane landed at Karachi that afternoon, and a car could not be arranged as he was unable to sit.  The ambulance carrying him had developed some problem, and another ambulance had to be arranged, resulting in waiting on the road side for some time, in oppressive heat and trucks and buses passing by not knowing the person inside the ambulance. Jinnah died on 11 September 1948, just a year after creation of Pakistan.

There is a reason to believe that had Indian independence was delayed till his death, Pakistan would not been a reality.  Mountbatten’s prediction that East and West Pakistan would not remain as one nation for too long came true with the dismemberment of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, disproving Jinnah’s two –nation theory. And today India has more Muslim population than the Islamic Pakistan, which was created for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent.  It is a terrible tragedy of history that Jinnah, a staunch nationalist, had become instrumental for creating bitter feelings of animosity, hatred and enmity between the Hindus and the Muslims.  Jinnah’s struggle for Pakistan was just seven years- 1940- 1947- and, unlike the Indian nationalist leaders who participated in the freedom struggle and were imprisoned, Jinnah never went to jail. In history there is no parallel of any single individual achieving so much in such a short span.  Ironically, Jinnah, who once dismissed the very thought of creation of Pakistan as a ‘joke of a student’ and figment of ‘imagination of a poet’, became its first Governor-General. The American historian Stanley Wilbert, biographer of Jinnah of Pakistan, said: “Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Muhammad Ali Jinnah did all three.”

In the hindsight we can say that had the birth of Pakistan been avoided, the millions of people of the Indian sub-continent would not been uprooted; and there would have been no ‘Second Crucifixion' and the murder of the Mahatma Gandhi that demonstrated to the world ‘how dangerous it is to be good’, as George Bernard Shaw said. The Hindustan Standard came out with its editorial page left blank, ringed by a black border; at its centre was a single paragraph set in bold face type, paying him a most memorable tribute:"Gandhiji has been killed by his own people for whose redemption he lived. This second crucifixion in the history of the world has been enacted on a Friday, the same day Jesus was done to death one thousand nine hundred and fifteen years ago. Father, forgive us.”

Jinnah’s personal ambition and his misconceived flawed two-nation theory had divided India. And perhaps he wouldn’t have survived to face the consequences of a ‘Civil War’ that he threatened to launch, if his demand for Pakistan wasn’t conceded.  In 1860s, Abraham Lincoln fought the civil war and averted the USA breaking up on the issue of slavery.