Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Muhammad Ali Jinnah founded Pakistan and had spent most of his career arguing against partition. Born in Karachi in 1876 to a Gujarati merchant family of the Ismaili and later Twelver Shia community, he was sent to London at sixteen, qualified as a barrister at Lincoln's Inn, and built one of the most successful practices at the Bombay bar. He joined the Indian National Congress in 1906 and the Muslim League in 1913, and was for years the leading advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity — the architect of the Lucknow Pact of 1916, which united both bodies behind a common demand for self-government, and was called the ambassador of unity by Gopal Krishna Gokhale. He broke with Congress in 1920 over Gandhi's non-cooperation movement, which he regarded as unconstitutional, religiously charged and certain to end in disorder. He resigned and was heckled off the platform. He spent much of the 1930s practising law in London, disillusioned. He returned to lead the Muslim League and, at Lahore in 1940, moved the resolution demanding separate states for Muslim-majority regions — a demand many historians read as a bargaining position for federal guarantees rather than a settled objective. The collapse of the Cabinet Mission plan in 1946 and Congress's refusal of the safeguards he wanted removed the alternative. Pakistan came into being on 14 August 1947, with perhaps a million dead and fifteen million displaced. He told its constituent assembly that religion had nothing to do with the business of the state. He died of tuberculosis thirteen months later.
- Lived: 1876 CE – 1948 CE
- Nationality: Pakistani
- Roles: statesman, lawyer, founding_father
