How critical was Quaid-i-Azam’s role in the making of Pakistan? Surprisingly though, it was most succinctly and brilliantly summed up in rather unsuspecting quarters – in H.V. Hodson (d. 2000)’s The Great Divide (1969), perhaps the most authoritative British account of the imperial retreat from the subcontinent. He says:
Of all the personalities in the last act of the great drama of India’s rebirth to independence, Mohammad Ali Jinnah is at once the most enigmatic and the most important. One can imagine any of the other principal actors…. Replaced by a substitute in the same role – a different representative of this or that interest or community, even a different Viceroy – without thereby implying any radical change in the denouncement. But it is barely conceivable that events would have taken the same course, that the last struggle would have been a struggle of three, not two, well-balanced adversaries, and that a new nation State of Pakistan would have been created, but for the personality and leadership of one man, Mr. Jinnah. The irresistible demand for Indian independence, and the British will to relinquish power in India soon after the end of the Second World War, were the result of influences that had been at work long before the present story of a single decade begins; the protagonists on this side or that of the imperial relationship were tools of historical forces which they did not create and could not control… Whereas the irresistible demand for Pakistan, and the solidarity of the Indian Muslims behind the demand, were creations of that decade alone, ad supremely the creations of one man.
Of relevance here is how Alfred Broachard evaluated the role of Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) in the making of the modern Turkey:
Without Napoleon, without de Gaulle, there would still be a France.
Without Washington, there would certainly be the United States.
Without Lenin, it is certain that there would be the Soviet Union; but
without Ataturk, it is certain that there would have been no Turkey.
Turkey had, of course, had a territorial, political, cultural and ethnic existence in history for over five centuries before Ataturk transformed it into modern Turkey in 1923. In contract, Pakistan fell even below the category of middle nineteenth-century “Italy” which the Austrian Chancellor, Matternich (1809-48), had most disparagingly characterized as a mere a “geographical expression”. Pakistan was not even such an expression barely fifteen years before its emergence. There was a “nation” called Turkey for several centuries, but there was none called Pakistan before 1947. Hence if Ataturk’s presence in the early 1920s was critical to have making of modern Turkey, how much more critical should have been Jinnah’s presence in the 1940s in the emergence of Pakistan, especially since she was bereft of any historical prototype hand parentage? Hence Leonard Mosley and a host of other contemporary observers and historians (including Penderal Moon, Ian Stephens, John Terraine, Margaret Bourke-White, Frank Moraes, and D.F. Karaka) rate Jinnah as being the critical variable in its emergence to a point that they characterize Pakistan as a “one-man achievement”.
