No Indian political leader of the first half of the twentieth century provokes more controversy than Mohammad Ali Jinnah. He began his career as an Indian nationalist and parliamentarian and ended up demanding the partition of India to create a Muslim-majority Pakistan. The result was a violent upheaval which cost more than a million lives and caused the biggest migration in history, as some 15 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs crossed the international border in search of safe havens. This study examines Jinnah’s ideas, his political stands and strategies as he transited from Indian nationalist to Muslim communitarian and Muslim nationalist, finally becoming the all-powerful head of state of Pakistan. These events took place in a period when the British were the final arbiters of the future of India and the Indian National Congress was Jinnah’s principal opponent. In the postcolonial era he held political powers unknown to parliamentary democracy. In retrospect, was Jinnah a leader endowed with great charisma and political acumen, as his admirers assert, or did objective circumstances favour him over his rivals? His ‘two-nation’ theory transformed Indian Muslims from a large religious minority into a distinct political nation seeking a separate state. And yet his famous speech of 11 August 1947, describing all Pakistanis as equal citizens irrespective of their religion, failed to dislodge the confessional basis of Pakistani nationalism. Why? The author proposes an original solution to this puzzle, focusing on the force of ideas as influential in themselves. In the case of Jinnah, he argues, we are faced with a paradox: both the intended and the unintended consequences of his ideas weighed in the scales of history. The creation of Pakistan led directly to political Islam, opening a Pandora’s box of sectarian conflicts among Pakistani Muslims, marginalizing non-Muslims and embittering relations with India.    
The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-Person Accounts Karachi: Oxford University Press  
WINNER Best Book on Punjab at the Vaisakhi Mela, Lahore 2016 Best Non-Fiction Prize at the Karachi Literature Festival, 2013    

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