Jinnah’s Secret Tuberculosis, Parsi Doctors: The Illness That May Have Prevented Partition

Muhammad Ali Jinnah died on this day, 78 years ago, just 394 days after Pakistan's creation on September 11, 1948, of chronic tuberculosis at 71. His terminal illness, as he led the campaign for India's division in the 1940s, remained a secret until his death. Last month, Pakistan announced one of its highest civilian honours, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, for two Bombay (now Mumbai) Parsi doctors, Jal Ratanji Patel, Jinnah’s physician, and Jal Daeboo, a radiologist, acknowledging their inadvertent contribution to the circumstances that made Pakistan's creation possible by maintaining this secret. They will receive the honour posthumously next year on Pakistan Day, which marks the 1940 Lahore Resolution that spelled out the two-nation theory.

Pakistani minister Ahsan Iqbal wrote on social media that British viceroy Louis Mountbatten acknowledged he might have delayed Partition, potentially altering history's course and jeopardising Pakistan's creation, had he known how seriously ill Jinnah was. He said the two doctors performed a quiet but extraordinary service by maintaining professional confidentiality at a critical moment. Iqbal said Patel and Daeboo's fidelity to their professional oath inadvertently contributed to Pakistan's creation.

The Nishan-e-Imtiaz announcement spotlighted a forgotten chapter. HT reported it created a stir in the Parsi community, with whom Jinnah had a complicated history. Jinnah scandalised the community when he eloped with Rattanbai, industrialist Dinshaw Petit's daughter better known as Ruttie, in 1918. The couple's romance blossomed in 1916 when Petit invited Jinnah to escape Bombay's heat to their plantations in Darjeeling.

Jinnah asked Petit how he felt about intermarriage when they returned to Bombay, without realising what he was angling for. Petit declared intermarriage a great idea that could help break down barriers dividing Indians but was soon horrified when Jinnah asked for his daughter's hand.

The couple continued to correspond secretly as Jinnah's influence grew after he helped arrange simultaneous annual sessions of the Muslim League and the Congress, and brokered an agreement to present a common set of demands to the British under the Lucknow Pact. As soon as Ruttie turned 18, the couple eloped.

Petit disowned Ruttie and unsuccessfully attempted to prove in court that Jinnah, who was in his early 40s and had lost his first wife a year after they were married off in their teens, was after his money. He got a restraining order against Jinnah and sued him for kidnapping Ruttie before she told the court: ‘Mr Jinnah has not abducted me... I abducted him.’ The Parsi Panchayat, the highest community body, excommunicated Ruttie and adopted a resolution excluding the Petits from rituals and ceremonies.

The couple was married for 11 years when Ruttie, 29, died in 1929. Jinnah soon packed up and left for London. His personal tragedy coincided with the Muslim League's sagging popularity, with fewer than 2,000 members. Jinnah spoke about reaching a dead end when asked about plans to return, as another Gujarati, Mahatma Gandhi, captured the national imagination and consolidated Muslim support by backing the movement supporting the Ottomans. 

In 1920, Jinnah was jeered for addressing Gandhi as "Mister" instead of "Mahatma". Jinnah slid into irrelevance, as Gandhi's stature as a national leader kept growing. Jinnah was pushed to the margins, and the elitist Muslim League splintered.

When he secured Pakistan after reviving a moribund Muslim League with British help for his support during the Second World War while leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru were imprisoned, Karachi Parsi businessman and friend Rustamjee Fakirjee Cowasjee was among those he counted on for nation-building. Cowasjee's son, Ardeshir, would become a champion of Jinnah’s idea of Pakistan, which many argue was a secular state, as a leading columnist and what has been described as a watchdog-in-chief.

Like in India, Parsis have made contributions disproportionate to their numbers in Pakistan. Parsis own Pakistan’s only brewery, the oldest shipping firm, and a group of luxury hotels. They are known as makers of Karachi, the country’s economic backbone, and have made their mark across fields from sports to the armed forces.

Parsis annually observe Jinnah’s death anniversary in Karachi’s Cyrus Minwalla Community Hall, although it is not a public holiday. In 1947, Jinnah unsuccessfully tried to convince Sam Manekshaw, a Parsi, to follow his 12th Frontier Force Regiment in becoming a part of the Pakistan Army. Manekshaw, India’s celebrated military leader, would go on to lead the Indian Army in the 1971 war, which reduced Jinnah's "moth-eaten" country to its western wing with Bangladesh's creation.

Decades later, Pakistan's move to decorate Patel and Daeboo has revived the debate over partition's inevitability. In Freedom at Midnight, Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins write that Mountbatten might have delayed the power transfer and Pakistan's creation if he had known Jinnah suffered from chronic tuberculosis, which Patel diagnosed in 1946. Patel secretly gave Jinnah injections every two weeks. Daeboo is believed to have examined Jinnah’s X-rays.

Lapierre and Collins wrote that Patel told Jinnah he did not have more than a year or two to live unless he reduced his workload, rested more frequently, gave up cigarettes and alcohol, and eased the pressures on him. 

The authors, who interviewed Jinnah’s daughter Dina Wadia and Patel, wrote that India's division might have been avoided if Mountbatten, Nehru, or Gandhi had known the secret about Jinnah's illness. They noted it was such a crucial secret that even the British Criminal Investigation Department, one of the world's most effective agencies, did not know about it.

History is too complex to expect doctors just doing their job to alter its course. A Mumbai Parsi doctor echoed this when he told HT that all talk of Patel and Daeboo being in a position to change the course of history is conjecture, perceptively underlining that they just kept professional secrets and the rest is just noise.

A shorter version of the piece was first carried in Hindustan Times