Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Pakistan has approved the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, the country’s highest civilian award, for two Indian Parsi doctors based in Bombay (now Mumbai) who kept the terminal condition of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, secret at a critical juncture in the run-up to the Partition of India in 1947.
Jinnah’s failing health was a little-known factor that, some historians have argued, could have altered the course and timing of Partition.
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In a post on X, Pakistan’s Minister for Planning, Development and Special Initiatives, Ahsan Iqbal, who also chairs the Awards Committee, announced that physician Dr Jal Ratanji Patel and radiologist Dr Jal Dhaybho-Koo had been nominated for the award for their “quiet but extraordinary service” in ensuring that Jinnah’s terminal illness remained known only to members of his inner circle.
“I feel honoured to have had the privilege, as Chairman of the Awards Committee, of nominating for the Nishan-e-Imtiaz two remarkable doctors, a physician and a radiologist, both members of Bombay’s Parsi community, who faithfully guarded the secret of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s terminal illness,” Iqbal wrote on X.
MUHAMMAD ALI JINNAH CONTRACTED TUBERCULOSIS IN THE 1930s
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who played an outsized role in the Partition of the Indian subcontinent and the creation of Pakistan, was in very poor health as the Partition unfolded.
According to historian and academic Akbar Ahmed in his book ‘Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin’, Jinnah had been suffering from tuberculosis since the 1930s, at a time when the disease was highly lethal and there was no effective antibiotic treatment.
“Since 1938 he had been constantly complaining of ‘tremendous strain’ on his nerves and physical strength. After that, he began to fall ill regularly, although his illness was kept secret,” Ahmed wrote in the book.
Jinnah’s illness was known only to a small circle of people close to him, including his sister, Fatima Jinnah, due to concerns that public knowledge of his condition could damage his political standing. By the final years of his life, his health had deteriorated severely. He was a heavy smoker, reportedly consuming as many as 50 cigarettes a day, in addition to Cuban cigars, while maintaining an intense work schedule.
In 1946, Bombay physician Dr Jal Ratanji Patel and radiologist Dr Jal Dhaybho-Koo examined Jinnah’s X-ray and concluded that his tuberculosis had advanced so severely that he might have only a year or two to live, according to Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s Freedom at Midnight. The two Parsi doctors kept his condition confidential.
Collins and Lapierre write in Freedom at Midnight that had Lord Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru or Mahatma Gandhi known of Jinnah’s condition in 1947, Partition might have been delayed or even avoided. Mountbatten later reportedly told the authors that, “If I had known all this at the time, history would have taken a different course. I would have delayed the decision to grant Independence by several months. Pakistan would not have come into existence.”
“By maintaining absolute professional confidentiality at such a critical moment, these doctors performed a quiet but extraordinary service. Their fidelity to their professional oath inadvertently became a significant contribution to the circumstances that made the creation of Pakistan possible,” Pakistani minister Ahsan Iqbal wrote on X on the two doctors’ actions.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah died of pulmonary tuberculosis on September 11, 1948, just over a year after Pakistan’s independence. The country’s highest civilian honour for Dr Jal Ratanji Patel and Dr Jal Dhaybho-Koo comes 78 years later. The awards will be formally conferred at a ceremony in March 2027.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
