History is too complex to expect doctors doing their job to alter its course

Published on: Sep 11, 2026, 06:39:52 IST

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Muhammad Ali Jinnah died aged 71, on September 11, 1948 — just 394 days after Pakistan’s creation — of chronic tuberculosis. 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.

Pakistani minister Ahsan Iqbal posted on social media that British viceroy Louis Mountbatten acknowledged he might have delayed Partition 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.

that the Nishan-e-Imtiaz announcement created a stir in the Parsi community, with whom Jinnah had a complicated history. Jinnah scandalised the community when he eloped with Rattanbai (better known as Ruttie), industrialist Dinshaw Petit’s daughter, 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 the latter realising what Jinnah 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 was after his money. The Parsi Panchayat, the highest community body, excommunicated Ruttie and excluded 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. 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. Jinnah slid into irrelevance as Gandhi’s stature as a national leader kept growing. The elitist Muslim League, too, splintered.

When Jinnah secured Pakistan after reviving a moribund Muslim League with British help, 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, through his columns in newspapers.

Like in India, Parsis have made contributions disproportionate to their numbers in Pakistan. 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 only, with Bangladesh’s creation.

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 wrote about the possibility that the power transfer from the British colonial government and Pakistan’s creation would have been delayed had the then viceroy known that 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.

The authors, who interviewed Jinnah’s daughter Dina Wadia and Patel, wrote that even Gandhi or Nehru knowing about Jinnah’s illness could have averted India’s Partition. They noted it was such a crucial secret that even the British Criminal Investigation Department did not know about it. History is too complex to expect doctors doing their job to alter its course. A Mumbai Parsi doctor echoed this when he told 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.

The views expressed are personal

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