Jinnah was not just another dominion governor general holding the office of the representative of the Queen.
LAHORE: This is with reference to Saleem H Ali’s article of May 11 titled “An open letter to Bilawal”. I would begin by quoting the writer where he says: “First, Jinnah was not democratically elected — he was appointed governor general.”
This is a de jure fact. He was de facto in power because of the mass support that he had gotten in the 1945-1946 elections.
Jinnah was not just another dominion governor general holding the office of the representative of the Queen. He was the head of a newly-founded dominion which was given independence under the Independence of India Act 1947. He came to this position because the Muslim League won close to 87 per cent of the seats it contested in the aforesaid elections.
The distinction between an appointed and an elected office is not as important as the distinction between a popular politician and a bureaucrat, and so on. Jinnah had served as an elected representative from Bombay from 1910-1947 (with brief absences between 1921-1922 and 1931-1934, winning the election every two years).
So those who are making the comparison are right — whatever that amounts to — because Jinnah was the leader of the second largest party in India and could not speak any more than broken Urdu.
Yasser Latif Hamdani
Published in The Express Tribune, May 12th, 2011.
