Pakistan has approved to honor two Indian Parsi doctors from Bombay (now Mumbai) with the country’s highest civilian award ‘Nishan-e-Imtiaz’. These doctors had kept the serious illness of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah a secret during the crucial period just before the partition of India in 1947.
Jinnah’s deteriorating health was something that very few people knew about; Some historians believe that if everyone had known this, the direction and timing of partition could have changed. Maybe then the history of South Asia would have been different.
in a post on x Pakistan Planning Development and Special Initiatives Minister Ahsan Iqbal announced that Dr. Jal Ratanji Patel and Radiologist Dr. Jal Dhaybho-Ku have been nominated for the award. Ahsan Iqbal is also the chairman of this award committee.
He is being given this honor for his “quiet but extraordinary service”, under which he ensured that information about Jinnah’s serious illness was limited only to those close to him.
Iqbal wrote on X, “As Chairman of the Awards Committee, I have the privilege of nominating two excellent doctors, a physician and a radiologist, for ‘Nishan-e-Imtiaz’. Both of them belong to the Parsi community of Bombay and kept the secret of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s serious illness with utmost sincerity.”
Jinnah suffered from TB in the 1930s
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who played a huge role in the partition of the Indian subcontinent and the creation of Pakistan, was suffering from poor health at the time of partition.
Jinnah’s illness was known only to a small group of people close to him, which included his sister Fatima Jinnah. This was done because there was a fear that if people came to know about his condition, his political image could be damaged. His health had deteriorated greatly in the last years of his life. He smoked heavily; It is said that he used to smoke 50 cigarettes and Cuban cigars a day and also had a heavy workload.
According to the book ‘Freedom at Midnight’ by Larry Collins and Dominic Lapierre, in 1946, Bombay’s Dr. Jal Ratanji Patel and radiologist Dr. Jal Dhaybho-Ku examined Jinnah’s X-rays and found that he had developed severe TB. Doctors believed that he probably had only one or two years left to live. These two Parsi doctors kept his illness a secret.
Collins and Lapierre have written in their book ‘Freedom at Midnight’ that if Lord Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru or Mahatma Gandhi had known about Jinnah’s illness in 1947, partition might have been averted or might not have happened. Mountbatten is later said to have told the writers, “If I had known all this at that time, history would have been different. I would have postponed the decision of granting independence by a few months. Pakistan would never have been formed.”
Regarding the work of these two doctors, Pakistani Minister Ahsan Iqbal wrote on Twitter, “By maintaining strict professional confidentiality at such a critical juncture, these doctors rendered quiet but extraordinary service. Their devotion to their professional oaths inadvertently became a major contribution to the conditions that made the creation of Pakistan possible.”
Muhammad Ali Jinnah died of TB on 11 September 1948, a little more than a year after Pakistan’s independence. Dr. Jal Ratanji Patel and Dr. Jal Dhaybho-Ku are receiving the country’s highest civilian honor after 78 years. These honors will be formally given at a ceremony in March 2027.
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