Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah

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Sir Stafford Cripps was Chancellor of the Exchequer with an ambition to be Viceroy of India. This picture was taken in 1942

Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Secretary of State for India on February 19, 1946, announced in Parliament that a special mission consisting of three Cabinet ministers, in association with the Viceroy, would proceed to India, in order to hold discussions with the Indian leaders. The three Cabinet ministers would be Pethick Lawrence, Sir Stafford Cripps and A.V. Alexander. Cripps told the press conference on landing at Karachi on March 23 that the purpose of the mission was "to get machinery set up for framing the constitutional structure in which the Indians will have full control of their destiny and the formation of a new interim government." The Mission arrived in Delhi on March 24 and left on June 29. Jinnah faced extreme difficulties in the three-month-long grueling negotiations with the Cabinet Mission. The first of these was the continued delicate state of his health. At a critical stage of the negotiations, he went down with bronchitis and ran temperature for ten days. But

The passing of the Pakistan Resolution was a turning point in the history of Indian Muslims; it brought about a qualitative change in their status as a minority in India. By the middle of 1940, the war had brought disaster for the allies, as France fell in June 1940, the British Government made renewed appeals for co-operation to all parties in India. In the middle of 1941, the war situation had become more serious for the allies, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America was involved in the war, the initial success of the Japanese armies in South-East Asia brought the war to India's doorstep. The British under the leadership of the die-hard imperialist Churchill were most reluctant to make any firm commitment regarding Indian independence. Sir Stafford Cripps, who had recently joined the government as Lord Privy Seal and become a member of the War Cabinet and leader of the House of Commons, had decided to proceed to India. Churchill gave the genesis of this new policy, &quo

Jinnah left London for India in 1896. He decided to go to Bombay after a brief stay in Karachi. He opted for Bombay because it offered scope for the exercise of his legal faculties and ground for his political ambitions. Bombay had the brightest constellation of India’s lawyer-politicians, at that time. Ranade, Badruddin, Tyabji, Gandhi, Tilak, Gokhale, Cowasji, Dadabhoy Naoroji, Bholabhai Desai, Wacha, Nariman and many more renowned men were based in Bombay. He was enrolled as a barrister in Bombays’ high court on August 24, 1896. He took up lodgings in Room No.110 of Apollo Hotel. Father’s business had suffered serious losses by then, and he could hardly get any brief for a year or so but he never stopped helping the poor and needy, even in his precarious financial position. In a letter to the Times of India, Bombay, the June 10, 1910 issue, he appealed to the well-off section of the Muslim Community in Bombay to aid a Muslim orphanage in the city. He donated a handsome amount to t