Pakistan has announced that it will confer its highest civilian honour on two Mumbai-based Parsi doctors for not revealing that that Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the country’s first president, had a terminal illness in the years before Partition.

Jal Ratanji Patel, Jinnah’s physician, and Jal Daeboo a radiologist, will receive the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, said the Pakistan Cabinet’s official awards list. Some members of the community believe that Daeboo is a misspelling of the Parsi name Deboo.

They will be given the award posthumously.

Jinnah had been suffering from tuberculosis at the time of Partition. The disease had severely affected his lungs. He died on September 11, 1948, just over a year after Pakistan was created.

Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins have claimed in their 1975 popular history Freedom at Midnight that if British India’s last Viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, had known that Jinnah was suffering from a terminal illness, he might have delayed the transfer of power from British India to independent India and the creation of Pakistan.

“Lord Mountbatten later acknowledged that, had he known how seriously ill Jinnah was, he might have delayed Partition – potentially altering the course of history and perhaps even jeopardising the creation of Pakistan,” wrote Pakistan Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal in a social media post.

He added: “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.”

In 1946, Patel diagnosed Jinnah with chronic tuberculosis, Lapierre and Collins write. They do not mention Deboo. He is thought to have examined Jinnah’s X-rays.

Patel told Jinnah that unless he "severely reduced his work load, rested much more frequently, gave up cigarettes and alcohol, and eased the pressures on his system, he did not have more than one or two years to live", Lapierre and Collins write.

They add that Jinnah told Patel that there was no question of him doing that. “Fortified every two weeks by injections given him in secret by Dr Patel, Jinnah returned to work. He made no effort whatsoever to follow his doctor’s advice,” they write.

Partition had triggered one of history’s largest mass migrations. Lakhs of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs crossed the newly created borders between India and Pakistan. The communal violence that accompanied this killed between two lakh and 10 lakh persons.

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Sneha.

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