Pakistan honours two Mumbai doctors who kept Jinnah’s terminal illness secret before Partition

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...

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