Three Founding Figures, Three Tragic Ends

The history of modern South Asia is inseparable from the lives and legacies of Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Each played a defining role in the emergence of a new political order on the subcontinent, yet the circumstances surrounding their deaths were strikingly different. Gandhi and Bangabandhu were assassinated by gunmen, while Jinnah died from prolonged illness. Yet his final days were marked by profound physical suffering, isolation and an extraordinary episode of administrative failure.

Gandhi was assassinated in New Delhi on 30 January 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who had been associated with circles opposed to Gandhi’s political approach. Among the issues that angered his critics was his insistence on communal harmony following the Partition of British India. Gandhi had also pressed the Indian government to honour Pakistan’s financial entitlement under the Partition arrangements. Of the Rs750 million allocated to Pakistan from the cash balances of undivided India, Rs200 million had already been transferred, while the remaining Rs550 million became the subject of intense political controversy after fighting broke out over Kashmir.

In January 1948, Gandhi undertook his final fast in Delhi, primarily to demand an end to communal violence and to restore trust between Hindus and Muslims. His position on the transfer of Pakistan’s funds became part of the wider controversy surrounding the fast. The Indian government subsequently released the remaining Rs550 million, and Gandhi ended his fast on 18 January. Twelve days later, he was shot dead while walking to an evening prayer meeting at Birla House.

Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman met an equally violent fate, though in a very different political setting. Following Bangladesh’s independence in 1971, he became the country’s first leader and faced the immense task of rebuilding a war-ravaged state. The new country struggled with economic hardship, administrative disruption, political conflict and famine. Amid growing tensions within the state and the armed forces, a group of military officers staged a coup on 15 August 1975. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated at his residence in Dhaka, along with most of his family members who were present there.

Jinnah’s death, by contrast, was not the result of an assassination. The founder and first Governor-General of Pakistan had been seriously ill for years, suffering from tuberculosis and other health complications. His condition deteriorated sharply during the summer of 1948 while he was staying at Ziarat, a hill resort in Balochistan, in the hope that the cooler climate would aid his recovery.

By July, his health had become a matter of serious concern. He was moved to Quetta for medical treatment. In early September, his condition worsened further, and he developed pneumonia. His doctors eventually advised that he should return to Karachi, where better medical facilities were available.

On 11 September 1948, Jinnah travelled from Quetta to Karachi by air. The circumstances of his arrival remain one of the most distressing episodes in Pakistan’s early history. His arrival was kept relatively discreet, partly because of concerns about his fragile condition. Even senior government figures were not present at the airport to receive him.

Jinnah, by then extremely weak, was brought down from the aircraft on a stretcher. Accounts of the episode describe the intense heat at the airport and the effort he made to shield his eyes from the sun. He was then placed in a military ambulance and taken towards Government House.

The journey, however, soon turned into a nightmare.

The ambulance broke down only a short distance from the airport. Jinnah was left inside the vehicle in the heat while arrangements were made for another ambulance. The delay lasted for a considerable period. Contemporary and later accounts describe flies gathering around his face, with Nurse Dunham helping to keep them away from the dying statesman. Eventually, another ambulance arrived and he was taken to Government House.

Jinnah died there at about 10.30pm on 11 September 1948, less than 14 months after Pakistan came into existence. He was 71.

The contrast between the three deaths is striking. Gandhi was killed amid the communal tensions that followed Partition. Jinnah, who had succeeded in creating Pakistan through a prolonged political struggle, died from illness while the new state was still struggling to establish itself. Bangabandhu was assassinated barely four years after Bangladesh achieved independence, at a time when the young republic was confronting severe political and economic instability.

Their deaths also raise a broader question about the nature of national identity in South Asia.

Indian and Pakistani nationalism developed through a complicated combination of territory, political history, religion and the experience of colonial rule. The Partition of 1947 gave political form to competing visions of nationhood, with religion becoming a particularly powerful basis for the creation of Pakistan. Yet the evolution of Bengali nationalism followed a markedly different path.

For Bengalis, language and culture became central to the formation of political identity. The Language Movement of 1952 demonstrated that the struggle over Bengali was not merely a linguistic dispute; it had become a question of dignity, rights and political recognition. The movement was followed by successive stages of political mobilisation, including the Six-Point Movement, the mass uprising of 1969 and, ultimately, the Liberation War of 1971.

This is one of the reasons Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s political legacy occupies a distinctive place in the history of South Asian nationalism. He emerged as the principal political figure through whom Bengali aspirations for autonomy and self-determination were transformed into the demand for an independent state.

Language possesses a particular relationship with identity. A person can change their place of residence, migrate to another country or even change their religion. Language, however, remains deeply connected to childhood, culture, memory and collective experience. The life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt offers a powerful example. After converting to Christianity, he remained a major Bengali literary figure and wrote Meghnad Badh Kavya in Bengali. His religious identity changed, but his creative relationship with the Bengali language remained central to his literary achievement.

That does not mean religion or geography are insignificant in the formation of national identity. They can be powerful political forces, as the history of India and Pakistan clearly demonstrates. But the Bengali experience shows how language can provide a particularly enduring foundation for collective consciousness, capable of cutting across differences of class and social background.

Seen from this perspective, the deaths of Gandhi, Jinnah and Bangabandhu cannot simply be placed in the same historical category. Gandhi’s assassination reflected the violent communal politics surrounding Partition and its aftermath. Jinnah’s death was natural in the medical sense, but his final hours exposed the vulnerability of a seriously ill leader at the beginning of a new state’s history. Bangabandhu’s assassination, meanwhile, represented the violent rupture of a political order that had emerged from a language-based nationalist movement and a devastating war of independence.

Three men, three different national projects, and three profoundly different endings. Yet their stories converge on one enduring lesson: the creation of a nation does not end with the achievement of independence. The harder task is to build institutions, protect political legitimacy and preserve the sense of collective identity that made independence possible in the first place.

The deaths of Gandhi, Jinnah and Bangabandhu therefore remain more than episodes of personal tragedy. They are windows into the turbulent birth of modern South Asia—and reminders of how fragile newly established states can be when political conflict, communal divisions and institutional weaknesses collide.