In his 1954 book
Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan, H. Bolitho writes that, in 1920 when Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian National Congress and India’s pan-Islamists came together to force the ouster of the British from the region through protests, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was not amused.
Bolitho describes Jinnah as someone who was steeped in the political and social traditions and ideas of British liberalism and constitutionalism. In 1916, Jinnah had worked as a bridge between the Congress and the Muslim League and invested a lot of energy in gaining some important political concessions from the British for the Hindu and Muslim polities of India. However, four years later, when Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement merged with the pan-Islamic Khilafat Movement, Jinnah wrote a letter to Gandhi warning him that these movements had the potential of unleashing religious and communal sentiments that would be hard to control and, thus, lead to chaos.