This book analyses the development of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s relationship with India’s Muslims from his entry into politics until 1934. It establishes that a dominant view of Jinnah -- namely that he was an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity in the 1920s who became a communalist in the 1940s -- is far from the truth. It shows that the primary changes in his politics were the strategies he employed to achieve his goals.

Among the facets of Jinnah’s political thought and career reviewed here include his elitism and distance from mass politics; the effect on his work of an intellectual genealogy from the Liberalism of Morley, on the one hand, and the constitutionalism of Gokhale, on the other; his view of secularism, religion and the religious community; his relations with Gandhi, Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, Willingdon, Ramsay MacDonald and Irwin; his attitude to the Rowlatt Act, Khilfat Movement and Non-cooperation; and his complex, troubled relations with other nationalist Muslim leaders.