In 2009, I went to Bombay to look for Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s legal papers. I had a visa measured in days, a list of case names, and a good deal of more confidence than the trip deserved. Not the speeches. We have quarried those for sixty years, and they now yield whatever the quarrier came for. I wanted the other man: pleadings, written statements, and briefs from the Original Side of the Bombay High Court. I wanted to know how the barrister sounded on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, addressing a judge and not history.
And not him alone. Gandhi practised law before he practised anything else. Nehru was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple. Almost every tall figure of that generation started in a courtroom, and the working papers of the whole generation lie in the same registries, under the same dust. I found none of it. Anyone who has done this kind of work knows why. Catalogues are incomplete. The bundle you want is misfiled under a name you would never think to ask for. Someone remembers something and sends you to another room, and the man in that room is on leave. Everybody was courteous. Courtesy was not the difficulty. The work takes weeks, and it requires the freedom to come back next month when the missing register turns up. I had neither.
I flew home with a notebook and no papers. That is a small private disappointment, and I would not inflict it on readers, except that the whole of what I want to say is inside it. The professional life of the man who made Pakistan is Indian archival property, in a jurisdiction we cannot practically enter and which Indian scholarship has no particular reason to catalogue. Gandhi has been worked over by generations. Nehru has an institution to himself. Jinnah the lawyer, as opposed to Jinnah the icon, is the least documented of the three, and the reason is not neglect. It is a visa counter.
We call these men the tall figures of the subcontinent, and we have arranged matters so that nobody can properly study them. Now consider what actually survived 1947. Partition divided territory, an army, a currency, and a civil service. It did not divide the law. I appear in our Supreme Court under a Code of Civil Procedure of 1908, argue admissibility under an Evidence Act of 1872, and read a Penal Code Macaulay drafted in 1860. India has since renamed its criminal statutes—the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2024—though anyone who opens them will recognise the building under the new signboard. Our courts cite Indian judgments. Theirs cite ours. Nobody finds this strange, and it is strange.
The one federation that outlived Partition is the common law. Let me say what I am not saying, because in this country one has to. I am not reopening 1947. Pakistan is settled, sovereign, and will remain so. The European Union is worth a look because it is a union of sovereign states that presupposes statehood instead of dissolving it. No Frenchman became less French in 1957.
The fact was never hidden; it has always been in the record. But I first heard it said out loud on a television channel during General Musharraf’s years, and I suspect many Pakistanis heard it there for the first time too: in 1946, Jinnah had accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan, a union confined to defence, foreign affairs, and communications, with everything else left to the provinces. It came around again this past year, usually as a gotcha.
I read it differently. The acceptance was not a lapse, and I doubt it was a feint. It sits with everything the man said about the morning after. The Lahore Resolution of 1940 speaks of independent states, in the plural, and says nothing about a wall between them. In 1946, he agreed to a union of three subjects. Asked by the first American ambassador what he wanted with India, he said something like the United States and Canada. Separate flags, separate parliaments, a border you cross without ceremony. That is nearer to Brussels than to Berlin, and it was there from the beginning.
The scheme failed. I have no interest in whose signature killed it. Every reader already knows which answer he prefers, and my argument does not need one. What is harder to explain away is what he did next, when he had got what he asked for and might reasonably have behaved like a man shutting a door. He kept the keys to his house. South Court on Malabar Hill was his own commission, and he never spoke of it as property left behind. In May 1948, with the killing barely nine months old, he asked India’s High Commissioner to carry a message to the Indian Prime Minister personally: Do not break my heart. Tell Jawaharlal not to break my heart. I built it brick by brick.
And then there is the line I cannot get past: “You do not know how I love Bombay. I still look forward to going back there.” He was dead in four months. He never saw it again. Put that beside the Cabinet Mission, and there is not much ambiguity left. In the worst year either country has had, the Governor-General of Pakistan assumed he would spend part of his life in an Indian city, in his own drawing room, and saw nothing odd in it. Whatever he thought he had drawn in 1947, he did not think it was a wall.
The wall came afterwards. Both of us built it. Then we agreed to call it his. Now, the honest difficulty with the comparison, which I had better put before somebody else does, is this: we say “EU” and picture open borders. Free movement came at the end of that road, not at the start. The founding act was coal and steel in 1951, an arrangement so dull that nobody could get angry about it, and Schengen came thirty years later.
Partition divided territory, an army, a currency, and a civil service. It did not divide the law.
Kashmir is made no easier by any of this, and nothing I propose touches our legal position. Integration does not settle a dispute. At its best, it makes a line less lethal. And yes, we have tried this before. SAARC was built so that nothing could move until both capitals agreed, and it has been comatose for a decade. Anything built the same way will die the same way. So start with something that needs one capital.
Pakistan can liberalise its own visa regime tomorrow morning. Visa policy is sovereign. It needs no treaty, no summit and, this is the part we keep forgetting, no reciprocity. We already run an online system through NADRA, and Indian nationals already sit in a prior-clearance category. What I am asking for is a reclassification and a schedule of exemptions. It is a file, not a bill.
Start narrow, where nobody can shout “concession”. A researchers-and-scholars category: twelve months, multiple entry, tied to the city where the archive is, sponsored by the institution holding the papers. Then pilgrims, medical visitors, families, and business travellers. One drafting point, and to my mind it is the whole design: the visa must require nothing from the Government of India. No no-objection certificate, no police clearance, no attestation from any Indian authority whatsoever. A passport, an online form, our vetting, our decision. The moment an Indian document becomes a precondition, we have stopped being unilateral, because Delhi can then finish the thing off simply by not issuing it, at no cost to itself. Not issuing paper is the cheapest veto there is.
As for security, hotel registration, city-limited visas, and a record of entry and exit are what everybody else manages with. Here is the part that ought to trouble us and does not. We have made this offer already. Pakistan built the Kartarpur Corridor and kept it open through years that were anything but friendly. It has been shut since May 2025, and this August, the Indian Foreign Ministry again gave security as the reason, while Sikh bodies in Indian Punjab asked for more pilgrim visas.
So the first step is not hypothetical. It is on the table and it has been declined. I would widen it anyway. A door one side holds open is an argument. A door both sides close is only a border. I would like to go back. To sit on the Original Side for as long as the work takes and find the bundles with all three names on them. I am aware this is a sentimental reason for a policy column. I have decided not to apologise for it.
Nothing I have proposed gets me into that reading room. Only Delhi can do that. But a state that has opened its own door is making an argument, and one that has not is nursing a grievance. I would rather we were the first. Open our archives to their scholars in the same breath. He wanted to go back and was not given the time. I went, and was not given the days. I am too late for his politics. I would settle for his files.