I judge Jinnah by his actions during his final days. His leading of a party not of poor masses but of rich landowners, asking for more value to a muslim vote as opposed to a hindu vote in a united india, when it didnt't work, coming up with a medieval philosophy called TNT,istigating masses during direct action day, appointing himself as the governer general of Pakistan , invading Kashmir not with is army but using tribals , not of these actions paint a rosy picture of him.
Let us take these one by one, from neither a hagiographic point of view, nor a demonising point of view.
About leading a party of rich land-owners, not of the poor masses, this is an extrapolation of the Indian Congress' support base upon that of the Muslim League, an historical error. The Congress mobilised the rural and the urban masses, mostly but not entirely. Those who turned out for Congress programmes were NOT exclusively the poor, they included a wide and significant sampling of the nascent professional classes as well, and were strongly supported by and funded by the business community. G. D. Birla was well-known to have exercised enormous influence over Gandhi, much to the consternation of the socialistically minded Nehru. So we have the myth of the Congress being a mass party exclusively; it was a mass party but was led by the professionals. When we look at the Muslim League, we find that its support was NOT in the areas that now constitute Pakistan, but in the areas of UP, Bihar and Bombay. Bengal, too, gave it a quirky level of support, marching in the same direction but with a strong tendency to go their own way. What happened in Bengal was not entirely a matter which developed after independence and partition. When it became clear that Jinnah would have to have an alternative, an appalling, fearful alternative to his desire to push forward the envelope of protection enjoyed by the Muslim community beyond what they had got already in 1919 and in 1935, he mentioned partition. This was to be the AIML doomsday option, the then equivalent of the nuclear bomb. The Congress was expected to fall apart under the fear of this apocalyptic threat, and grant the AIML their concessions. In order to flesh out this threat, Jinnah had to define which areas should be taken out of the existing Indian colony. It was demographic logic, not political logic, that prevailed; the north-west and the east had proportionately more Muslims than any other part, so they were to be taken out.
Unfortunately, all the components of these havens were originally opposed to, if not outright hostile to the Muslim League. The
Sindhi leader G. M. Sated, was not pleased at the thought of being boxed up with the Punjab; Bacha Khan had his own plans for the future of what is today K-P,; the Baluch state of Kalat and its rulers were inclined towards India; even the Punjab was under the Unionists and their constituent feudals.
If Jinnah had to make headway to achieve the safety for Muslim aspirations that he sought, and that the ML had implicitly mandated him to seek, he had to play ball with these disparate and more than notionally hostile elements. Since there was only one course of action, Jinnah plunged into a campaign of winning over these areas. It is interesting to note from the contemporary point of view that most of his compromises with his democratic secular principles were made in these difficult days, during conversations, or public addresses, or discussions with feudal chiefs in the Punjab; reassuring the backward, regressive Pir of Ipi; winning over a Baloch population that didn't much know what was going on.
It was for these two reasons, the original composition of the ML, and the situation on the ground in the north-west, that created a situation in which Jinnah led a party not of the masses exclusively.
Let us look at the other points one at a time.