Q: Some people I have talked to have said that if he had died, Pakistan would not have happened in 1947, but it would have happened by 1957.

No sir, no. Today you see [look at what we have]. If Quaid had died in March 1947 there would have been no Pakistan. It was the sheer willpower of the man. After he died, Liaquat Ali Khan was there, and he was killed in 1951 I think. He had enough time to frame a Constitution. That is the elementary thing. The Indians produced one in two years. We didn't. When I was a member of the Cabinet in 1956, I was Minister of Finance in 1955 from October, and we had the first Constitution in 1956. The delay was the result in having so many different - to this day we do not have a [proper] Constitution.

Q: Why was the Muslim League after Jinnah so weak?

That is why I am telling you that if Jinnah had died in March 1947 [there would have been no Pakistan] for the simple reason that the Muslims could not throw up a man of that stature.

Q: What do you think the benefit has been of having Pakistan?

There is no doubt about this, that economically the Muslims today are much better off than they would have been [in a united India]. If the entrepreneurial system had continued unchecked, if the entrepreneurial talent that had developed from 1947 to let us say 1970 [had continued], and with the Arab money coming in later, Pakistan would have gone up quite far. I'll give you two examples.

Our business was largely in India. This was with the British Army. When we came to Pakistan I started this textile mill in 1945, before partition in Rahimyar Khan. I was also going to start a flour mill. We bought a razor blade plant, which we set up in Hyderabad [Sindh]. In Karachi we had an assembly plant, assembling Ford products, cars, trucks, tractors. When it was nationalized we were producing twenty-seven percent of the [Ford] Cortina car as local content. We also had an engineering concern, in which we were making bridges for the Army, pontoon bridges. We had a Lambretta plant for bicycles, we were producing forty-five percent local content and we had asked the Lambrettas that we wanted to do more. They went out of business, and they said yes, you can keep this but you have to change the name. So we had given the name Tiger, and our program was that after two years it would be ninety percent local content. This was the situation. I can only tell you about my own concern. When it was nationalized, for twenty years there has been no manufacture. We had built [so many things] all knocked down, we used to build the bodies of the trucks and vans, but now [there is nothing being made indigenously].

Economically the Muslims today are much better than they would have been, and if entrepreneurial system had continued unchecked, as it developed from 1947 till 1970, Pakistan would be a far better place now.