It is in 1947, India has been given its independence from British rule and the Islamic partition that would become Pakistan has been painfully born. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan realizes this great ambition and a year later succumbs to the illness through which he has willed himself to live. As his life begins to ebb away Jinnah relives the dilemmas and triumphs of his life, the drama of his ideals, his romance, his happiness and the tragedy of the death of his wife. It takes the handsome young idealist through his dream of freeing the people of India from the burden and the insult of foreign rule, a journey twisted and tempered by the realities and cruelties of politics, the intrigue and arguments between the Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru and the mercurial Lady Mountbatten. It is the story of a practical visionary who knew that on his word hung the future of a nation, who knew also that such a birth meant a division of a country and of his family, because his only daughter had married an Indian and would remain in India. The film shows Pakistan's first leader as something considerably more than the sly destructive zealot that too often seems to be his lot in the annals of Western history.