Author's Note
The 1930s do not look dramatic from outside. There is one famous walk to the sea, and after that a decade of committees, conferences, elections and legal drafts. Most popular histories skip it in a paragraph.
I think that is exactly backwards. This is the decade where the thing was decided.
In these ten years two men fasted against each other over how a community should vote, an election proved that a party had almost no support and then that same party rebuilt itself into a mass movement, and a resolution was passed in Lahore whose deliberately vague wording is still argued about today. Nothing in 1947 is intelligible without this decade.
There is one chapter here I want to warn you about. The confrontation between Gandhi and Ambedkar in 1932 is the hardest argument in this whole book to be fair about, because both men were right about something important and both did something indefensible. I have given each of them their case at full strength, in their own words, before giving a verdict. If you finish that chapter feeling uncomfortable with both of them, I have done my job.
I have also, for the first time in this series, printed a set of quotations that many people would prefer stayed unprinted, from a book published in 1939. I have included the authorship dispute around it honestly, because that dispute is real and it matters.
Where Parts One to Three Left Us
One page, so you can start here if you need to.
British rule made religion the operating system of Indian public life: a legal category in court, a box on the census form, and from 1909 the basis of the vote itself through separate electorates. In 1916 the Congress accepted that system at Lucknow in exchange for a moment of unity.
Gandhi returned in 1915 and within five years turned the Congress from a debating society into a mass organisation with village branches and a four anna subscription. He gave a disarmed people a method that worked against the one thing the British could not do without, their own justification for being there.
He then spent the entire capital of Hindu and Muslim unity on the Khilafat cause and obtained no constitutional settlement in return. The cause was destroyed by the Turks themselves in 1924. Malabar burned in 1921 and his response to it was imbalanced in a way that damaged him permanently with Hindu opinion. He suspended the whole national movement after Chauri Chaura in 1922, which was strategically defensible and organisationally costly.
Out of the wreckage of the 1920s came the Hindu Mahasabha revived, Savarkar's Hindutva in 1923, the RSS in 1925, and Ambedkar's movement from 1924. Between 1927 and 1929 Indians tried to write their own constitutional settlement of the communal question, without the British, and could not agree.
Part 4 covers 1930 to 1940. It ends with a resolution passed in Lahore that does not contain the word Pakistan.
Everyone knows the picture. Almost nobody can tell you what changed because of it. The answer is more interesting than the myth.
1The Salt March and What It Actually Achieved
Why salt
The Congress had adopted complete independence as its goal at Lahore in December 1929. Gandhi now had to choose a way to fight for it, and his choice baffled almost everybody at the time, including Nehru and the Working Committee.
The government held a monopoly on salt. It was illegal for an Indian to make or collect salt, and there was a tax on what you bought. Think about what that means. Salt is the one thing every human being must have, the poorest labourer and the richest merchant alike, and in a hot country where people sweat all day it is not optional. The tax was small in rupees and enormous in meaning.
That is exactly why Gandhi chose it. A land revenue campaign would mobilise peasants only. A tax on cloth would mobilise weavers. Salt touched literally everybody, it required no organisation to break the law, and the law itself was impossible to defend in front of an audience. You cannot explain to the world why picking up salt from a beach is a crime.
What happened
On 12 March 1930 Gandhi left Sabarmati Ashram with seventy eight chosen followers and walked about 240 miles to the coastal village of Dandi, arriving on 5 April. On the morning of 6 April he picked up a lump of natural salt from the mud and said, in effect, that he was shaking the foundations of the empire.
Then the country did it too. Salt was made illegally on every coast. Where there was no coast, people boycotted foreign cloth and liquor shops and refused taxes. Somewhere between sixty thousand and ninety thousand people were arrested, including Gandhi himself in May.
The turning point for world opinion came at the Dharasana salt works on 21 May 1930. Column after column of volunteers walked forward to be beaten down by police with steel tipped lathis, without raising an arm. The American journalist Webb Miller counted the wounded and cabled a report that was printed in over a thousand newspapers worldwide. It is one of the most consequential pieces of reporting in the history of the freedom movement, because it made the moral position of British rule indefensible in the one place the British cared about, which was the opinion of other Western countries.
What it got, and what it did not
On 5 March 1931 Gandhi and the Viceroy Lord Irwin signed the Gandhi Irwin Pact. Congress would suspend civil disobedience. The government would release political prisoners not convicted of violence, return confiscated property, and allow people living near the coast to make salt for their own use. Congress would attend the Round Table Conference in London.
Look at that list honestly. There is no independence in it. There is no dominion status. There is not even an inquiry into police conduct, which Gandhi asked for and did not get. In pure bargaining terms he got very little.
Younger Congressmen were furious, and Subhas Chandra Bose was the loudest. Two weeks after the pact was signed, on 23 March 1931, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged at Lahore, and the accusation that Gandhi could have saved them and did not begins from exactly this moment. That charge is the subject of Part 5 and I will not deal with it here.
TRUEthat it produced almost no constitutional gain. The Gandhi Irwin Pact was a thin document and Gandhi's critics inside the Congress said so at the time. FALSEthat it was therefore pointless. It did three things that mattered more than clauses. It made a Viceroy sit down and negotiate as an equal with a man he had jailed, which had never happened. It brought women into the national movement in large numbers for the first time, through the picketing campaigns. And through Dharasana it destroyed the moral standing of British rule in front of an international audience whose opinion Britain needed. The lesson to carry forward: mass movements in this period almost never won concrete concessions. What they did was change what was thinkable. Keep that distinction in mind when we reach Part 7 and weigh Gandhi's contribution against the Second World War.
2The Round Table Conferences and Why They Failed
Three conferences in London, from 1930 to 1932, meant to design India's constitutional future. They failed, and the reason they failed is the reason this whole book exists.
| Word | What it means | |
|---|---|---|
| First | November 1930 to January 1931 | Congress boycotted it entirely because its leaders were in jail. Princes, Muslim League, Hindu Mahasabha, Sikhs, Ambedkar and others attended. Without the largest party present it could decide nothing. |
| Second | September to December 1931 | Gandhi attended as thesolerepresentative of the Congress, having claimed that the Congress represented all of India. It collapsed over the communal question. |
| Third | November to December 1932 | Congress absent again. Small attendance. It produced the framework that became the Government of India Act of 1935. |
The claim that broke the second conference
Gandhi went to London arguing that the Congress alone spoke for the whole Indian nation, including Muslims, including the Depressed Classes, including everybody. It was a sincere claim and it was politically necessary for him, because if India was many communities negotiating separately then India was not a nation and the British could stay indefinitely as referee.
The trouble was that other people in the room did not accept it.
The Muslim delegates did not accept that Gandhi spoke for Muslims. The Sikhs did not accept that he spoke for Sikhs. And Dr B. R. Ambedkar, who was there as the representative of the Depressed Classes, told the conference to its face that Gandhi did not speak for the untouchables and that the Congress had done nothing for them.
That confrontation in a London committee room is the beginning of the most painful argument in this part.
Why the British position was cynical and also unanswerable
The British line at these conferences was simple: settle the communal question among yourselves and we will discuss transferring power. If you cannot agree, we will have to decide for you.
It was cynical because they had built the system that made agreement almost impossible, as Part 2 showed, and because every failure to agree extended their stay. Ramsay Mac Donald knew perfectly well that an award imposed from London would harden the divisions further.
And it was unanswerable, because the Indians in that room genuinely could not agree. Not because they were unreasonable, but because the two positions were incompatible in the way I set out in Part 3. Congress said permanent religious quotas would prevent a nation from ever forming. The minorities said that without guarantees they had no protection against a permanent majority. Both were correct.
So on 16 August 1932 Ramsay Mac Donald announced the Communal Award, and everything changed.
This is the chapter I have rewritten most. Two great men, both right about something, both doing something they should not have done. I am going to give each of them the strongest possible case before I say anything of my own.
3Gandhi Against Ambedkar: The Fast and the Poona Pact
What the Communal Award actually did
The Award granted separate electorates to Muslims, Sikhs, Indian Christians, Anglo Indians and Europeans, which continued what had existed since 1909.
And it extended separate electorates to the Depressed Classes, the communities we now call Scheduled Castes or Dalits. They were given about 71 reserved seats in the provincial legislatures, to be filled by voters from those communities voting separately. They were also given a double vote: they could vote in their own separate constituency and in the general constituency as well.
Gandhi's response
Gandhi was in Yerawada jail in Poona. On 20 September 1932 he began a fast unto death against this one clause. Not against separate electorates for Muslims, which he had accepted since 1916. Against separate electorates for the Depressed Classes.
Within days he was weakening dangerously. The country was in a state of panic. Temples were suddenly thrown open to untouchables across India, wells were opened, and mass meetings passed resolutions. Ambedkar came to the jail to negotiate with a dying man while every newspaper in India told its readers who would be responsible if that man died.
Ambedkar's case, at full strength
1.Only untouchables can represent untouchables.Under a joint electorate, a Dalit candidate in
2.The Depressed Classes are a separate element, not a subdivision of Hindus.They suffer a
3.The fast was moral coercion, not a moral argument.Ambedkar said openly that this was a
4.Gandhi's own record did not earn him the trust.Gandhi in the 1920s had defended
5.The word Harijan.Gandhi called untouchables Harijans, children of God. Ambedkar found it
Gandhi's case, at full strength
1.Separate electorates would make the split permanent.His central claim was structural, and
2.The reform had to happen inside Hindu society.Untouchability was a sin committed by
3.He was not opposing representation, only the mechanism.He offered, and delivered, more
4.His fast was directed at Hindus, not at Ambedkar.His stated target was caste Hindu society,
The Poona Pact, 24 September 1932
Ambedkar signed. The terms:
- Separate electorates for the Depressed Classes were dropped.
- Reserved seats in the provincial legislatures rose from about 71 to 148, filled through joint electorates.
- Reserved seats in the central legislature were fixed at eighteen percent of the general seats.
- A primary election system: Depressed Class voters would choose a panel of four candidates for each reserved seat, and the general electorate would then choose from that panel. This provision was allowed to lapse and never operated in practice.
Gandhi broke his fast. The country celebrated. Ambedkar went home having got more seats and less independence, and he never forgave the method.
Gandhi was right about the mechanism.Separate electorates do harden a group permanently outside the body politic. We watched that happen to Hindu and Muslim politics from 1909 onwards. Anyone who says Gandhi's objection was insincere has to explain why the identical objection was correct in the Muslim case. Ambedkar was right about the representation.Ninety years of experience since have proved his prediction. Reserved seats in joint electorates have overwhelmingly produced representatives dependent on the majority party rather than on their own community. He said in 1932 exactly what would happen, and it happened. And the method was indefensible.Whatever Gandhi's intention, the practical effect was that one man's life was placed on the scale against another community's political rights, in public, with the whole country watching. It is not a coincidence that Gandhi never used a fast unto death this way against the Muslim League, which had far more to concede. He used the weapon where it would work, on the weaker party. Ambedkar's word for it was duress, and I do not think that word can be argued away.
The wider claim: "Gandhi and Congress did nothing for the untouchables"
"Ambedkar himself said the Congress and Gandhi did nothing for the untouchables. Gandhi defended the caste system, gave Dalits a patronising name, and blocked their political rights. All the real gains came from Ambedkar."
What is true.Ambedkar did say it, and he wrote a whole book with that title in 1945. Gandhi did defend varnashrama in his earlier years. The Poona Pact did remove a political weapon from Dalit hands. The primary election safeguard was quietly dropped. And the great constitutional gains, the abolition of untouchability in Article 17, the reservation framework, the framing of the Constitution itself, came through Ambedkar.
What is left out.Gandhi made the removal of untouchability a formal aim of the national movement in 1920, when no other political body in India had done so. He founded the Harijan Sevak Sangh in 1932 and the weekly Harijanin 1933, and he toured the country for nine months in 1933 and 1934 on an anti untouchability campaign, during which he was attacked by orthodox Hindus and a bomb was thrown at his car in Poona. He also changed. By the 1940s he was refusing to attend any wedding that was not between a caste Hindu and a so called untouchable, and he had abandoned his earlier defence of the fourfold order.
FALSEthat he did nothing. He put the issue on the national agenda, campaigned on it personally at physical risk, and moved a great deal in his own views over twenty five years. TRUEthat what he offered was reform from above by the guilty, not power to the wronged, and that when the two collided in 1932 he used his life as a lever to take political power off the table. Ambedkar wanted rights, not repentance. That is the whole difference between them, and it is a real one.
If you remember only one set of numbers from this entire book, make it the ones in this chapter. They demolish the most common story told about Partition.
41935 and 1937: The Election That Humiliated the Muslim League
The Government of India Act, 1935
It was the longest Act the British Parliament had ever passed. Its main features:
- Provincial autonomy.The eleven provinces would be governed by ministries responsible to elected legislatures. This was real power over education, health, police, land revenue and local government.
- Governors kept emergency powersto override those ministries, which is why nationalists called it a fraud.
- A federation at the centreincluding the princely states, which required the princes to join voluntarily. They did not. This part of the Act never came into being.
- An expanded franchiseof around thirty million people, roughly one adult in six, based on property and education qualifications. Still not democracy, but ten times the previous electorate.
- Separate electorates continuedand were extended, following the Communal Award and the Poona Pact.
Nobody liked it. Nehru called it a charter of slavery. Jinnah called it thoroughly rotten and fundamentally bad. Both then fought the elections under it, because it was the only power on offer.
The results of the 1937 elections
Here are the numbers. Read them slowly.
| Result | Figure |
|---|---|
| Total provincial assembly seats | 1, 585 |
| Seats won by the Indian National Congress | 711, with outright majorities in five provinces and the ability to form governments in most |
| Seats reserved for Muslims across British | 482 |
| India | |
| Seats won by the All India Muslim League | 109, that is under 23 percent of the seats reserved for its own community |
| Result | Figure |
|---|---|
| Total votes cast by Muslim voters for | 7, 319, 445 |
| Muslim candidates | |
| Votes that went to the Muslim League | 321, 772, about 4. 4 percent |
| Provinces where the Muslim League | None |
| formed a government |
In 1937, out of every 100 votes cast by Indian Muslims, the Muslim League got about four. The party that would demand Pakistan three years later, and get it ten years later, was at this point rejected by roughly ninety five percent of the Muslim voters who bothered to vote. It did not run a single province. It was not, in any meaningful sense, the voice of Indian Muslims.
Who did Muslims actually vote for?
This is the part that gets erased from both the Indian and Pakistani versions of the story. In the Muslim majority provinces, Muslims voted forregionalparties that were built on land, class and locality rather than on religion.
| Province | Who Won | What Kind Of Party |
|---|---|---|
| Punjab | The Unionist Party under Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan | A cross community party of landholders: Muslim, Hindu Jat and Sikh landlords together. It kept Punjab out of communal politics for a decade. |
| Bengal | The Krishak Praja Party under A. K. Fazlul Huq | A peasants and tenants party campaigning on debt relief and land reform, not on religion. |
| North West | Congress, in alliance with Khan | An overwhelmingly Muslim province that voted for the |
| Frontier Province | Abdul Ghaffar Khan's Khudai Khidmatgars | Congress. |
| Sindh | Shifting coalitions of local parties | Local and personal, not League. |
Hold this table in your mind. In 1937 the four provinces that would form the core of West Pakistan and East Pakistan were governed by parties that were not the Muslim League and in one case by the Congress itself.
The documentary record of the only reasonably wide election held before the demand was made shows the party of Pakistan winning about 4. 4 percent of Muslim votes and no provinces at all. The Muslim majority provinces voted for landlord and peasant parties and, in the Frontier, for the Congress. Which raises the question that the next four parts of this book exist to answer:how did a party with four percent in 1937 sweep the Muslim seats in 1946?Something happened in those nine years. It was not ancient religious destiny. It was a sequence of decisions by identifiable people, and we are about to watch the first of them.
Many serious historians point to a single decision in the summer of 1937, in one province, as the moment the Muslim League was given its second life. Let us test that.
"After the 1937 elections the Muslim League in the United Provinces wanted to join a coalition government with the Congress. Nehru refused, and demanded that the League party dissolve itself. That arrogance humiliated moderate Muslim leaders who wanted to work with Congress, proved to Muslims that the Congress would never share power, and handed Jinnah the argument he needed. Nehru made Pakistan."
5The United Provinces Decision: The Mistake That Made Pakistan?
What actually happened
In the United Provinces, the Congress won a clear majority. The Muslim League won twenty seven of the sixty six Muslim seats, its best performance anywhere, and during the campaign the two parties had cooperated in places rather than fighting each other.
The two leading League figures in the province were Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman and Nawab Mohammad Ismail Khan. Both expected, and were widely expected, to be taken into the ministry.
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who was the Congress leader most involved, wanted exactly that. In his memoir India Wins Freedom, Azad states plainly that he had hoped both men would be made ministers and that his efforts were frustrated by Nehru, who was Congress president at the time.
What Nehru offered instead was that onlyoneof the two could enter the ministry, and, crucially, that the Muslim League parliamentary party in the United Provinces should dissolve itself and its members join the Congress group. Neither man was willing to come in alone on those terms. They declined. There was no coalition.
Azad's judgement on this, from inside the Congress leadership, is blunt: Nehru's action gave the Muslim League in the United Provinces a new lease of life.
Nehru's defence, which is not stupid
It would be easy to present this as arrogance and stop. It was more than that, and the reasoning deserves to be stated properly.
- Congress did not need a coalition.It had a majority. In a parliamentary system, a party with a majority forms a government. That is not a communal insult, it is arithmetic.
- Nehru's objection was ideological.He genuinely believed Indian politics should divide on economic lines, between those who wanted land reform and those who did not, and that religious blocs were a colonial artefact that had to be dissolved rather than accommodated. He famously said there were only two parties in India, the Congress and the British. Bringing a communal party into government as a communal party would, in his view, permanently entrench the very thing that had to be destroyed.
- Congress was running the Muslim Mass Contact campaignat exactly this time, trying to recruit Muslims directly as Congressmen. Making a deal with the League at the top would have undercut that entirely.
Testing the claim
Points in favour of the claim.The two men refused were precisely the kind of Muslim leaders who wanted to work inside a united India. Humiliating them proved Jinnah's central argument: that Congress would not share power with Muslims even when it cost nothing to do so. Within two years the League had turned itself into a mass party in exactly this province, and Khaliquzzaman became one of Jinnah's most important lieutenants. Azad, a Congress Muslim with every reason to defend his own party, blamed Nehru in print.
Points against the claim.A party with a majority is not obliged to share power, and no British or European party would have. The League was tiny nationally in 1937, and it is a stretch to say that a provincial ministry post for two men would have changed the trajectory of a subcontinent. The Punjab and Bengal, which decided Partition, were not affected by the United Provinces decision at all. And the structural problem, which is the whole argument of Parts 1 and 2, was there regardless of who got a ministry.
TRUEthat a coalition was expected, that Azad wanted it, that Nehru blocked it on terms amounting to surrender, and that a senior Congress leader blamed him for reviving the League. This is not Muslim League propaganda. It is Azad, in his own memoir. FALSEthat it single handedly caused Partition. Punjab and Bengal, the provinces that actually mattered, were governed by parties hostile to the League and were not touched by this decision. The accurate statement:it was a serious unforced error at exactly the wrong moment. It did not create the demand for Pakistan. It gave a dying party a grievance, an argument and a mission, and there is a real difference between causing a fire and handing somebody a match.
Congress governed eight provinces from July 1937 to late 1939. What it did in those twenty eight months became the Muslim League's central campaigning argument for the next decade.
6Congress Rule and the Atrocities Charge
What the Congress ministries actually did
The record is not a bad one, and it should be stated before the charges. They released thousands of political prisoners. They restored civil liberties and lifted bans on books and organisations. They passed tenancy legislation improving the position of cultivators against landlords, which is the reason landlord interests turned against them so sharply. They expanded primary education and prohibition. Ministers took modest salaries and travelled third class.
The charges
The Muslim League appointed a committee under Raja Syed Mohammad Mehdi of Pirpur to investigate the treatment of Muslims under Congress rule. The Pirpur Report, ninety six pages, was presented on 15 November 1938. A second report by A. K. Sharif in March 1939 covered Bihar, and a third covered the Central Provinces.
The main allegations were these:
- Vande Mataram.Sung at the opening of assembly sessions and in schools. Muslims objected that it came from a novel in which Hindus fight Muslim rulers and that it involves the worship of the land as a goddess, which is idolatry in Islam. Congress eventually agreed to use only the first two stanzas, which was too late to undo the damage.
- The tricolour flagflown over public buildings, presented as a party flag imposed as a national one.
- The Wardha scheme of basic educationand the Vidya Mandir scheme in the Central Provinces, alleged to promote Hindu religious content and to undermine Muslim schooling.
- Language.Promotion of Hindi in the Devanagari script at the expense of Urdu, in provinces where Urdu had been the language of administration and courts.
- Riots and administrative bias.Allegations that Muslims got no justice from Congress police and magistrates, and that Muslims were excluded from services and from Congress ministries.
How serious were these charges?
Historians who have examined the reports generally conclude that the specific allegations were exaggerated, that many incidents were reported without evidence or were ordinary local disputes recast in communal terms, and that no independent inquiry substantiated a pattern of atrocity. The Congress asked for an impartial inquiry by a British judge and the League refused it, which tells you something about the confidence of the case.
But dismissing the whole thing as propaganda is a mistake, and here is why. Strip out the invented incidents and a real grievance remains underneath, and it is a grievance aboutsymbols and exclusion rather than atrocity.
The Congress genuinely did believe it was a national party rather than a Hindu one. But its national symbols, its song, its language preference and its cultural instincts were drawn from the majority community, because that is what its leaders were. To a Muslim shopkeeper in Lucknow, the government of his province now opened its business with a Hindu devotional song, flew a party flag as a national one, promoted Hindi over the Urdu his son needed for a clerkship, and contained no minister from his community's largest party. None of that is an atrocity. All of it says: this country belongs to somebody else and you live in it.
FALSEthat Congress ministries carried out systematic oppression of Muslims. The specific allegations in the Pirpur and Sharif reports were mostly unverified, and the League refused an impartial judicial inquiry into its own charges. TRUEthat Congress governed with majority symbols, gave the minority's largest party no share of office anywhere, and was tone deaf about what that looked like from below. Why it mattered more than the truth of it:in politics, a widely believed grievance is a fact whether or not the underlying allegation is. The Pirpur Report gave the Muslim League something it had never had: a story about the future. Not "we deserve more seats", which is a lawyer's argument, but "look what they did to us with only provincial power, now imagine them with a country". That story is what took the League from 4. 4 percent to a mass movement, and it was handed to Jinnah by Congress conduct in office.
The Congress ministries resigned in October and November 1939 over the Viceroy declaring India at war without consulting anybody. Jinnah called on Muslims to observe 22 December 1939 as a Day of Deliverancefrom Congress rule. That is the temperature of Indian politics on the eve of the war, and Part 6 begins there.
Two documents from these two years matter more than anything else written in the decade. One is a book. One is a resolution.
71939 and 1940: The Ideologies Harden
Golwalkar, 1939
M. S. Golwalkar became head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1940. In 1939 a book appeared under his name,We or Our Nationhood Defined. Its argument is that a nation requires five unities, geographical, racial, religious, cultural and linguistic, and that in India this describes the Hindus. Non Hindu groups, in its formulation, must either merge entirely into the Hindu nation, adopting its culture and language and holding no separate claims, or remain in the country wholly subordinated, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges and not even citizen's rights.
The passage that is most often quoted, and that I am printing because leaving it out would be dishonest, praises Germany for what it calls purging the country of the Semitic races, the Jews, and calls this a good lesson for India to learn and profit by.
Two points of fairness must be made here, and I will make both.
- The authorship is genuinely disputed.It has been argued for decades, including by people inside the organisation, that the book was substantially a translation of a Marathi work by Ganesh Damodar Savarkar, the elder brother of V. D. Savarkar, rather than Golwalkar's own composition. Historians disagree about how much of it is his. The book was published under his name and made his reputation within the organisation, so he cannot be entirely separated from it, but the dispute is real and I am not going to pretend it is not.
- The RSS itself later withdrew it.The organisation stopped circulating the book and has publicly distanced itself from its contents, saying it does not represent its position.
What matters for this book is not a verdict on an organisation that still exists. It is this: by 1939, the two nation idea was being stated in its hardest form onbothsides, and each side could point to the other's text as proof that it was right. Jinnah did exactly that in his negotiations, and Part 8 will show you where.
Jinnah, 1935 to 1940
The Jinnah who returns from London in 1935 is not the Jinnah of Part 2. He is sixty, his wife is dead, his health is poor, and he has watched the constitutional path fail three times: the Nehru Report in 1928, the Fourteen Points in 1929, and the coalition talks of 1937.
Muhammad Iqbal wrote him a series of letters in 1936 and 1937 urging him to take up the cause of a separate Muslim political future, and telling him that the Muslim League would be nothing until it became the party of the Muslim masses rather than the Muslim gentry. Jinnah took the advice. Between 1937 and 1940 he rebuilt the League as a mass organisation, using the Pirpur grievances as fuel and the Congress ministries as the enemy.
The Lahore Resolution, 23 March 1940
At the Muslim League session at Lahore, a resolution drafted with Muhammad Zafarullah Khan's involvement was moved by A. K. Fazlul Huq, the Bengali peasant leader who had won Bengal in 1937 on a land reform platform and not on religion. Its key words:
"...that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in the North Western and Eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute Independent States, in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign."
Now notice three things, because all three become critical in Part 8.
1.The word Pakistan does not appear.Not once. The name was applied to it afterwards, and by
2.It says "States", plural.Two zones, north west and east, grouped into independent states.
3.It does not say what happens to Muslims in the rest of India, who were about a third of
Was the Lahore Resolution a demand or a bargaining position? Jinnah was a constitutional lawyer who had spent thirty years negotiating. A vague resolution demanding the maximum is what a lawyer tables when he expects to settle for less. Several serious historians, including Ayesha Jalal, have argued that Pakistan was a bargaining counter to secure a strong federal share for Muslims and that Jinnah was surprised to be taken at his word. Other historians reject this and say he meant it from 1940. The evidence for both readings sits in the events of 1946, and I will lay it out properly in Part 8 rather than pretending it is settled here.
Where We Have Reached
The decade began with a man walking to the sea and ended with a resolution nobody could pin down. In between, four things changed permanently.
- The Depressed Classes entered national politics as an independent force, and were then pushed back into the Hindu fold by a fast. Ambedkar's grievance from 1932 shapes everything he does afterwards, including how he responds to the Pakistan demand in Part 9.
- Indians governed provinces for the first time, and in doing so proved to the minority that majority rule would look and sound like the majority.
- The Muslim League was destroyed and then rebuilt.At 4. 4 percent of the Muslim vote in 1937, it was finished. By 1940 it was tabling a resolution about independent states, and by 1946 it would sweep. That transformation is the single most important political fact of the 1940s.
- Both nationalisms hardened their theoryin 1937 and 1939, and each used the other's hardest statement as proof of its own case.
And there is one more thing, easy to miss. In 1939 the Viceroy declared that India was at war with Germany without consulting a single Indian. Every elected Indian government resigned in protest. The provinces went under British officials again.
So on the eve of the biggest war in history, India had no functioning Indian governments, a Congress out of office, and a Muslim League celebrating a Day of Deliverance. Part 6 begins there.
But before the war, we have unfinished business. Part 5 goes back to 1928 and deals with the men who chose a different method entirely, and with the two accusations that follow Gandhi more closely than any others: that he could have saved Bhagat Singh, and that he destroyed Subhas Chandra Bose.
| Dat E | Event |
|---|---|
| 26 January 1930 | Independence Day observed following the Lahore Congress. |
| 12 March to 6 April | The Salt March. Gandhi walks about 240 miles to Dandi. |
| 1930 | |
| 21 May 1930 | Dharasana salt works. Webb Miller's report goes worldwide. |
| November 1930 to | First Round Table Conference. Congress absent. |
| January 1931 | |
| 5 March 1931 | Gandhi Irwin Pact. |
| Dat E | Event |
|---|---|
| 23 March 1931 | Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev hanged at Lahore. See Part 5. |
| September to December | Second Round Table Conference. Gandhi attends alone for Congress and clashes |
| 1931 | with Ambedkar. |
| 16 August 1932 | Communal Award. Separate electorates extended to the Depressed Classes, about 71 seats. |
| 20 September 1932 | Gandhi begins his fast unto death at Yerawada jail. |
| 24 September 1932 | Poona Pact. Separate electorates dropped, reserved seats raised to 148 in joint electorates. |
| 1932 and 1933 | Harijan Sevak Sangh founded. The weekly Harijanbegins. |
| 1933 to 1934 | Gandhi's nine month anti untouchability tour. A bomb is thrown at his car in Poona. |
| 1935 | Government of India Act. Provincial autonomy, franchise of about thirty million. |
| 1936 to 1937 | Iqbal's letters to Jinnah urging a mass Muslim politics. |
| February 1937 | Provincial elections. Congress 711 of 1, 585. Muslim League 109 of 482 Muslim seats and about 4. 4 percent of Muslim votes. |
| July 1937 | Congress ministries take office in eight provinces. United Provinces coalition talks fail. |
| December 1937 | Savarkar's Ahmedabad address states the two nation position for the Hindu Mahasabha. |
| 15 November 1938 | Pirpur Report presented. |
| 1939 | We or Our Nationhood Definedpublished under Golwalkar's name. |
| March 1939 | Sharif Report on Bihar. |
| 3 September 1939 | Viceroy Linlithgow declares India at war without consulting Indian opinion. |
| October to November | Congress ministries resign. |
| 1939 | |
| 22 December 1939 | Muslim League observes Day of Deliverance. |
| 23 March 1940 | Lahore Resolution, moved by A. K. Fazlul Huq. The word Pakistan does not appear in it. |
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Communal Award | The British decision of August 1932 assigning separate electorates to religious and social communities, including the Depressed Classes. |
| Depressed Classes | The official term of the period for the communities now called Scheduled Castes or Dalits. |
| Joint electorate with reserved | Everyone votes together, but certain seats can only be won by candidates from |
| seats | a specified community. The system adopted in the Poona Pact and still used in India. |
| Fast unto death | A fast declared to continue until either a demand is met or the faster dies. |
| Varnashrama | The traditional fourfold order of Hindu society. Gandhi defended it in his earlier years while condemning untouchability. Ambedkar regarded the two positions as incompatible. |
| Harijan | Literally children of God. Gandhi's name for untouchables, rejected by Ambedkar and by most Dalit organisations as patronising. |
| Provincial autonomy | The 1935 Act arrangement giving elected Indian ministries real control of provincial government, subject to the Governor's emergency powers. |
| Unionist Party | The cross community landholders' party that governed Punjab from 1937, uniting Muslim, Hindu and Sikh landed interests. |
| Krishak Praja Party | A. K. Fazlul Huq's peasants and tenants party in Bengal, which won in 1937 on land reform rather than religion. |
| Khudai Khidmatgars | Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan's nonviolent movement in the North West Frontier Province, allied to the Congress. |
| Pirpur Report | The Muslim League's 1938 inquiry into the treatment of Muslims under Congress provincial rule. |
| Day of Deliverance | 22 December 1939, observed by the Muslim League to mark the resignation of the Congress ministries. |
- Text of the Communal Award, announced by Ramsay Mac Donald, 16 August 1932, and the text of the Poona Pact, 24 September 1932.
- B. R. Ambedkar,What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, 1945, and his statements to the Round Table Conferences.
- Gandhi's writings in Young Indiaand Harijanon untouchability and on the fast of September 1932, in the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.
- Maulana Abul Kalam Azad,India Wins Freedom, for the account of the United Provinces coalition talks of 1937 and the role of Nehru.
- Official results of the 1937 provincial elections, including the Muslim seat and vote figures: 482 Muslim seats, 109 won by the League, 7, 319, 445 Muslim votes cast and 321, 772 to the League.
- Report of the Inquiry Committee appointed by the Council of the All India Muslim League, known as the Pirpur Report, 15 November 1938. Full text available on the Internet Archive.
- The Sharif Report on Bihar, March 1939.
- Uma Kaura and other scholarly studies of Congress and League relations from 1937 to 1939 in Modern Asian Studiesand related journals.
- M. S. Golwalkar,We or Our Nationhood Defined, 1939, together with the published scholarship on its disputed authorship and its later withdrawal from circulation.
- Text of the Lahore Resolution of the All India Muslim League, 23 March 1940.
- Government of India Act 1935, text and official summaries.
- Webb Miller's despatches from Dharasana, May 1930.
Sources & further reading — Part 4
Part 5: Bhagat Singh and Bose, the Betrayal Charges.Could Gandhi have saved Bhagat Singh? What the Gandhi Irwin Pact actually covered, what Gandhi wrote to Irwin and how hard he pushed. What Bhagat Singh himself thought of Gandhi's methods. Then Tripuri in 1939 and whether Bose was pushed out, what Bose actually said about Gandhi, about Savarkar and about the Hindu Mahasabha, the Indian National Army, and what the declassified files do and do not show about his death.