owning elites, had been granted a foothold, forming a government in
coalition with the KPP. (In all, the League won only 109 of the 482 seats
reserved for Muslims, did not contest all the seats and gained just 5% of
the Muslim vote.)
Retrospective wisdom, both of historians and of politicians, has it
that in the Congress-ruled provinces, some concessions to the Muslim
League in 1937 with regard to sharing power might have prevented the
demand for Pakistan and eventual partition. Nehru, as Congress president
in 1936–7, has traditionally been blamed for not being willing to come
to some such agreement. It is clear that he made some incautious and
inappropriate remarks, declaring, for instance, that the elections had
proved that there were only two political forces in India of significance:
the Congress and the British government. But the Muslim League had
been completely defeated in the 1937 elections, by whatever standards
one chose to apply, and to share power with the League would have been
to grant them the right to represent Muslims unearned. This could only
have served to legitimise the League and to undermine the legitimacy of
the Congress’s own claim to represent Muslims, besides being a perpet-
uation of the anti-democratic politics of the British Empire in which a
self-appointed or government-appointed organisation was granted the
right to represent a group of people as a whole – without anyone asking
by what right. There were, moreover, anomalies of electoral politics and
party affiliation that made distinctions between the Congress and the
Muslim League not altogether as strong as they became later: in the
United Provinces, some of the campaigners and candidates for the League
were close to the Congress or were even Congress members; others had no
fixed attachments and had stood for office because they had been asked to
do so. Nehru regarded many of them as reactionaries and opportunists.
Nehru was, in fact, a strong believer that ‘communal’ identities only
survived in India because they were backed by strong vested interests
and encouraged by the British. If, his argument went, the masses were able
to find people to represent their true economic interests, and be allowed
the means to recognise who these representatives were, they would find
that their economic selves were far more important to them than their
communal selves – a version of the ‘false consciousness’ argument of many
socialists. For the left, religious sectarianism was an epiphenomenon,
an irrational response to poverty and oppression. If made aware of their
actual class interests, Hindu and Muslim peasants and workers would
‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39 89