with them again. The war in Europe having ended with the German
surrender on May 7, other matters could now reappear on the agenda.
It had become apparent, in the course of the war, that Britain did not have
the will or the military resources to hold India by force after the war,
and the viceroy, Lord Wavell, as a military man, now saw the virtues of
an orderly transfer of power to a government that Britain would be able
to deal with after the war, rather than risk popular initiatives that led
in unknown directions. This seems to have been the British position from
at least late 1944, if not earlier. The problem now, as the British saw it,
would be to create enough agreement among the two main players in the
negotiations, the Congress and the Muslim League, to effect such an
orderly transfer. Wavell now decided that the time had come to agree
terms; to this end, he arranged a conference at Simla.
One of the major outcomes of the Congress leadership’s long period in
jail during the war was that when they re-emerged into the outside world
they were not fully conversant with the political situation. Events had
moved along quickly in their absence. Most importantly, the Muslim
League had made great advances in their political strength. Whereas at the
beginning of the war, they were a small part of an uneasy coalition in the
provincial government of Bengal, by the end of the war they had emerged
as a major political force, with much of India’s Muslim population rallying
round their slogan of Pakistan. Admittedly, ‘Pakistan’ was not properly
defined; it was a deliberately vague slogan that could by its very vagueness
accommodate the aspirations of every Muslim dissatisfied with his
lot. Nevertheless, the Muslim League’s gains in the wartime period were
undeniable. In this they were substantially helped by the British shopping
around for allies who would back them in the war effort. The Muslim
League was able to offer cautious and conditional support to the British,
winning in turn the right to represent Muslims to the British. Thus in
large measure, it was due to Britishrecognition of the Muslim League
as representing Muslims that the League could, post-ex facto, gather the
support of Muslim groups behind itself, and thereby also inherit the
supporters of these other Muslim groups.
The Congress, and Nehru, missed this part of the plot. For them, the
League was the major failure of the 1937 elections, where they had failed
even to win Muslim seats. A hard-line, uncompromising position against
the League could still be viable as far as they were concerned, because, even
as it was admitted that the Congress itself had to work harder to bolster
THE END OF THE RAJ 121