its Muslim support base, it was taken as self-evident that the League
did not have much of a support base itself. The last testing of the electoral
waters had, therefore, not prepared the Congress at all for the situation,
and the incarceration of its leaders had left them unable to follow
developments during the war with any accuracy – to which developments
they had also a propensity to be blind. At any rate, the endgame was to
be played on the basis of negotiations between three main players – the
Congress, the League and the British; the ‘people’ were to be invoked by
all sides in different ways, but the ‘will of the people’ was a mysterious
entity to all concerned.
Negotiations, nevertheless, now began in earnest. In May 1944,
Gandhi had been released from prison; soon afterwards, in July, he had
met Jinnah for talks. With most important Congressmen in jail, in 1943
the South Indian Congress leader Chakravarty Rajagopalachari had
proposed a formula for an eventual Pakistan: Muslim areas should be
defined, followed by a plebiscite of the areas with a Muslim absolute
majority to determine whether they would prefer a separate Pakistan.
The proposals envisaged important subjects such as communications
and defence remaining in the hands of some sort of union government
even in the event of some separation. Gandhi based his talks on the
Rajagopalachari formula; Jinnah preferred the separation of Punjab, Sind,
Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier Province, Bengal and Assam, and
refused to accept what he referred to as a ‘maimed, mutilated and moth-
eaten Pakistan’.^22 This hardly augured well for Simla, at which haggling
over formulae, territories, reassurances to minorities and the Muslim
League’s wish to be identified with all Muslims took centre stage.
Wavell’s hope at the Simla Conference (June 25–July 14, 1945) was to
bring Congress and League into government. Muslims and ‘caste Hindus’
were to be equally represented in a new Viceroy’s Executive Council, with
other minorities also represented, on the basis of the existing constitution,
but with a new one to be drawn up after the war. Negotiations broke down
on the League’s refusal to allow Congress to appoint any Muslims to the
Council and the Congress’s refusal to be further reduced in stature to that
of a ‘caste Hindu’ party. Maulana Azad, the Congress president, himself a
Muslim, was continuously derided by Jinnah as the Congress’s window
dressing. ‘This was the first time,’ Azad later wrote, ‘when negotiations
failed, not on the basic political issue between India and Britain, but on
the communal issue dividing different Indian groups.’^23 Perhaps Wavell’s122 THE END OF THE RAJ