ENDGAME: CLUMSY NEGOTIATIONS, POPULAR
VIOLENCE
The tone for the Congress’s election campaign in 1945–6 had been set
by Nehru’s speeches, although the organisational work of selecting
candidates was taken over by Vallabhbhai Patel. In the elections, 442 out
of 509 of the Muslim seats in the provinces went to the Muslim League,
as did all 30 of the reserved seats in the Central Assembly. These electoral
gains took Congress by surprise, but gave the League greater political
legitimacy at the negotiating table. The six provinces that Jinnah had
demanded as ‘Pakistan’ had not all obliged by returning League govern-
ments: in the North-West Frontier Province and in Assam, Congress was
in government. Campaigns had been opportunistic, and often cynical: the
Congress had appropriated the INA issue; in Punjab, the League had
campaigned on the basis of the distinction between dinand duniya
- religion and worldly things – with maulvisplaying a strong role in their
campaigns, threatening recalcitrant Muslim voters with excommunication
or divine vengeance. In Bengal, by contrast, where a left wing of the
League had working relationships with the CPI-run Kisan Sabhas, the
rhetoric was far more economics and class based. Witnesses to the Tebhaga
movement, an agrarian movement of sharecroppers demanding a fair share
of the produce, and led by the Kisan Sabhas, reported the presence of
Muslim peasants at meetings carrying Muslim League flags onto which
had been painted the hammer and sickle.
A three-member Cabinet Mission was now sent to India with a plan
for the transfer of power. Sir Stafford Cripps, the Cabinet Mission’s main
negotiator on the basis of past experience, offered, on April 16, 1946,
a three-tier scheme of provinces, groups of provinces and a weak federal
centre to look after matters of vital importance. Provinces were cate-
gorised as Group A (the four north-western Muslim-majority provinces),
Group B (the Hindu-majority provinces) and Group C (Assam and
Bengal, the Muslim-majority provinces in the east). Cripps offered Jinnah
this plan with the other option being a partition of Bengal and Punjab.
Jinnah did not commit himself. In May, Nehru and Azad, the Congress’s
negotiators, accepted the three-tier scheme; but details were far from
worked out, a familiar sticking point being Jinnah’s insistence that the
Congress be denied the right to appoint any Muslims in an interim
government.
THE END OF THE RAJ 129