THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT AND THE PARTITION OF INDIAand so he went back to New Delhi instead. Here he pursued a nationalist
line: when the elections to the provincial assemblies approached in 1936,
he established Parliamentary Boards of the Muslim League in all provinces
and practically copied the Congress election programme. In this way he
hoped to recommend himself as the coalition partner he thought the
Congress might require in order to form ministries in the various
provinces. He also calculated that the separate electorates for Muslims
(now operating with an enlarged franchise) would yield a good crop of
successful Muslim League candidates. Why should a Muslim vote for a
Congress Muslim if a League candidate standing for the same programme
was available? To Jinnah’s great disappointment this calculation proved to
be wrong.
In British India as a whole, the Muslim League won only about 25 per
cent of the Muslim seats, Congress Muslims obtained 6 per cent and the
lion’s share of 69 per cent was captured by provincial parties in the
Muslim majority provinces. With its overwhelming strength in the Hindu
majority provinces the Congress did not need the League as a coalition
partner there; in the Muslim majority provinces the League also had to
remain in opposition.
With the benefit of hindsight one can state that it would have been an
act of wise statesmanship if the Congress had nevertheless established
coalition governments with the League, thus helping Jinnah to remain
what he had been up to this point—a nationalist spokesman for the
Muslims in the Muslim minority provinces. But from the perspective of
1936 there were serious obstacles to such a course. The Congress initially
had an ambivalent attitude towards office acceptance and the needs of the
freedom movement might have called for a resignation of the ministries at
any moment. Would the League as a coalition partner have gone along
with all this? Moreover, the League was at this stage not yet the political
force it was to become ten years later. Why should the Congress try to
nurse this sectarian party rather than make an attempt to wean the Muslim
masses away from it? Thus Jinnah was left out in the cold and had to turn
his attention to the Muslim majority provinces. Rahmat Ali’s ideas were
growing upon him, whether he liked it or not. The Urdu press had spread
these ideas in India: Pakistan was now no longer a strange word but had
already become a very familiar slogan.
At the session of the Muslim League in October 1937 Jinnah underwent
a fateful metamorphosis which he also expressed outwardly by abandoning
his fashionable Western suit and donning, for the first time, a North Indian
sherwani (long coat) complemented by the typical fur cap which soon
became known as the ‘Jinnah cap’. In this attire he concluded a pact with
the powerful chief minister of the Panjab, Sir Sikander Hyat Khan. This
Sikander-Jinnah pact stipulated that the Unionist Party of the Panjab, led
by Sikander, would retain full autonomy of the affairs of that province;