THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT AND THE PARTITION OF INDIAJinnah would have had to join a national government and play second
fiddle to Nehru and the Congress. He kept his cards close to his chest,
noted with satisfaction that the Cripps offer contained certain concessions
with regard to the Pakistan demand, withheld any immediate promise of
his cooperation and watched what the Congress was going to do. When
the Congress finally refused to accept the Cripps offer, Jinnah rejected it,
too. Perhaps he did this with a sigh of relief, because he thus retained a free
hand to build up his bargaining position. This he did with great skill
during the last years of the war.
In 1944 he held a series of talks with Gandhi in which Gandhi
practically conceded the Pakistan demand, although insisting on a treaty to
be concluded before partition which would ensure that India and Pakistan
would stay together in a kind of confederation. Jinnah accepted the idea of
a treaty but said that it should be concluded after partition because only
truly autonomous partners could conclude a treaty on equal terms. Legally,
Jinnah’s point was well taken and Gandhi despaired of reaching an
agreement. The talks ended without a result; they also added to Jinnah’s
political stature. In reality, he was not much interested in these talks—
Britain rather than the Congress would concede to the Pakistan demand—
but he wished to project an image of a reasonable negotiator who would
never refuse to consider an honourable compromise.
The Simla Conference and its aftermathJinnah was put to a more severe test a year later when Viceroy Lord
Wavell convened a conference at Simla in the hope of getting Indian
leaders to agree on the formation of a national government now that the
war was almost over. Wavell was keen to get such a government installed
to tackle India’s immediate postwar problems. What Linlithgow had
failed to do at the time of the Cripps mission Wavell wanted to do now.
The Congress was ready to enter such a government and Jinnah was
again afraid of getting into the ‘second fiddle’ position without any
guarantee that the British were going to give him Pakistan in due course.
On the other hand, he could not afford to be unreasonable to begin with,
so he torpedoed the conference at the end by demanding that the Muslim
League should have the exclusive right to nominate all the Muslim
ministers of the proposed national government. The conference broke
down on this point. But Wavell made another attempt with the blessing
of the India Committee of the British war cabinet. He drafted a list of a
national government himself. This included no Congress Muslims; only
one Unionist Muslim of the Panjab; all other Muslims mentioned were
members of the Muslim League. Jinnah rejected this list, too, and as the
India Committee had authorised Wavell to show the list to Jinnah and to
nobody else, he could neither call Jinnah’s bluff nor publicise what had