Appeasement” was originally the term used by the HMS to describe Mahatma Gandhi’s policy of repeated unilateral concessions to the Muslim League in the hope of dissuading it from pursuing its Pakistan project. The implied reference to Neville Chamberlain’s policy of “appeasement” vis-à-vis Adolf Hitler is deliberate: at the time, the Muslim League openly compared its own position (that Muslims were part of the Muslim commonwealth and not of India, and that they should politically accede to the former and separate from the latter) with that of the Sudeten Germans who were “liberated” from
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