The electoral fortunes of 1937 were now significantly reversed. The Congress still carried a majority of the provinces. But except for the North-West Frontier Province, where the Congress won nineteen Muslim seats to the League’s seventeen, the League swept the reserved seats for Muslims across the board, even in provinces like Bombay and Madras which had seemed immune to the communal contagion. Whatever the explanation—and Nehru could have offered a few—there was no longer any escaping the reality that Jinnah and the Muslim League could now legitimately claim a popular mandate to speak for
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