An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

Wavell convened a conference in Simla from late June 1945, which the viceroy allowed Jinnah to wreck. In this atmosphere of frustration and despair, the British called elections in India at the end of 1945, for seats in the central and provincial assemblies. The Congress was woefully unequipped to contest them. Its blunder in surrendering the reins of power in 1939 and then losing its leadership and cadres to prison from 1942 meant that it went into the campaign tired, dispirited and ill-organized. The League, on the other hand, had flourished during the war; its political machinery was well oiled with patronage and pelf, while the Congress’s was rusty from disuse. 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 the majority of India’s Muslims.