In July 1937 Jinnah issued a statement deploring the Congress’ ‘mass contact’ policy with Muslims: ‘There is plenty of scope for Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to improve his own people, the Hindus,’ he declared. Nehru replied immediately: ‘Not being religiously or communally inclined, I venture to think of my people as the Indian people as a whole.’ Two months earlier he had confessed to the press: ‘Personally I find it difficult to think of any question on communal lines. I think on political and economic lines.’ In those fundamentally irreconcilable attitudes lay the seeds of a divide that would,
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