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This device of the communal electorates served its purpose so well, in the manner devised that a decade later we find a successor secretary of state for India, Montagu, and the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, placing on record their observation: ‘Division by creeds and classes means the creation of political camps organised against each other, and teaches men to think as partisans and not as citizens… We regard any system of communal electorates, therefore, as a very serious hindrance to the development of the self-governing principle’. The authors of the Montford scheme of Reforms then add: ‘That the principle works so well that once it has been fully established, it so entrenches communalism that one could hardly then abandon the principle even if one wished to do so’. And thus the system of communal franchise got embedded via the Montford Reforms. Lord Olivier, secretary of state for India in the Labour Government under Ramsay MacDonald, admitted it in as many words: ‘No-one with any close acquaintance of Indian affairs will be prepared to deny that on the whole there is a predominant bias in British officialdom in India in favour of the Muslim community, partly on the ground of closer sympathy but more largely as a make-weight against Hindu nationalism’.

Excerpted from Page 51 of ‘Jinnah: India-Partition Independence’ by Jaswant Singh