Number of words: 199

The total immobilisation of the Congress leadership, by being jailed and their consequent political subjection for three years, without doubt affected the functioning of the Congress party during that period, throughout the country, but much more significantly it also greatly distorted the future course of India’s politics, contributing markedly to enhancing Jinnah’s unreal sense of the relative political and social importance of the League. This illusory ‘success’ had another consequence: it ensured that claims for a separate and sovereign ‘Muslim nation’ could now not be lightly brushed aside. However, once the constitutional dialogue was reopened by the Labour’s Cabinet Mission in 1946, the League’s exaggerated demands did get exposed, for their claims of a separate land were found to be sustainable in only the Muslim majority areas of the two largest Muslim majority provinces of undivided India, Punjab and Bengal. That being so an eventual partition of these two provinces, (Bengal and Punjab) also became the logical and inevitable consequence of this arrival of the League as a Muslim party. This was that unreal political world of the 1940s, particularly so after the failure of the Cripps mission.

Excerpted from Page 350-351 of ‘Jinnah: India-Partition Independence’ by Jaswant Singh