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After the 1937 elections, where it had contested very few Muslim seats and had been routed even in these, the Congress still continued to see itself as a national party because it now switched emphasis on to its assumed ‘secularism’, this then became a substitute for Muslim support. This was really spurious reasoning, simply because the party called itself secular, therefore, it was national, and because of this self-adopted nomenclature of national it was automatically representative of all Indians, regardless of what the election results demonstrated does not carry any conviction. This idea of ‘secularism’, just the idea not the fact, thereafter became more important than any empirical reality. This illusionist tendency had been foreshadowed in Jawaharlal Nehru’s own address to the Faizpur Congress, where he had made his famous assertion that there were only two forces in the country, the Congress representing ‘nationalism’ and the British representing ‘imperialism’. A few months later, with obvious reference to Jinnah’s assertion that the party of the Muslims was the third force, Nehru wrote that third parties were unimportant because the Congress was charged with a ‘historic destiny’; but that self assumed ‘destiny’ was certainly not to lead the country down the path of vivisection.

This self-adopted conviction about the Congress being secular, allowed Nehru to interpret the party’s disastrous performance in the Muslim constituencies of UP as actually a hopeful augury. ‘Though the Muslim nominees of the Congress have been defeated in the UP, I refuse to believe that the Congress has no hold on the Muslim masses’, and continuing in the same vein added ‘… our very failure on this occasion has demonstrated that success is easily in our grasp and (that) the Muslim masses are increasingly (?) turning to the Congress.’ According to Nehru the Congress had failed with the Muslims because it had failed to work amongst them. This was perhaps true, also that the League had hardly any organisational structure (a valid observation) but the League did have a base even if that was totally sectarian and was dominated by provincial interests.

Nehru believed that the Muslims in the UP were in a ferment. They were fed up with ineffectual communal leadership. They wished to climb out of the communal rut and to line up with the forces of freedom and progress. The elections had ‘… gone some way to lay the ghost of communalism’. In so far as a section of the Muslims was alienated from the Congress, it was the urban as opposed to the rural Muslims. ‘I am sure that when the next opportunity comes we shall not lose a single Muslim seat in the rural areas though I am not quite certain about the urban seats’. Given this kind of optimistic unreality for an assessment of the 1937 elections it is not at all surprising that Nehru was so sanguine about the Congress taking office in the UP without the Muslim League.

The second feature of the Congress’ political ideology allowing it to ignore this demonstrated lack of support with the Muslim electorate was its commitment to a ‘Congress kind’ of Westminster model of majoritarian democracy, a simple majority in the legislature being enough to form the government, the arithmetic constituting the only legitimacy, but in India a complex social arithmetic also operated, and it did so simultaneously. This notion blinded Nehru and many other Congressmen to the fact that under the system of separate electorates (and the Congress had agreed to play the electoral game according to the rules of the 1935 constitution), a government (any), entirely majoritarian and not reasonably inclusive of minorities, (in this instance, Muslim MLAs) would be seen as an unrepresentative government. There were others, of course, within the Congress, and there were (are still) many of this ilk, for whom this political model was a means to the end of showing the Muslim minority in the UP its ‘place’.

When the Congress formed a government with almost all the Muslim MLAs sitting on the Opposition benches, non-Congress Muslims were suddenly faced with this stark reality of near total political powerlessness. It was brought home to them, like a bolt of lightning, that even if the Congress did not win a single Muslim seat, as had happened now, (in the 1937 elections) so long as it won an absolute majority in the House, on the strength of the general (Hindu) seats, it could and would form a government entirely on its own, unless Muslim politicians altogether surrendered their separate political identity, in which case they would hardly be elected in the first place. Yet again this carried a very serious and damaging message for the future of a united India: that in a majoritarian minded, Congress ruled India there was no place for the Muslims, indeed, for any political minority, unless the Congress found itself in a corner, then it would ally with anyone.

Excerpted from Page 230-232 of ‘Jinnah: India-Partition Independence’ by Jaswant Singh