In 30 Seconds
Story
In the winter of 1936 and 1937, under the constitution it had sworn to wreck, the Indian National Congress went to the polls for the first time as a mass electoral machine, and the results redrew the political map of the subcontinent twice over. The provincial elections of 1937, held under the Government of India Act 1935 before an electorate five times enlarged, some thirty million voters where six had stood, gave the Congress a victory so sweeping that it settled who spoke for political India, and dealt the Muslim League a defeat so instructive that it remade, within three years, what the League would speak for. Both consequences framed the decade that ended at partition.
The Congress fought the elections against its own hesitations. The Lucknow session of 1936 under Jawaharlal Nehru, fresh from Europe and preaching socialism to the right wing’s alarm, had authorised contesting the elections while deferring the poisoned question of accepting office, and Nehru himself, the campaign’s tireless voice, travelling by his own estimate fifty thousand miles to speak before ten million people, framed the contest as a referendum against the Act, only two forces in India, he declared, the Congress and the government. The manifesto promised the peasant the earth’s practical items, revenue reduction, debt relief, tenancy reform, civil liberties, and the machine that Nagpur had built and the movements had tempered delivered. Of the eleven provinces the Congress won outright majorities in five, emerged the largest party in three more, and formed, after the wrangle the next chapter tells, ministries in seven, later eight, Madras, Bombay, the United and Central Provinces, Bihar, Orissa, the Frontier itself under Dr Khan Sahib, victory even where the franchise’s property bars had been expected to protect the loyalists, some seven hundred and sixteen of the general seats taken of the eleven hundred odd contested.
The League’s ledger taught the opposite lesson. Jinnah, returned from his London half retirement to rebuild the party for the elections, had offered the Muslim electorate a platform barely distinguishable from the Congress’s own and an understanding, never written, of post election partnership in the United Provinces, and the Muslim voters answered with indifference. The League took a hundred and nine of the four hundred and eighty two separate Muslim seats, under a quarter, won not one province, and was beaten in the Muslim majority lands by the parties of region and interest, Fazl ul Haq’s Krishak Praja peasants in Bengal, the Unionist landlord alliance of Sikander Hayat Khan in the Punjab, Sindh’s factions, the Frontier’s Khidmatgars. The Congress’s own Muslim seat performance was worse still, a handful of wins, a fact its critics never let rest. And in the victory’s aftermath came the decision over which historians still argue, the United Provinces Congress, holding an absolute majority, declined a coalition and offered the League’s men office only upon the dissolution of their party group into the Congress ranks, terms Jinnah’s biographers count the great insult and the Congress’s defenders call ordinary majority politics, and the League, locked out of power everywhere, drew Jinnah’s conclusion, that in the democracy of numbers the Muslims of India would be a permanent minority petitioning a permanent majority, and that the game itself, not the last hand, was the problem.
What followed flowed from both verdicts. The Congress, its legitimacy sealed by ballot as by struggle, entered the offices whose story comes next, learning government and its costs. The League, its parliamentary road closed, went to the country with the counter appeal the elections had taught, Islam in danger under Hindu raj, the mass contact campaigns and atrocity reports of the ministry years, Pirpur and its fellows, manufacturing the grievance file, membership swelling from thousands toward hundreds of thousands as the two year rebuild made Jinnah, by the Lahore session of 1940, the sole spokesman he had failed to be at the polls. The elections of 1937 were thus the freedom movement’s proudest arithmetic and its most expensive, the count that proved the Congress a nation’s party, and persuaded its rival to seek another nation to be the party of.
