2 - Jinnah and the League's search for survival

Summary

Section 1

Before the 1937 elections Jinnah's plan had been to claim for the League the undisputed spokesmanship of Muslims at the all-India level. This plan required the Muslim-majority provinces to come under the League's banner and Muslims in provinces where they were in a minority to vote solidly for the League. If he had won this mandate from Muslim voters, Jinnah might have been able to offer Congress something worth having: at the centre, support from Muslim provinces for a combined assault upon the federal provisions of the 1935 Act and, in the minority provinces, solid League backing which might have tipped the balance against the old guard upon whom the British depended and have brought into office coalition Congress–League ministries.

But for Jinnah the results of the 1937 elections proved another setback in a career marked more by snakes than by ladders. In the Punjab, the Unionists swept the board; in Bengal, Jinnah and the League had to accept a coalition led by Huq who did not acknowledge their writ; in Sind they faced an independent ministry; and in the N.W.F.P., where almost the entire population was Muslim, the worst humiliation of all, a Congress ministry. In each of the majority provinces, Jinnah's strategy had been repudiated by the voters' choice.