ABSTRACT
Jinnah had his say in the midst of persistent heckling, but he was so angry and disgusted at the end of it all that he walked out of the Congress session in Nagpur with his wife and caught the first train to Bombay. Jinnah’s biographers have represented the Nagpur session of the Congress in December 1920 as the venue of a straight fight between Jinnah and Gandhi. Deeply embittered as he was by his humiliation at Nagpur and his utter isolation in nationalist politics in the beginning of 1921, Jinnah decided to put on a brave face. Many years later he compared politics to a game of chess. While the country was yet to recover from the shock of the revocation of civil disobedience, Gandhi’s arrest and trial, Jinnah was trying to form a new political party. Any hope he had of filling the political vacuum caused by Gandhi’s absence from the scene was not to be realized.
