ABSTRACT
The tone for the Congress’s election campaign in 1945-6 had been set by Nehru’s speeches, although the organisational work of selecting candidates was taken over by Vallabhbhai Patel. In the elections, 442 out of 509 of the Muslim seats in the provinces went to the Muslim League, as did all 30 of the reserved seats in the Central Assembly. These electoral gains took Congress by surprise, but gave the League greater political legitimacy at the negotiating table. The six provinces that Jinnah had demanded as ‘Pakistan’ had not all obliged by returning League governments: in the North-West Frontier Province and in Assam, Congress was in government. Campaigns had been opportunistic, and often cynical: the Congress had appropriated the INA issue; in Punjab, the League had campaigned on the basis of the distinction between din and duniya – religion and worldly things – with maulvis playing a strong role in their campaigns, threatening recalcitrant Muslim voters with excommunication or divine vengeance. In Bengal, by contrast, where a left wing of the League had working relationships with the CPI-run Kisan Sabhas, the rhetoric was far more economics and class based. Witnesses to the Tebhaga movement, an agrarian movement of sharecroppers demanding a fair share of the produce, and led by the Kisan Sabhas, reported the presence of Muslim peasants at meetings carrying Muslim League flags onto which had been painted the hammer and sickle.
