ABSTRACT
Until the fateful parting of ways signalled by Mohammad Ali Jinnah’scall to Muslims to observe a ‘Day of Deliverance’ upon the resignationof Congress ministries, an amicable settlement between the All-India Muslim League and the Indian National Congress was not beyond the pale of possibility. Writing to Jinnah on 18 October 1939, Jawaharlal Nehru thought it was ‘a tragedy that the Hindu-Muslim problem’ had ‘not so far been settled in a friendly way…. [f]or after all, the actual matters in dispute should be, and indeed are, easily capable of adjustment’. He spent the next decade turning what should have been a simple matter to resolve into one extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, of resolution. Already in 1939, Nehru was ‘terribly distressed’ and ‘ashamed of [him]self’ that he had ‘not been able to contribute anything substantial’ to the solution of the Hindu-Muslim problem. ‘I must confess to you,’ he wrote, ‘that in this matter I have lost confidence in myself, though I am not usually given that way.’ Developments in India during the past few years had left him feeling like ‘an outsider…alien in spirit’.1
