Free The Great Partition by Yasmin Khan Page A

through British India; this was the first outlet for popular politics sanctioned by the British for almost a decade. All parties accelerated their fund-raising and within days election songs, poetry and campaign propaganda filled the newspapers and the city streets.
    While the Congress claimed to speak for all Indians, irrespective of religion, the League claimed to be the mouthpiece of all Muslims. Neither would budge on this fundamental issue. Only a few far-sighted individuals warned of the dangers written on the wall, of the pressing need to address the fractured politics of Hindu and Muslim political communities. The Communist Party of India had built a realistic acknowledgement of Pakistan's popularity into its policy-making, by acknowledging the Muslim right to self-determination in 1942, but the CPI was sidelined from mainstream Congress politics and left-leaning Congressmen were marginalised from the inner workings of the Congress Party by 1945. 24 None of the leading political thinkers in Congress were incorporating a national division into their thinking. Instead, the parties embarked on a concerted bid to rally supporters across the country, by welding economic concerns with religious and emotive symbols into a broad-based, popular appeal.
    A flurry of marching songs and poems rang out throughout the country. Printing presses worked overtime producing thin sheets of party information. Party workers pasted up posters and flyers on city walls and telegraph poles. ‘The land and nation are our bread and butter,’ Muslim Leaguers sang out as they paraded in North India with their distinctive green and white flags. ‘But ploughing the nation yields the best crop/ Come to the league, overwhelm all others/ Your people are in anguish/ It's voting day: let's march/ let's march in step,
Mukhiaji
[chief]!’ 25
    ‘Red box for the Congress, cast your vote in the red box of the Congress!’ called out a Congress election flyer. ‘Gandhiji and Jawaharlal Nehru are awakening us/
Kisan
! Be awake and know the condition of our country/ There is no food, we can't get cloth/ No oil, it's dark in our house/ All things are controlled [i.e. rationed]/ But sometimes we don't get cloth to put round the dead body/ Vote for the Congress and win our own rule/ Then our country will be happy,
Kisan
!’ 26
    These were remarkably similar appeals based on economic hardship and brutal social realities. Before long, though, economic issues were supplanted by a more trenchant issue. The campaigning focal point quickly emerged as Pakistan. Swiftly it became the dominant election issue, and a deadly wedge was driven between the Congress and the League as both parties dug their heels in more defiantly and uncompromisingly. Pakistan was becoming a black and white issue.
    Indian leaders had demanded the election, although some criticised the rapidity with which it was thrust upon them, and embraced the opportunity to display their popular power. It was most useful to the British government, which needed to rubber-stamp any future constitutional settlement. This imperative – the need to absolutely ascertain ‘Indian will’ – meant that the election result had monumental implications that outlived the temporary formation of governments. It was a peculiar mixture of the lofty and the mundane; it was a nation-making referendum with international and permanent implications about state formation. Yet, it was also a vent for far more parochial concerns, at a time of dire economic hardship. Under the diarchal system, which pared off provincial governance, leaving the most critical aspects of the state – defence, budgets and foreign affairs – firmly in British clutches, the provincial legislators elected would be expected to take on jobs overseeing municipal water supply, the school curriculum and road-building. The voters had a double duty: to elect their local party man or woman who would fight their corner in the everyday struggles over