Free The Great Partition by Yasmin Khan Page B

resources, but also to express a much more amorphous and nebulous attachment to the idea of ‘Indian freedom’ or ‘Pakistan’. For would-be politicians, appealing to Pakistan, or opposing it tooth and nail, seemed an attractive short cut to winning votes.
    The clear connection between the outcome of the election and the likely future shape of the country gave the campaigns an intensely bitter flavour. A.K. Azad observed that it was ‘hardly an election in the normally understood meaning of the term’. 27 The electorate was tiny, there was widespread malpractice and fights broke out in constituencies as the election evolved into a plebiscite in favour of, or against, the idea of Pakistan. The League was battling for its life, determined to build a Muslim consensus around the Pakistan demand and to win the strongest possible hand in the constitutional negotiations with the British, which were sure to follow. Nor was the Congress manifesto, which underlined its commitment to secularism, economic development and land reforms, uppermost in the minds of Congress workers whose first duty was to prove that the Congress had universal support and that the population was, therefore, anti-Pakistan.
    The central committee of the League studiously avoided publishing a manifesto altogether, and pinned their whole campaign to the demand for Pakistan. As Jinnah clarified to an audience in the North West Frontier Province, this was a winner-takes-all game, a zero sum equation: every vote cast in favour of the League was a vote in favour of Pakistan, every vote against would help create Hindu Raj. ‘That is the only choice and the only issue before us.’ 28 If this was a referendum, though, the meaning of the question being asked was obscure and could be interpreted in dramatically different ways. With the stakes so high and the number of voters so low, winning seats by fair means or foul was the ultimate end of every party and those who could not vote still participated in the street theatre of the electoral show.
    Never before had Indian politicians needed to demonstrate and prove quite so visibly that they had mass support and backing. Ends began to justify means as internal consistency in speech and thought became dispensable. The words ‘Pakistan’ and ‘
swaraj
’, which were already barely defined, began to be used with deliberate impreciseness. People did not just support a political party by this stage – they felt its importance was integral to their sense of self. As the battle to claim the future shape of the Indian state intensified in 1946, politicians wilfully muddied the meanings of freedom and outdid each other in their promises at mass election rallies as they attempted to secure proof of their popularity, to demonstrate their status to the British government, to achieve the right to represent the populace.
    It is little wonder that the exaggerated and utopian strand in political rhetoric might be taken at face value; Nehru gave one speech at Sukkur in Sind to a crowd estimated to be 50,000 strong in which he said that, in the free India, ‘everybody would be provided with sufficient food, education and all the facilities including a house to live’ and that Pakistan was a ‘useless idea’ which meant ‘slavery forever’. 29 During the post-war Indian general election politicians roused their followers with the vocabulary of wartime and articulated their struggle in the global language of alliances and enemies, using the metaphors of battle and blood. ‘To vote for the Congress is tantamount to baring one's chest before bullets,’ Pandit Pant loftily declared at a public meeting. Jinnah made a direct comparison between his leadership and Churchill's, while Congressmen drew parallels between the Muslim League and the activities of the Nazis. 30 Similarly, a League activist, Zawwar Zaidi, a student who canvassed for the party, later recalled the way in which the idea of Pakistan was propagated during the