Independence
In the aftermath of the failure of the Cripps mission, Gandhi's decision to embark on mass civil disobedience created a painful dilemma for Nehru, but he fell in line with the decision of the party. The government unleashed a massive repression. All Congress leaders, including Gandhi and Nehru, and more than 60,000 adherents of the party were imprisoned. This was Nehru's longest spell in jail; it was also his last. He was released in 1945, just in time to attend the abortive Simla conference convened by the viceroy, Lord Wavell, to break the political deadlock. Soon after, the Labour Government was voted into power in Britain, and it decided to concede self-government to India. Nehru played a prominent role in this conference as well as in the subsequent negotiations with the Cabinet mission in 1946, and later with Lord Mountbatten, for transfer of power from British to Indian hands. In these negotiations the most vexed question was the position of the Muslim community in India after the withdrawal of the British power.
Nehru was a rationalist and a humanist and was remarkably free from religious passions and prejudices. The communalism of India, he told Lord Lothian, a British Liberal politician, in 1936, "is essentially political, economic and middle class." He had observed upper-class politicians, both Hindu and Muslim, who had little contact with the masses, and were wrangling endlessly over the distribution of seats in legislatures and jobs under the government. The Muslim League had been the principal proponent of Muslim separatism since the beginning of the twentieth century. It was founded in 1906 with a two-fold program: loyalty to the British Raj, and provision of safeguards for Muslims against a Hindu majority in a future constitution. The League had met with an electoral disaster in 1937. But nine years later, in the general election of 1946, it won a landslide victory under the leadership of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the president of the All-India Muslim League. He owed his victory to his undoubted tactical and polemical skills, but he was also able to exploit the antagonism between the Congress and the British government that prevailed throughout World War II. The vision he held forth of a separate Muslim state, reminiscent of the glory of the Mughal empire, struck the imagination of his coreligionists. Nehru has been blamed for underrating Jinnah, but in retrospect, it seems it was beyond the power of Nehru and the Congress Party to stem the tide of Muslim separatism, which had been rising since the beginning of the twentieth century, and which took the form of secession and nationalism in the 1940s. The stand taken by Nehru, and indeed by the Congress leadership, was that religion was not a satisfactory basis for nationality, and that the best course for multiracial and multireligious countries was to seek a solution within the framework of a federal constitution, as the United States and Canada had done. Such a proposition was, however, not acceptable to the leaders of the Muslim League; its truth was to dawn upon them much later, in 1971, after the breakup of Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh.
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