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Unlock This CourseBy the summer of 1945 the war in Europe was over. The viceroy, Lord Wavell, wanted Indian leaders to share in governing India straight away, while a lasting settlement was worked out. On 14 June 1945 he announced his offer in a radio broadcast. The Congress leaders were let out of prison, and 21 Indian politicians were invited to meet him at Simla, the summer capital of the Raj in the hills of northern India.
Key terms:
Every member of the Executive Council would be Indian, except the viceroy and the commander of the army. Indians would run finance, the police and foreign affairs for the first time. There would be parity between Muslims and caste Hindus, with other seats for groups such as the Sikhs and the untouchables. The viceroy kept his veto but promised not to use it unreasonably.
The conference opened on 25 June. Both sides accepted the idea of the new council. The quarrel was over who chose its Muslim members. Jinnah demanded that the Muslim League alone should name every one of them. Congress refused. It said it spoke for Indians of all religions, and its own president, Maulana Azad, was a Muslim.
Jinnah's demand also shut out the Unionist Party, which governed the Punjab and was led by Muslims who did not belong to the League. Wavell tried a compromise. He drew up his own list, with four Muslims from the League and one from the Unionists. Jinnah turned it down. He would not even hand in a list of League names.
Congress was willing to go ahead. Wavell was not. He would not form a council without the League, so on 14 July 1945 he closed the conference and took the blame for the failure himself.
While the leaders argued at Simla, Britain voted in a general election. The results came out on 26 July 1945. The Labour Party won a landslide (a very large victory). Winston Churchill, who had always opposed self-government for India, was out. Clement Attlee became prime minister. He knew India well, as he had sat on the Simon Commission. He made Lord Pethick-Lawrence the minister for India.
Labour had backed Indian self-government for many years. Leading Labour politicians such as Sir Stafford Cripps were friendly with Nehru and other Congress leaders. For them the question was no longer whether Britain should leave India, but how and when.
Britain was nearly bankrupt and needed a huge loan from the USA, agreed in December 1945. Labour wanted to spend what money it had on rebuilding Britain. British soldiers wanted to come home. Holding India down by force was no longer possible.
Labour's attitude can be summed up in three points:
Congress was pleased by Labour's victory. Jinnah was worried. He believed that Labour favoured Congress, and this made him more determined to prove the League's strength. Labour moved quickly. In August 1945 it was announced that elections would be held in India that winter. On 19 September Wavell added that, after them, Indians would be asked to form a body to write a constitution.
Voting for the central assembly took place in December 1945, and for the provinces in early 1946. Remember, Muslims voted separately for their own seats, so the results would show who really spoke for them. The League fought on one issue. A vote for the League, it said, was a vote for Pakistan.
Congress won most of the open (non-Muslim) seats. It took 57 of the 102 elected seats in the central assembly and about 920 of the 1,585 seats in the provinces. It formed governments in eight provinces, including the mostly Muslim North-West Frontier Province.
The League won all 30 Muslim seats in the central assembly and about 425 of the 492 Muslim seats in the provinces. In 1937 it had won only about 110. It formed governments in Bengal and Sind. In the Punjab it became the largest party, but the Unionists, Congress and the Sikhs joined together to keep it out of power.
The elections mattered for three reasons. They proved Jinnah's claim that the League spoke for most of India's Muslims. They showed that Indian politics had split along religious lines, with the smaller parties squeezed out. And they left the British facing two strong parties with opposite aims, a united India or Pakistan. The Labour Government's answer was to send three ministers to India, as you will see in The Cabinet Mission and Direct Action.
Explain two effects of the Simla Conference (1945) on Indian politics. [8 marks]
One effect of the Simla Conference was that it made Jinnah and the Muslim League much stronger. At Simla, Jinnah demanded that the League alone should choose every Muslim member of the viceroy's Executive Council. When Congress refused, Wavell closed the conference on 14 July 1945 instead of forming a council without the League. This showed that no settlement could be made without Jinnah's agreement, so in effect he had gained a veto. As a result, Muslim politicians in other parties, such as the Unionists of the Punjab, began to move to the League, which went on to win all 30 Muslim seats in the central assembly in December 1945.
A second effect was that relations between Congress and the League grew worse. The Wavell Plan had offered the two parties the chance to govern India together on an all-Indian council. Because the talks broke down over who spoke for India's Muslims, that chance was lost and each side blamed the other. Congress was angry that Wavell had let the League block a plan Congress had accepted. This led both parties to treat the elections of 1945-46 as a contest to prove their claims, with the League campaigning for Pakistan, so agreement on a united India became harder to reach.
What lifts it to the top level: there are two separate effects, each backed by precise facts (names, dates, numbers), and each paragraph shows how the conference led to the effect instead of just describing what happened at Simla.
One effect alone cannot score more than 4 of the 8 marks, however well you explain it. Write two paragraphs, and do not spend them retelling the Wavell Plan. Use link words such as 'this showed' and 'as a result' to tie what happened at Simla to what changed afterwards.