As per the Government of India Act 1935, provincial elections were held in 11 provinces, including Madras, Bihar, Orissa, Sindh, Bengal, Punjab and the North West Frontier Province.
The three main contenders in the election were the Indian National Congress, the All India Muslim League and the Unionist Party. Jawaharlal Nehru was the leader of the Congress at the time and threw himself wholeheartedly into the election campaign. He covered around 80,000 km across the length and breadth of India, through cities and villages, jungles, deserts and plains. Over 10 million people came to hear him and his popularity grew enormously.
His campaign centred around the message that all Indians were part of the fight for freedom and should rally behind the Congress to fight poverty, unemployment and all forms of degradation. It was a message that ordinary people could understand and respond to and when the time came to vote, they swept his party to an overwhelming victory.
The Congress won 758 out of 1500 seats and went on to form 7 provincial governments. The Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, won 109 seats, and the Unionist Party, led by Sikandar Hayat Khan, won 101 seats.
Established in 1906, the Muslim League lacked popular appeal and received only five per cent of the total number of votes cast. These results, Jawaharlal Nehru pointed out, justified the Congress’s claim of representing all Indians. But this claim led Nehru into making one of his most serious errors of judgement and was a catalyst to the rise of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
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