The most important political development in the country between 1928 and 1940 was the widening of the gulf between the Congress and the Muslim League, resulting in the emergence of the demand for partition as embod­ied in the famous Lahore Resolution of the Muslim League in March 1940.

This dramatic change in Muslim politics was neither due to the ‘ever-present’ Hindu-Muslim antagonism nor was it an inevitable consequence of a separate Muslim nationalism. It was, as the author argues, the culmina­tion of a process that had begun in 1928 with the failure of the All Parties...