Another road to midnight: The India League and the anticolonial idea of a Constituent Assembly 1932–47

Abstract This article argues that the India League’s 1942–47 anticolonial campaign for a Constituent Assembly for India played a constitutive role in Indian independence. It examines the Constituent Assembly not as an institution that followed the decision to offer India independence but as an anticolonial idea that helped produce it. A necessary part of this was the dissolution of the ‘minority veto’ placed on Indian constitutional progress, mainly by the Conservative Party. It traces the transmission of the Constituent Assembly idea through the India League’s transnational networks until it became a Congress demand in India and a Labour Party initiative in Britain, leading to the Cripps Mission and the policy of the 1945 Labour government. In doing so this article challenges the historiography of geopolitical decolonization by finding Indian independence to be the product of an anticolonial campaign that operated through solidarity and elective affinities with the global left. This was contested by both the Conservative Party and the Muslim League, and the article also examines how Muslim League opposition to being ‘minoritized’ within the Constituent Assembly contributed to the Partition of India.