Read the following excerpts and answer the questions that follow:

The Muslim League Resolution of 1940

The League’s resolution of 1940 demanded: That geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions, which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary, that the areas, in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in the north-western and eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute “Independent States” in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.

(i)    Explain the background of the League’s Resolution of 1940.

(ii)    Explain the provisions of the Resolution of 1940.

(iii)    What did Mohd. Iqbal say on this issue in his Presidential Address?

(iv)    Was the demand of the League reasonable? Comment.

(i) The background of Muslim League’s Resolution of 1940 was infact its wrongly created idea in leader's mind of this party that there are two nations in India the Hindus and the Muslims. The leaders of this party had wrong notions that after the Independence of the country the interest of minority Muslims will not safe and they will dominated by the majority of Hindus. This party wanted autonomy for Muslim majority areas of the subcontinent. In short, wether we accept or not but communalism or divide and rule policy of British Government was the root case in the background of the League Resolution of 1940.
(ii) The Muslim League Resolution of 1940 passed at Lahore demanded that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions, which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in the northwestern and eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute “Independent states”, in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.
(iii)    The Urdu poet Mohd. Iqbal in his presidential address to the Muslim League in 1930 stressed a need for a “North East Indian Muslim state”. Iqbal however was not visualizing the emergence of a new country in that speech but a re-organisation of Muslim-majority areas in north western India into an autonomous unit within a single, losely structured Indian federation.
(iv)    The demand of the Muslim League was not legally because majority of the people did not like the division of the country based an religion or two nations theory propagated later on by the Muslims League. Infact the Muslim have been living in this country in some parts even since 18^th century. India was ruled by Muslim Sultans or emperors and several times by Hindu kings or rulers. Most of them believe and favour secularism.

Even during the freedom struggle from the days of First War of Independence 1857 upto 1947 Hindus and Muslims both struggle for country's independence against the British rule.