The road to Partition: two two-nation theories
The two-nation theory is remembered as the Muslim League's doctrine. The Hindu Mahasabha built its own version — earlier, and almost word for word.
The standard account of Partition runs through Jinnah and the All-India Muslim League: the Lahore Resolution of 1940, the demand for Pakistan, the Muslim mandate of 1946. That account is not wrong. It is incomplete.
The premise underneath the demand — that Hindus and Muslims were two distinct nations who could not share a single polity — was not a League monopoly. The Hindu Mahasabha, under V.D. Savarkar, articulated the same premise. Savarkar's Essentials of Hindutva (1923) defined the Hindu as a nation; his 1937 presidential address stated the two-nation idea explicitly, three years before the League made it official at Lahore. The two organisations were ideological mirror images — and in 1942, in three provinces, they shared power.
A caution this asset keeps in front of itself: the architecture was shared, but the outcome was asymmetric. The League won the Muslim mandate; the Mahasabha never won a Hindu one. That asymmetry is not a footnote — it is the difference between an idea and a movement, and it is laid out in the two charts at the end.
B.R. Ambedkar, surveying the field in 1940, noted that Savarkar and Jinnah — supposed opposites — were in complete agreement on the one question that mattered: both insisted India held two nations, one Hindu and one Muslim. They differed only on what to do about it.
— paraphrased from Ambedkar, Pakistan or the Partition of India, 1940
The explicit "two nations" framing appears on the Hindu side in 1937 — before the League's official resolution of 1940. The point is not who copied whom; it is that both wings of communal politics arrived at the same destination.
If the two theories were twins, the parties that carried them were not. The 1946 elections — fought on separate communal electorates — settled who actually spoke for whom. This is the integrity check on the whole argument: it refuses the lazy "both sides were equally to blame" reading.
Each communal party against its own community, 1946
Share of seats won within each electorate. Provincial assembly elections, early 1946.
Source: 1946 provincial election results (Wikipedia compilation of provincial returns). "General seats" = non-Muslim reserved + general; the Indian National Congress, not the Hindu Mahasabha, won roughly 90% of them.
Bengal, 1946: where the Hindu Mahasabha actually stood
Seats won in the 250-member Bengal Legislative Assembly. The Mahasabha governed Bengal in 1941–42; in a free vote four years later it took one seat.
Source: 1946 Bengal Legislative Assembly election returns. The Krishak Praja Party is Fazlul Huq's party — Huq moved the Lahore Resolution in 1940, then split with Jinnah.
Two conclusions survive the evidence. First: the intellectual case for partitioning India on religious lines was built by communal nationalists on both sides. The Hindu Mahasabha's two-nation theory was explicit by 1937, and in 1942 the Mahasabha and the League set aside their public hostility to govern together in Sindh and the North-West Frontier Province while Savarkar's lieutenant ran finance in Bengal.
Second, and against the first: the two were never equals in the country. The League turned its theory into a mass Muslim movement and proved it at the ballot box in 1946. The Mahasabha turned its theory into pamphlets and a single Bengal seat. Hindus voted for the Congress and a united India. The Mahasabha's contribution to Partition was to supply the logic — not the votes.
The popular memory keeps the first conclusion and erases the second's first half: it remembers the League's theory and forgets the Mahasabha's. The record holds both.