How did Gandhi try to stop the fighting between different religious groups within India?

Independence for India and Pakistan

In 1945, Muslims were about 25 percent of India's population. They were scattered across the sub-continent and were a majority of the population in India's Bengal and Punjab regions. India was a land of peoples of different ethnicity and fourteen official languages, with different dialects. The Muslims also varied in language and ethnicity, and they differed in economic class - from a wealthy few to merchants and urban and rural poor.

Muslims mixed little with Hindus, even if they were neighbors. Muslims were strict monotheists. They saw Hindus as idolators. Muslims had their Koran, and the Hindus had their ancient Bhagavad Gita. They did not study or eat together. They ate different foods, Muslims eating the meat of the cow, and Hindus worshipping cows. Muslims and Hindus did not intermarry. On trains, Muslim passengers drank "Muslim water" and Hindu passengers drank "Hindu water."

With India on its way to independence from British rule and on its way to establishing a constitution, many Muslims were afraid that Hindus would use their majority status to impose upon them laws that would deny them the freedom to pursue their way of life untainted by Hindu ways.

In the 1930s the leader of India's Congress Party, Jawaharlal Nehru, had wanted Muslims to join his party. The Congress Party won the elections that took place at the end of 1945. Nehru considered his party as representing the interests of Hindus and Muslims. but there was the Muslim League, which considered itself as representing Muslims. The Muslim League won all Muslim constituencies and 30 of the 102 seats in parliament.

The Muslim League leader was Muhammad Ali Jinnah. He had secularist leanings. He was a sophisticated man who disliked the kind of Hindu and Muslim small-mindedness that produced interfaith hostilities. Jinnah was an exceptionally shrewd and bright lawyer, a man who pressed hard for his goals, with the kind of skill in maneuver that Woodrow Wilson lacked at Paris.

In 1946, the British tried to facilitate an agreement between the Congress Party and the Muslim League - a basic plan preliminary to the creation of a constitution. There were those who believed that what the world needed was more integration rather than segregation. A greater integration was coming in Europe with a treaty for a European Economic Community, the forerunner of the European Union. And integration rather than segregation was to become a big issue in the United States. But it was segregation that was about to be adopted on the Indian sub-continent. Muslims wanted power divided by geography and by religious affiliation.

How to give sovereignty to Muslims living in communities scattered across the sub-continent was a problem, and in the Punjab, where the Muslims were a majority, there was the problem of Hindu minorities. Muslims, moreover, wanted a place for themselves called pak-i-stan, pak meaning purity, stan meaning place. In rallying Muslim support for his political party, Muhammad Ali Jinnah claimed that Muslims could not progress in their various spheres of life without pakistan. It was impossible, he claimed, "to live under Congress authority on account of acts of injustices." Muslims, he warned, would be "reduced to the status of Shudras [low castes]." He added that he would "never allow Muslims to be slaves of Hindus." Jinnah said that he wanted the Muslims of India to develop to the fullest of "our spiritual, cultural and economic life in consonance with our own ideals, and according to the genius of our own people."