Why did Congress not accept the offer of the Muslim League to form a joint government in the United Province in the 1937  provincial elections?

A- Congress had an absolute majority in the province.

B- Nehru and Jinnah were not getting along well.

C- The local people did not want Congress to accept the offer.

D- League tended to support landlordism, which the Congress wished to abolish,

A and D

The Muslim League also fared poorly, polling only 4.4 per cent of the total Muslim vote cast in this election. The League failed to win a single seat in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and could capture only two out of 84 reserved constituencies in Punjab and three out of 33 in Sind. In the United Provinces, the Muslim League wanted to form a joint government with Congress. The Congress had won an absolute majority in the province, so it rejected the offer.

The Congress ministries also contributed to the widening rift. In the United Provinces, the party had rejected the Muslim League proposal for a coalition government partly because the League tended to support landlordism, which the Congress wished to abolish, although the party had not yet taken any concrete steps in that direction. Nor did Congress achieve any substantial gains in the “Muslim mass contact” programme it launched. In the end, the secular and radical rhetoric of the Congress merely alarmed conservative Muslims and the Muslim landed elite, without winning over the Muslim masses.