... It is misnomer to call the Hindu-Muslim question a question of minorities. There are certainly minorities in India, and we must provide for them in such a way that they should feel that the future Government of India is not going to be a government only for one or two communities, but the government of all Indians irrespective of creed and caste. Nevertheless the one hitch in the way of the recognition of India's responsibility with a government of her own is the question not of these minorities but the deep- seated differences that divide the Hindus and the Muslims ... First of all the Mussalmans ruled over India from the  beginning of the 8th century to about the middle of the 19^th century in one way or another and in one region or another, which no other community can claim in the same manner ...Whether by conquest or by diplomacy the Muslim rule had passed finally from the hands of the Mussalmans to those of the British ... A very important result of that ... today is the feeling created by the record of Muslim rule for so long over so large a part of India. There is hardly a community that has not a real or an imaginary grievance against the old Muslim rulers and what we know of human nature elsewhere brings it home to us that even today there is a feeling of "revanche" harboured against the Mussalmans in the minds of some Hindus and some members of other communities ... It is with this feeling that we must deal, and against which we must provide safeguards for the future when framing a constitution for an ideal Indian Government in which all would feel safe, equal and free.

The next consideration is that the Mussalmans constitute not a minority in the sense in which the last war and its sequel has habituated us to consider European minorities. The League of Nations deals with minorities ...A community that in India alone must now be numbering more than 70 millions cannot easily be called a minority in the sense of Geneva minorities, and when it is remembered that this community numbers nearly 400 million of people throughout the world, whose ambition is to convert the rest of mankind to their way of thought and their outlook on life, and who claim and feel a unique brotherhood; to talk of it as a minority is a mere absurdity".

The real problem before us is to give full power to Mussalman in such provinces as those in which they are in a minority, whether small or large, and protection to them in such provinces as those in which they are in a minority, and in order to be absolutely fair to the Hindu community also, precisely the same thing must be done with the Hindus. What is needed is to give power to a community which is in a majority in any province ... and protection to it (in others) ... There are the four or five provinces where the Mussalmans should have precisely the same power as the Hindus have everywhere else, and they should have the same protection as the Mussalmans demand where they are in minorities.