Important events were taking shapes for India. The Congress party leaders were making preparations to take part in the general elections the government was planning as part of the implementation of the new constitution of India. 

Pandit Nehru was the president of the Congress for the year (1936). He had spent the previous year in Europe where he took his wife for medical treatment. This gave him a good opportunity to observe the happening in Europe and he found that the Western world is moving towards a great war and that this would have great impact on Indian future. 

The leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League were engaged in vehement debates in that the elections were round the corner. Gandhi kept himself aloof from all this. 

A foreign news correspondent asked Gandhi about the propriety in his keeping himself away in a hamlet when significant developments were taking shape in the cities. My neighbors are my countrymen and they are now helpless, and so I have to help them out and that is precisely my mission now, answered the Mahatma.

The Indian National Congress was going to participate in the ensuing elections as per the new constitution. But the party’s official manifesto maintained that a constitution for India could be made only by a body elected by the people of India and a foreign power has no authority to conduct an election or to make a constitution. 

At the same time, the party took part in the election only to fight the foreign power, the manifesto sought to clarify. The party did not believe that India could win its independence through a constituent assembly. The Muslim League also came up with a similar manifesto for the election.