wordpress wp_query pagination not working

Question

Here's my code on index.php of the theme. I am using Twenty Twenty-One theme . I have 16 posts in total. I want to show 2 posts per page with pagination but this code returns only first 2 pages in pagination. It doesn't go to page/3, page/4 etc.

In WP dashboard->settings->Reading->Blog pages show at most is set to : 10 posts.
Your homepage displays is set to : Your latest posts

I want to know what's wrong in the code? Why this code is not working? any help will be appreciated.

get_header();

$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1; 
$the_query = new WP_Query('posts_per_page=2&paged=' . $paged );

if ( $the_query->have_posts() ) {

    
    while ( $the_query->have_posts() ) {
        $the_query->the_post();

        the_title(); // post Title
    }

    
    twenty_twenty_one_the_posts_navigation();
    
    wp_reset_postdata();

} else {

    echo 'now posts found';

}

get_footer();

Answer 1

If you are using default index.php and want 2 post per page then you can easily do with admin setting 2 instead of 10 which you already know. I also checked and your code is almost fine and seems working fine for me as well as, Please debugging that with other code and other things