Muslim League Founded
The All-India Muslim League was founded in December 1906 in Dhaka, then in British-ruled Bengal, as a political organization meant to represent the interests of India's Muslims. It began as a modest body of elites, but over the next four decades it grew into a mass movement, and under its leadership the demand for a separate Muslim homeland ultimately led to the creation of Pakistan in 1947.
The background lay in the politics of late colonial India. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, claimed to speak for all Indians, but many Muslim leaders worried that a system of representative government based on numbers would leave a minority community, roughly a fifth to a quarter of the population, permanently outvoted. Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the educationalist behind the Aligarh movement, had earlier urged Muslims to focus on modern education and to stay aloof from Congress. The partition of Bengal in 1905, which created a province with a Muslim majority in the east, also heightened political awareness and divided opinion along communal lines.
The immediate catalyst came in 1906, when a delegation of Muslim notables, often called the Simla Deputation and associated with the Aga Khan and the Nawab of Dhaka, Khwaja Salimullah, petitioned the Viceroy, Lord Minto. They asked for separate representation and weightage in any expanded legislative councils. Soon afterward, at an educational conference in Dhaka, the Muslim League was formally launched. Its early aims emphasized loyalty to the British Crown, protection of Muslim political rights, and cooperation with other communities only where compatible with these goals. Historians debate how far British officials encouraged the effort as a counterweight to Congress; most see both official sympathy and genuine Muslim concerns at work.
The Indian Councils Act of 1909, the Morley-Minto reforms, introduced separate electorates for Muslims, a major early success for the League and a lasting source of controversy. In the following years the organization sometimes cooperated with Congress, most notably in the Lucknow Pact of 1916, which Muhammad Ali Jinnah helped broker. Relations later soured, and the League remained relatively weak in the 1920s and 1930s.
Its fortunes changed after the 1937 provincial elections, which were poor for the League, and Congress's subsequent rule in several provinces. Under Jinnah's leadership, the League adopted the Lahore Resolution in 1940, calling for Muslim-majority areas to be grouped as independent states. Its strong showing in the 1945-46 elections among Muslim voters strengthened its claim to speak for them. Independence and partition in August 1947 created Pakistan, accompanied by mass migration and terrible violence.
The League's legacy remains contested. In Pakistan it is remembered as the vehicle of national creation, while others stress the human cost of partition and the role of colonial policy in hardening communal divisions.