What is the Indian Muslim League ?

After the independence of India and Pakistan, the League split up into several components. The major part went to Pakistan and became the Muslim League there. It also continued as a minor party in India, especially in Kerala, where it is often in government within a coalition with others.

In Pakistan, the League formed the country's first government, but disintegrated into a number of factions during the 1950s after an army coup by General Ayub Khan. One or more factions of the Muslim League have been in power in most of the civilian governments of Pakistan since 1947.

In Bangladesh, the party was revived in 1976 and won 14 seats in 1979 parliamentary election. Its importance has decreased since then and it no longer holds any major or significant role.

Muslims and Hindus that lived in the same villages generally got along fine until their passions were stirred by nationalist and separatist politicians. One Muslim villager told TIME, "Many of our Hindu friends would join us in [our] processions. There was no trouble then. The only thing was at school Hindus and Muslims drank from different taps."

Muslims were generally poorer than Hindus, who regarded Muslims as members of separate inferior quasi-caste. The purity requirements of Hinduism discouraged Hindus from marrying, sharing meals and even drinking the same water as Muslims. In railway stations, there were separate drinking-water pitchers labeled "Hindu water" and "Muslim water." "Muslims lived under double colonial rule—British colonialism and Hindu colonialism," a Pakistani official told Newsweek. "A Muslim could start a race riot merely by touching the Hindu water pitcher."

The British fanned the divisions between the two groups as part of their divide-and-rule policy. Many historians argue that partition of India and Pakistan, and the violence that followed it, was a direct result of the divide-and-rule separatism. Others have argued the difference ran deep. "We are different," the founder of Pakistan Mohammed Ali Jinnah once said. "Our names, our clothes, our foods...We challenge each other at every point of the compass."

There were language riots, caste riots and riots between Hindus and Muslims. Describing life before partition, one Pakistani man told National Geographic, "There was a lot of fighting in India then. People would hit you if they found out you were a Muslim. When Pakistan was created, Muslims were overjoyed to have a place whey the could go, where people wouldn't hurt them just because of who they were. We only wanted to be free, and now, Praise Be to Allah, we have our freedom."

Gandhi greatly abhorred Hindu-Muslim hatred. He went on several fasts to stop violence between the two groups. He called the division of India and Pakistan a "vivisection of the motherland" and once said, "You will have to divide my body before you divide India." Gandhi urged Muslims to join the Indian National Congress and even established relations with the Ottoman Empire, whose Caliph was the protectors of Islam’s holy sites.

The east Indian state of Bengal divided into the predominately Muslim eastern and predominately Hindu western provinces in 1905, but after a period of anarchy and violence, it was reunited in 1911 at the request of Hindus. Muslims were angered by this. Muslims were also repulsed by perceived aggressions towards Muslims by Europeans in Libya, Morocco, Persia and Turkey.

the governor-general (1899-1905), ordered the partition of Bengal in 1905. He wanted to improve administrative efficiency in that huge and populous region, where the Bengali Hindu intelligentsia exerted considerable influence on local and national politics. The partition created two provinces: Eastern Bengal and Assam, with its capital at Dhaka (then spelled Dacca), and West Bengal, with its capital at Calcutta (which also served as the capital of British India). An ill-conceived and hastily implemented action, the partition outraged Bengalis.

In 1906 a Muslim deputation met with the viceroy, Gilbert John Elliot (1905-10), seeking concessions from the impending constitutional reforms, including special considerations in government service and electorates. The All-India Muslim League was founded the same year to promote loyalty to the British and to advance Muslim political rights, which the British recognized by increasing the number of elective offices reserved for Muslims in the India Councils Act of 1909. The Muslim League insisted on its separateness from the Hindu-dominated Congress, as the voice of a "nation within a nation."

Muslim League, original name All India Muslim League, political group that led the movement calling for a separate Muslim nation to be created at the time of the partition of British India (1947).

In what the British saw as an additional goodwill gesture, in 1911 King-Emperor George (1910-36) visited India for a durbar (a traditional court held for subjects to express fealty to their ruler), during which he announced the reversal of the partition of Bengal and the transfer of the capital from Calcutta to a newly planned city to be built immediately south of Delhi, which became New Delhi.

The Muslim League was founded in 1906 to safeguard the rights of Indian Muslims.

At first the league was encouraged by the British and was generally favourable to their rule, but the organization adopted self-government for India as its goal in 1913.

The Muslim League was organized in 1906 to defend the interests of Muslims against the Hindu majority. Muslims did not believe the National Congress represented their interests. The Muslim League sought separate communal representation. The India Councils Act of 1909 addressed Muslim grievances that they were being discriminated against by granting them their own representatives to the Legislative Council. This move was seen by some historians as the first step in the creation of Pakistan.

For several decades the league and its leaders, notably Mohammed Ali Jinnah, called for Hindu-Muslim unity in a united and independent India.

In 1916 the Muslim League and the National Congress signed the Lucknow Pact which recognized a separate Muslim electorate in return for support ousting the British. After Gandhi became head of the National Congress in 1920 there were brief periods of cooperation between the Muslim League and the primarily-Hindu National Congress but the relationship fell apart in the mid-1920s, because the Muslims were fearful of the Hindu majority. Many Muslims didn't embrace Gandhi's non-violent tactics of achieving independence and Hindus rejected Muslim demands for a third of the seats in a future parliament.

Muslims, loyalty to the British crown seemed preferable to cooperation with Congress leaders. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-98) launched a movement for Muslim regeneration that culminated in the founding in 1875 of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh (renamed Aligarh Muslim University in 1921). Its objective was to educate wealthy students by emphasizing the compatibility of Islam with modern Western knowledge.

The Congress neither acknowledged the Muslim League's performance, albeit poor, in the 1937 elections nor deigned to form a coalition government with the League, a situation that led to the collapse of negotiations and mutual trust between the leaders. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a Western-educated Muslim lawyer, took over the presidency of the moribund Muslim League and galvanized it into a national force under the battle cry of "Islam in danger." [Source: Library of Congress]

It was not until 1940 that the league called for the formation of a Muslim state that would be separate from the projected independent country of India.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1875-1948) was the father of Pakistan and the man often credited with making the idea of a separate Muslim state a reality, an idea he initially opposed. Jinnah doubted the motives of Gandhi and Nehru and accused them of practicing Hindu chauvinism.

The league wanted a separate nation for India’s Muslims because it feared that an independent India would be dominated by Hindus.

As a young barrister in London and Bombay, Jinnah was tall and handsome. He dressed in perfectly-tailored English suits and dazzled courtroom audiences with his extraordinary, English-accented voice. As an old man, Jinnah was pencil thin. He was 1.9 meters-tall but weighed only 54 kilograms, the result of a life-long battle with tuberculosis that slowly wasted him away. He wore a monocle and traditional Muslim clothes but retained his persuasive, intelligent style of speaking and was described as "cool, austere, polite to a fault."

Jinnah and the Muslim League led the struggle for the partition of British India into separate Hindu and Muslim states, and after the formation of Pakistan in 1947 the league became Pakistan’s dominant political party. In that year it was renamed the All Pakistan Muslim League.