All India Muslim League

Founding and early years

The League was founded at a meeting in Dhaka in December 1906, convened in the aftermath of the 1905 partition of Bengal, which many Muslim leaders in eastern Bengal had welcomed as administratively favorable to them. Its founders, including the Nawab of Dhaka, Salimullah, and the Aga Khan, sought a platform to represent Muslim interests separately from the Indian National Congress, which they regarded as dominated by Hindu concerns. In 1909, the League's lobbying contributed to the Morley-Minto Reforms establishing separate electorates for Muslims in provincial and central legislative councils, a structure that shaped Indian electoral politics until independence.

For much of its first three decades the League remained a loosely organized body of landed and professional elites with limited mass following, often eclipsed by the Congress and, in some periods, cooperating with it. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who joined the League in 1913 while still a member of the Congress, worked in these years toward Hindu-Muslim unity, notably through the 1916 Lucknow Pact between the two organizations.

Jinnah's leadership and the demand for Pakistan

Jinnah's relationship with the Congress deteriorated over the 1920s and 1930s amid disputes over communal representation and, particularly, the Congress's rejection of League participation in provincial ministries after the 1937 elections held under the Government of India Act 1935 — an episode the League cited as evidence that Congress rule would marginalize Muslims. Jinnah rebuilt the League as a mass organization through the late 1930s, and at its Lahore session in March 1940 the League adopted the Lahore Resolution, calling for autonomous and sovereign Muslim-majority states in the northwest and east of India — the basis of what came to be called the Pakistan demand, articulated as the "two-nation theory."

Role in partition

The League's position hardened through the Second World War and the failed Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946, and its Direct Action Day of 16 August 1946 was followed by serious communal violence in Calcutta and elsewhere. As negotiations for the transfer of power proceeded in 1946-47, the League under Jinnah rejected a unified, federal India and pressed for partition, which the British government and the Congress leadership eventually accepted under the Mountbatten Plan of June 1947. Pakistan came into existence on 14 August 1947, with Jinnah as its first Governor-General, and the League subsequently became the ruling party of the new state, though it fractured into separate organizations in India and Pakistan after partition.