The Ail-India Muslim League was formed in Dhaka in 1906 as a political platform for Muslims in British India. Eventually, under the leadership of finnah, the Urdu-speaking elite-dominated Muslim League succeeded in carving out the Muslim homelands of East and West Pakistan. The following two articles, written by Lahore journalist Asha'ar Rehman, and Delhi-based writer Irfan Ahmed, look at how the party has fared in post-1947 Pakistan and India.
After 1947, the Muslim League in India was caught in the Shakespearean dilemma of to be or not to be. Following Gandhi´s assassination, Muslim members of the Constituent Assembly led by Nawab Ismail Khan decided to dissolve it. However, leaders from South India disagreed, and in 1948 with Mohammad Ismaile as president and Mahebob Beg as general secretary it was renamed Indian Union Muslim League (IUML).
Nawab Ismail Khan´s and Mohammad Ismaile´s rather opposite views reflected the different conditions in North and South. North India had to undergo the trauma of Partition through the flight of its well-off sections which had earlier provided the League with most of the leadership. Partition did not affect the South as it remained peaceful; and the altogether different conditions provided a favourable atmosphere for the League to survive.
In the India after 1947, thus, Madras became the centre of IUML´s politics. In the 1951 parliamentary elections, it won one seat from Madras; in 1957 and in 1971 also the party managed to capture a seat in parliament. It had some base in West Bengal where in the 1969 state elections it won three seats, and the tally rose to seven seats in 1971.