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Pakistan
Index
The Muslim League was founded in 1906 as the All-India
Muslim
League to protect the interests of Muslims in British
India and
to counter the political growth of the Indian National
Congress,
founded in 1885. Under the leadership of Mohammad Ali
Jinnah, the
Muslim League adopted the Lahore Resolution (often
referred to as
the "Pakistan Resolution") in March 1940 and successfully
spearheaded the movement for the creation of an
independent
homeland for Indian Muslims. At independence the Muslim
League
was the only major party in Pakistan and claimed the
allegiance
of almost every Muslim in the country. However, with the
deaths
of its two principal leaders, Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan,
shortly after independence and its central goal of
creating
Pakistan achieved, the party failed to develop a coherent,
postindependence ideology. The Muslim League gradually
came under
the influence of West Pakistani, and particularly Punjabi,
landlords and bureaucrats more concerned with increasing
their
personal influence than with building a strong national
organization.
The Muslim League was further weakened by the
constitutional
impasse in the 1950s resulting from difficulties in
resolving
questions of regional representation as well as the
problem of
reaching a consensus on Islamic issues. Regional loyalties
were
intensified during the constitutional debates over the
respective
political representation of the country's west and east
wings. In
addition, East Pakistan had a larger Hindu population, and
some
strong provincial leaders believed their power depended on
developing broad-based secular institutions. The Muslim
League,
however, pressed for provisions to establish Pakistan as
an
Islamic state.
Two powerful Bengali leaders and former Muslim League
members, Hussain Shahid Suhrawardy and Fazlul Haq, used
their own
parties, the Awami League and the Krishak Sramik Party
(Workers
and Peasants), respectively, in a joint effort in 1954 to
defeat
the Muslim League in the first election held in East
Pakistan
after partition. Fazlul Haq had made the motion to adopt
the
historic "Pakistan Resolution" in 1940, and Suhrawardy,
subsequently the last chief minister of undivided Bengal,
had
seconded it. But both men were alienated by West Pakistani
domination of the Muslim League. Suhrawardy was elected
leader of
the opposition in the second Constituent Assembly and in
1956 was
appointed prime minister, a further loss for the Muslim
League
because he was the first non-Muslim League politician to
hold
this position. By this time, the Muslim League had lost
its
influence in both East Pakistan and West Pakistan, having
also
lost its majority in the West Pakistan Legislative
Assembly to
the Punjab-centered Republican Party. The promulgation of
martial
law in 1958 and the dissolution of all political parties
finally
resulted in the demise of the Muslim League after its
fifty-two-
year existence.
General Ayub Khan formed a party called the Pakistan
Muslim
League (PML) in 1962, and Junejo established a party with
the
same name (PML-J) in 1986, but these two parties had
little in
common with the 1906-58 Muslim League in terms of their
objectives and composition. After Junejo died in March
1993, Mian
Nawaz Sharif took over the party and it became the
Pakistan
Muslim League (PML-N) for Nawaz Sharif. The death of
Junejo
signified the end to an uneasy coalition that had existed
between
the feudal lobby under Junejo and the representatives of
the new
industrialist classes who, under the guidance of Nawaz
Sharif,
were running the Islamic Democratic Alliance (Islami
Jamhoori
Ittehad--IJI) government of 1990-93.
Data as of April 1994
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