| 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.
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