Strong Party, Weak Party: The Institutionalization of the All-India Muslim League

Abstract

Using election data from 1937 and 1945-6, correspondence between Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the leaders of the All India Muslim League (AIML), his letters and speeches to the British Crown and newspaper articles in the English and Urdu press, this paper shows that the AIML was successful in its struggle for political significance because of its highly centralized institutional structure. The party benefited from Jinnah’s ability to broker power with the British government and make alliances with religious and political leaders in the provinces; it therefore dominated discourse on Muslim nationalism far more effectively than other parties. The hypothesis proposed by some scholars that the AIML based its demands for Pakistan on the increase in vote share between 1937 and 1945-6 is rejected; Muslim support for the war effort during the 1945-6 period is found to be a far more important political lever when bargaining for near-equal status with the numerically stronger Congress Party. Examining institutionalization criteria proposed by Huntington and Mainwaring and Scully (adaptability, complexity, autonomy and value infusion) in the light of this evidence the author finds that the criteria do not explain how “weak” institutions are often politically successful and historically persistent. The overemphasis on electoral gain as a measure of institutionalization neglects the fact that parties often rely heavily on other means to access power besides vote mobilization. The paper suggests that identifying the incentives that drive political parties to adopt “good” practices (such as alliances with local organizations) may be far more useful for studying the institutionalization of democratic parties.