From 50 Years Ago: Muslim League Comes to Life.

Congress expediency in Kerala in seeking the cooperation of the Muslim League to fight Communists in the last general elections is claiming its price. Addressing the Tamil Nadu Muslim League Conference in Madras last week, Mohammed Ismail, President of the Indian Union Muslim League, was gloating over the fact that “the Muslim League was not only in existence but was very much alive all the time”. He found considerable satisfaction in observing that the very Congress leaders who had been waiting for “the relics of the non-existent Mus-lim League” to be removed to “a museum” had to come forward and “put a distinguished rep-resentative of the same organisation at the head of a whole and important department, the Legislature of Kerala State”…What the recent traffic of certain Pradesh Congress organisa-tions with the hibernating League has done is to give them respectability and a sort of sanction which could be utilised by League leaders to whip up the enthusiasm of the Muslim masses, who had been disillusioned after Partition. Despite the fine phraseology used to cover the new aims and policies of the League,…it is only too patent from the proceedings of the Conference in Madras that the motives actu-ating the Leaguers have remained unchanged in the years of freedom.