Aga Khan III

Aga Khan III, Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah (1877 to 1957), was the hereditary Imam of the Nizari Ismaili Muslims and one of the leading Muslim politicians of the early twentieth century. He led the Muslim deputation that asked the Viceroy in 1906 for separate electorates, and he is named as the first president of the All-India Muslim League. Punjab's Sikhs were drawn into the system of community electorates that his deputation asked for, as the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records below.

He was born on 2 November 1877 in Karachi and became Imam in 1885, at the age of seven.

Key moments

• 1 October 1906: he led the deputation to the Viceroy, Lord Minto, at Simla. It asked for Muslim representation proportionate to their numbers, with separate electorates, and argued that their former role as rulers gave them a greater political importance and interests that other communities did not share. Minto largely agreed. Banglapedia reports the deputation's description of Muslims as "a nation within a nation".
• 30 December 1906: the All-India Muslim League was founded at Dhaka. Banglapedia says it was initially led by the Aga Khan, and Wikipedia calls him its first president.
• 1909: the Indian Councils Act, the Morley-Minto reforms, introduced separate Muslim electorates, which Banglapedia calls its most far-reaching feature. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records that Punjab and Burma were left out at this stage, and that Punjab got separate Muslim electorates, and electorates for Sikhs, only under the 1919 Act.
• 1916: the Congress-League Lucknow Pact, to which the Sikhs were not a party, gave Muslims 50 per cent of the communal seats in Punjab, as Sundar Singh Majithia read it, according to the Encyclopaedia.
• 1930 to 1932: he took part in the three Round Table Conferences in London. He was a member of the League of Nations Assembly and was its President in 1937 and 1938. He died on 11 July 1957 near Geneva.

What he is remembered for: Wikipedia calls him one of the founding fathers of Pakistan, because his case for Muslims as a distinct political community later fitted the League's two-nation argument. In Punjab the 1932 Communal Award fixed the seats for the province's legislature at 90 for Muslims, 48 for Hindus and 33 for Sikhs out of 175, and Sikhs, who had 13 per cent of the population against 56.5 per cent for Muslims, called it a repudiation of promises made to them.