Signs from Allah: History, Science and Faith in Islam 136. Mohammed Ali Jauhar (1878-1931) and the Origins of Pakistan - 2
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
The Khilafat movement was a milestone in the history of South Asian Muslims. It brought together ulema like Maulana Hussain Ahmed Madani, secular nationalists like Dr Saifuddin Kuchlo and Hakim Ajmal Khan, universalists like Maulana Azad and pan-Islamists like Maulana Mohammed Ali under one umbrella, and when it ended it unleashed communal forces whose frenzy propelled the subcontinent into the holocaust that accompanied partition in 1947. It defined the career of Maulana Mohammed Ali who felt that an enslaved India could not successfully resist the international intrigues of the British Empire.
Cooperation with the majority Hindu community was essential if India was to achieve its independence. The emergence of this conviction coincided with the rise of Gandhi on the national stage. Gandhi saw in the Khilafat movement a golden opportunity to fuse together the Hindus and the Muslims into an integrated political movement that would force the British out of India. But it was a marriage of convenience in which the national agenda of independence was wedded to the pan-Islamic idea of Indian support for the Khilafat based in far-away Istanbul.The injection of religion into the struggle for independence provided an entry for fringe right wing elements, both Hindu and Muslim, to enter politics. It was an idea fraught with explosive potential for the future of communal harmony in the subcontinent. Indeed, partition was born in the communal politics of the 1920s. Jinnah, a strict constitutionalist and a secular nationalist at the time, saw through this danger and warned his countrymen and fellow Muslims about it. He was opposed to the Khilafat movement. No one listened. Indeed, it estranged Jinnah from Muhammed Ali and the motley collection of scholars and opportunists who had gathered around the issue. It also solidified the estrangement of Jinnah from Gandhi.
The coalition was inherently unstable and it was bound to break up sooner or later. And break up it did in 1922. Gandhi was chosen as the leader of the Khilafat movement in 1920 and he proposed peaceful non-cooperation to compel the British to listen to Indian demands. The movement was launched with much fanfare with the Ali brothers, Maulana Azad and others traversing the country to whip up support from the masses. But India was not ready for peaceful non-cooperation. The situation got out of hand when violence broke out in Chauri Chaura in 1922 and Gandhi called off the struggle leaving its ardent supporters in the lurch. The issue died a peaceful death when the Turkish parliament under Kemal Ataturk abolished the Caliphate in 1924.
The failure of the Khilafat movement compelled the Hindu and Muslim communities to face one another and try to work out a modus operandi. To give a voice to Muslim sentiments, Maulana Mohammed Ali restarted the Comrade weekly in 1924, soon to be followed by its Urdu counterpart, Hamdard. But the India of the 1920s was a changed India from that of the 1910s. Just as Jinnah had warned, communal forces were let loose. Communal riots rocked Nagpur, Meerat and other cities. The Hindu Mahasabha gained traction and in 1925, its president Golwalkar proposed the two-nation theory. A disunited and confused Muslim leadership held several meetings to chart out a vision and a course of action for the future. An all parties conference held in Delhi in 1925, which included representatives of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, failed to agree on guidelines for a future constitution for India and instead delegated the task to a committee headed by Motilal Nehru.
The Nehru Report was a watershed in the independence struggles of India and Pakistan. The report, compiled by an eleven-member committee including two absentee Muslim participants, came up with a unitary concept for the proposed constitution of India with residual powers vested in the center. This was a reflection of the socialist leanings of Jawarharlal Nehru who stayed wedded to top down, planned, government controlled economic models throughout his influential political career, but which had as its corollary the domination of majority views on the minority. The Muslim leadership preferred a federal constitution with residual powers vested in the states. Secondly, the Nehru Report abrogated the separate electorate agreements reached between the Congress and the League in 1915 in Lucknow which were brokered by Jinnah. Both of these were unacceptable to the majority of Muslim leadership. Maulana Mohammed Ali failed to convince Gandhi and the Congress party to change these provisions of the Nehru Report. In bitterness, he broke with Gandhi and walked away from the Congress.
Maulana Muhammed Ali attended the First-Round Table Conference in London in 1931, called by the British to discuss a dominion status for India. It was also attended by Jinnah, Dr Ambedkar, the Agha Khan, Sardar Ujjal Singh, Tej Bahadur Sapru, B.S. Moonje and others. It ended in failure because the Indian National Congress, the largest political party in India, boycotted it. Mohammed Ali died in London and was buried in Jerusalem as he had wished.
The primary legacy of Maulana Mohammed Ali was to give forceful expression to the voice of his generation through his consummate journalistic and poetic skills. He was at once a nationalist and a mujahid. Addressing one of the meetings of the Khilafat committee, he declared, “As far as the command of God is concerned, I am a Muslim and Muslim alone; as far the issue of India is concerned, I am Indian and Indian alone”. He roused the Muslim masses in support of the Khilafat movement and sought a cooperative independence struggle through Gandhi. In these attempts he failed because he failed to grasp the inherent contradictions in his positions on national and international issues. At the onset of the Khilafat movement he fell out with Jinnah but while in London in 1931, he and his brother Shaukat Ali begged Jinnah to return to India and take charge of the Muslim League. The rest is history.
Reference for further reading: Mujahid e Azam, Maulana Mohammed Ali Jowhar, Farooq Argali, Fareed Book Depot, Delhi.
(The author is Director, World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Washington, DC; Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member, State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and Chairman, Delixus Group)
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