Giants
and Myths
Milestones on the Road to Partition-Part 3
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
The Khilafat movement and
the concomitant non-cooperation movement of 1921
were both political failures. Gandhi realized
that the discipline required for a non-violent,
non-cooperation movement was not yet inculcated
in the Indian masses. He called off the agitation
on February 22, 1922 leaving the Khilafat movement
in the lurch.
Events in Anatolia took their own turn. The Turks
went on to win their War of Independence, drive
out the Greek, French and Italian armies invading
their homeland, and establish a republic under
the leadership of Mustafa Kemal. In 1924 the Turkish
National Assembly abandoned the Caliphate. The
Khilafat movement in India fizzled out without
a whimper.
In historical hindsight, the Khilafat movement
did more harm than good. On the positive side
of the ledger, this was the first and the only
time when the two principal religious communities
of India, the Hindus and the Muslims, conducted
a mass campaign on a common platform. In the great
province of Bengal, the movement was largely a
success. It enabled the Bengalis to gain some
experience in the politics of mass confrontation.
But the price for this success was the injection
of religious symbols into what had hitherto been
a national, non-sectarian struggle. It was a religious
movement which was grafted onto a secular national
struggle for self rule. Gandhi used religious
symbols to bring together Hindus and Muslims on
a common platform and galvanize India towards
political self-awareness. The results were the
opposite. The process awakened the latent communalism
of both Hindus and Muslims.
The Khilafat movement thrust the molvis and the
mullahs into the forefront of national politics
eclipsing the role played hitherto by constitutionalists
like Jinnah. Ironically it was Jinnah who saw
the dangers of using religious and cultural symbols
in a secular fight for independence and warned
against it. But his warnings were not heeded either
by the Congress or the Muslim leadership.
There were multiple ways the Indian milieu could
have been sliced. The basis could have been language,
region, land ownership, class conflict, wealth,
poverty or historical experience. It was a fateful
choice to slice it along religious lines. The
leaders chose to define their identities as Hindus,
Muslims and Sikhs rather than Punjabis, Bengalis,
North and South Indians, zamindars and kisans,
money lenders and debtors, rich and poor, traditionalists
and modernists. This choice dictated the history
of South Asia.
The 1920s started as a decade of great promise
for religious cooperation and national liberation.
It ended with these hopes dashed, trust destroyed,
suspicions enhanced and disharmony at its peak.
The political coordination between the Muslims
and the Hindus, however limited its success, alarmed
the British and impelled them to practice the
politics of divide and rule more overtly. As long
as the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were at each
other’s throats, they were unlikely to unite
in common opposition to foreign rule of their
native land. Britain had conquered the huge subcontinent
playing off one power center against another.
As early as 1861, Elphinstone, the British governor
of Bombay had observed, “divide and rule
was the old Roman motto, and it should be ours
in India”. Now this strategy was applied
with full force to tighten the British grip on
the Indian empire. The Malabar uprising against
the British which had spilled over into a Hindu-Muslim
riot was dubbed the “Moplah uprising”
and was played up as an example of Muslim aggressiveness
towards non-Muslims. In retribution, the British
packed up hundreds of Malabar Muslims in freight
trains, like canned sardines, and sent them to
far off jails. Two thirds of those transported
suffocated in the railway compartments.
There was an acceleration in Hindu-Muslim polarization
in the Punjab, UP and Bengal. In 1922 Shraddhanada
started the Arya Samaj with the intent of converting
Muslims and Christians to Hinduism. In 1923 Savarkar
wrote his book on Hindutva and came up with the
concept of the two-nation theory, describing the
Hindus and the Muslims as two separate nations.
His proposed solution to his self-articulated
two nation theory was to convert, expel or marginalize
the Muslims and Christians. In 1925, the Hindu
Mahasabha, which was conceived at the fifth Akhil
Bhartiya Hindu Conference in Delhi in 1918, was
organized as a political party. Between 1923 and
1925 the Arya Samaj did convert thousands of Rajput
Muslims to Hinduism. They were particularly active
in the provinces of the Punjab and UP. The aggressiveness
of the Arya Samaj fostered a sense of fear among
the Muslims. In response, they established the
Tablighi Jamaat and Tanzim movements in 1923.
The Darul Uloom at Deoband launched a program
to train ulema in Sanskrit so that they could
counteract the propaganda of the Arya Samaj. These
movements were a reflection one of the other.
The right wing Hindus and Muslims saw in each
other a mortal enemy to their own long-term survival.
Forgotten in this melee was the Lucknow Pact of
1916 for which Jinnah had worked so hard. The
populous Indus-Gangetic belt embracing Sindh,
Punjab, UP, Bihar, Bengal and Assam which was
at the time 40 percent Muslim, 52 percent Hindu
and 4 percent Sikh was rent asunder along communal
lines.
Religious extremism was often a camouflage for
the cold politics of economic exploitation. It
was a great game being played by the British and
a small number of British trained lawyers for
the future of one-fifth of humanity. In addition
to the sustained exploitation of India by British
colonialism, there was rampant internal economic
exploitation by Indians themselves. In Bengal,
there was mass poverty and the province had experienced
repeated bouts of famine and death. The peasantry
was in the shackles of the money lenders. In Punjab
and Sindh the big landowners were the political
bosses. The politics of UP and the Central Provinces
was dictated by the zamindars and nawabs. The
masses were poor, indeed destitute, and had no
say in the wheeling and dealing and the sloganeering
going on in Delhi, Lahore, Calcutta and Bombay.
The population of the princely states, numbering
over 75 million, was not involved in the grand
strategies worked out for them.
It is noteworthy that in the 1920s there was a
Communist movement in India. The success of the
Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 inspired
communists around the world to achieve the same
in their native lands. The British, suspicious
of Soviet intentions in Afghanistan and Northwest
India, banned the communist party. Nonetheless
many communists worked with the Congress Socialist
Party, the left wing of Indian National Congress,
forming a working relationship with stalwarts
such as Jawaharlal Nehru. Their membership cut
across religious lines. The Bengali intellectual,
Muzaffar Ahmed, for instance, was one of the founders
of the Communist party of India. However, except
in Bengal, Communist influence on the overall
flow of national politics was at best marginal.
Bengal had a socio-political matrix dominated
by tensions between landowners and peasants, money
lenders and debtors. Here, Muzaffar Ahmed and
others avoided the slogans of the Congress party
dominated by Hindu property-owning classes, shunned
Muslim exclusivity advocated by the League and
helped the emergence of the Krishak Praja Party
(KPP) in the 1930s. The KPP represented the interests
of the indebted farmers of East Bengal and the
exploited workers of Calcutta. It is in this context
of increasing economic tensions and communal polarization
that one has to examine the attempt by India’s
British educated elite to establish a constitutional
framework for the subcontinent. (To be continued)
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