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 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)
