Signs from Allah: History, Science and Faith in Islam
126. The Partition of India - 2
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
Even as the Great War raged in the heart of Europe, Britain and France entered into the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 partitioning the Ottoman Empire between them. Britain would secure Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, thus securing a land route from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea and from there to the British India Empire. France would control Syria and Southeastern Anatolia. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed (1918) and Istanbul was occupied by British troops, the scheming gathered momentum. By the Treaty of Sevres (1920), France, Britain, Greece, Italy and Armenia each claimed a piece of Ottoman territories leaving a tiny slice in Central Anatolia for the Turks. The Turkish nationalists rejected the terms of this Treaty, refusing to ratify it.
India was caught up in the turbulence created by the aftermath of the War. The British attempt to abolish the Khilafat in Istanbul dragged India into postwar politics. The Khilafat was an institution established by the companions of the Prophet Muhammed immediately after his death. It had survived fourteen centuries of Islamic history and its mantle had passed to the Turkish sultans in 1517. Although its influence had diminished in proportion to the loss of Islamic territories to European colonialism, it was still looked upon as the axis of Muslim political life, especially by the world of Sunni Islam. When the Treaty of Sevres awarded the Hejaz to Sharif Hussain as a reward for his collusion with the allies during the War, it cut the principal connection of the Caliph in Istanbul from his spiritual responsibilities as the “guardian of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina”. This was seen as an attempt to abolish the Khilafat. The Caliph himself became a de-facto British prisoner in Istanbul and had little authority to influence post war developments either in the former Ottoman territories or in the Turkish heartland of Anatolia. The emerging nationalist movement in Anatolia disregarded the edicts of the Sultan-Caliph proclaimed under British duress.
The attempt to abolish the Khilafat created an uproar among India’s Muslim religious establishment. India had lost its independence to British intrigue in the 18th century but the Indian Muslims had taken some consolation in an independent Ottoman empire whose titular head was the Caliph for all Muslims.
The occupation of the Sultan’s territories and the removal of the sultan’s sovereignty over the holy sites in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem meant that the sun had set on Islam’s political domains. At this time, Muslim leadership in India was divided into four categories. The first were the Nawabs and the zamindars of United Provinces (UP) and Bengal who dominated the Muslim League since its founding in 1906. In the second group were the Aligarh trained would-be bureaucrats whose career goal was to secure employment in the administrative machinery of the British Raj. The third were the elite, British educated secular nationalists such as Mohammed Ali Jinnah who were working at the time for Hindu-Muslim cooperation and a common political platform for the Congress and Muslim League. The fourth group represented the religious establishment, the Deobandis and the ulema such as Maulana Muhammed Ali and Maulana Shaukat Ali. The vast majority of Muslims, like the vast majority of Hindus, Sikhs and Christians were poor and destitute, often at the mercy of moneylenders and landlords, and had very little political involvement of any kind.
The Khilafat movement was started in 1919 by Muhammed Ali, Shaukat Ali and Hasrat Mohani at a time when the repressive Rowlett Act (1919) and the Jalianwala Bagh massacre (1919) had created a general feeling of animosity against the British. Gandhi, who was by this time emerging as the undisputed leader of the Congress party, saw in the Khilafat movement an opportunity to forge a united Hindu-Muslim stand against the British, and in combination with a peaceful non-cooperation movement, force the British to concede India’s political demands.
The non-cooperation movement was launched on September 1, 1920 under the leadership of Gandhi with the Ali brothers playing a supporting role. It was an alliance of convenience. The goals of the protagonists were different and it soon became clear that the inherent tensions in these goals would make their achievement impossible. First, the Khilafat was an issue for the Turks to resolve. If the Turks did not wish to carry the burden of the Caliphate, the Muslims in India could not force them to do so. Second, the preservation of the Ottoman Empire required the Arabs to acquiesce to Turkish rule. The goodwill between the Turks and the Arabs had been shattered by the Arab rebellion in which the British intelligence agent Lawrence of Arabia had played a key role. Third, the Khilafat movement received only lukewarm support from the elite Muslim leadership such as Mohammed Ali Jinnah who assessed correctly that the agitation in India was unlikely to affect the geopolitics of the Middle East. Jinnah, who was a constructive constitutionalist, desired an orderly transfer of power to India and had no use for the disruptive politics of the Khilafat movement or the non-cooperation movement of Gandhi. Fourth, even though the movement was headed by Gandhi himself, right wing Hindu leaders such as Malaviya were less than enthusiastic about it. Gandhi’s objective was swaraj (self-rule) and for him the Khilafat was no more than a tactical battle in that ultimate goal whereas for the right wing ulema it was an end in itself. Fifth, neither the Muslims nor the Hindus were ready as yet for the sacrifices required of a national movement with the dual objectives of forcing the British to concede self-rule and influencing international events in faraway Istanbul.
Upset over British policy after the War, some molvis from Jameet-e-Ulema-e Hind, a conservative association of Muslim clerics, declared India to be “darul harab” (the abode of war) and advised Muslims to migrate to a country like Afghanistan which they considered “darul Islam” (the abode of peace). In 1920, more than fifteen thousand peasants from the NW Frontier and Sindh heeded the call and did perform the hijrat (migration) to Afghanistan where they were robbed and some were killed. The protests by Kerala Muslims against the British in August 1921 got out of hand and resulted in a Hindu-Muslim riot which was exploited by British propaganda to drive a wedge between the two communities. Lastly, in February 1922, a violent mob set fire to a police station in Chari-Chaura in UP resulting in the death of dozens of people.
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.
(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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