Khilafat and the Non-Cooperation Movement

Between 1919 and 1922 the British were opposed through two mass movements: the Khilafat agitation and Gandhi's Non-Cooperation Movement. The two merged into a single struggle on a common programme of non-violent non-cooperation. It was the first nationwide mass movement of the freedom struggle. It drew in Hindus and Muslims, peasants and workers, students and women, and was a high point of Hindu-Muslim unity. It ended abruptly in 1922 after the violence at Chauri Chaura. The withdrawal then split the Congress into two camps, the Swarajists and the No-Changers, over whether to enter the legislative councils. This is a very high-yield topic.

The Khilafat issue gave the movement its immediate spark and cemented Hindu-Muslim unity. Indian Muslims, like Muslims worldwide, regarded the Sultan of Turkey as the Khalifa, their spiritual head. Turkey had fought on Germany's side in the war. When it lost, the British took a harsh line: Turkey was to be dismembered and the Khalifa stripped of power. This incensed Muslims everywhere.

In India, Muslims demanded that the Khalifa retain control over the Muslim sacred places and be left with sufficient territory. In early 1919 a Khilafat Committee was formed under the Ali brothers (Shaukat Ali and Muhammad Ali), Maulana Azad, Hakim Ajmal Khan and Hasrat Mohani. At the All-India Khilafat Conference in Delhi (November 1919), a call was made to boycott British goods. Gandhi, president of the All-India Khilafat Committee, saw in the issue a platform for united mass action.

The post-war years had already prepared the ground for joint Hindu-Muslim politics: the Lucknow Pact (1916), the Rowlatt agitation, and the rise of radical, anti-imperialist Muslim leaders over the old Aligarh conservatives.

The Congress comes on board. Gandhi favoured launching satyagraha on the Khilafat issue, but the Congress was divided. Tilak opposed an alliance over a religious issue. The Congress eventually backed non-cooperation for several reasons. It was a golden chance to cement Hindu-Muslim unity and bring the masses in. The Congress had also lost faith in constitutional methods after the Punjab atrocities and the partisan Hunter Report. And the masses were eager to act. The Muslim League also gave full support.

The movement unfolded through 1920:

• February 1920: Gandhi announced he would soon lead non-cooperation if the peace terms failed to satisfy Indian Muslims.
• May 1920: the Treaty of Sèvres completely dismembered Turkey.
• August 1920: the movement was formally launched (Tilak died on 1 August 1920).
• September 1920 (Calcutta special session): the Congress approved the programme: boycott of government schools, courts, councils, titles and foreign cloth, dispensing justice through panchayats, promotion of khadi and hand-spinning, and, in a second phase, mass civil disobedience including resignation from service and non-payment of taxes. Participants were to work for Hindu-Muslim unity and the removal of untouchability, staying non-violent.
• December 1920 (Nagpur session): the programme was endorsed. The Congress made a historic change to its creed: from self-government by constitutional means to the attainment of swaraj by all peaceful and legitimate means, an extra-constitutional mass struggle. A Congress Working Committee (CWC) of 15 was set up, provincial committees were reorganised on a linguistic basis, the entry fee was cut to four annas, and Gandhi declared swaraj could be won within a year.
• December 1921 (Ahmedabad session): at the height of the movement, Maulana Hasrat Mohani, the Khilafat leader, moved a resolution to define swaraj as complete independence, free from all foreign control. The Congress rejected the proposal at the time. He was thus the first to demand complete independence on a Congress platform, years before the Lahore resolution of 1929 made it the official goal.

Spread. The years 1921-22 saw an unprecedented upsurge. Thousands of students left government schools for some 800 national institutions: Jamia Millia, Kashi Vidyapeeth, Gujarat Vidyapeeth, Bihar Vidyapeeth, the National College at Calcutta (with Subhash Bose as principal). Lawyers like Motilal Nehru, C.R. Das, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajagopalachari, Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Asaf Ali gave up practice. Foreign cloth was burnt, liquor shops were picketed, and the Tilak Swaraj Fund raised a crore of rupees. Peasants (the Awadh Kisan and Eka movements, the Mappila revolt), workers and women joined. In many places two-thirds of those arrested were Muslims.

The government came down hard from December 1921, banning volunteer corps, gagging the press and arresting most leaders except Gandhi. Under pressure from the rank and file to begin mass civil disobedience, Gandhi threatened on 1 February 1922 to launch it from Bardoli. The ground there had been prepared by the Sarabandi (no-tax) campaign of 1922, led by Vallabhbhai Patel in Bardoli taluka. Peasants were organised to refuse payment of land revenue, as the opening step of the planned mass civil disobedience.

But on 5 February 1922 at Chauri Chaura (Gorakhpur district, UP), a crowd provoked by police firing set fire to a police station. 22 policemen were killed. Gandhi, appalled by the violence, withdrew the movement. The Congress Working Committee met at Bardoli and called off the struggle. Many leaders, C.R. Das, Motilal Nehru, Subhash Bose, were bewildered by the decision. In March 1922 Gandhi was arrested and sentenced to six years in jail.

The state's vengeance at Chauri Chaura was severe. In the trial that followed, the sessions court sentenced 172 of the accused to death. Madan Mohan Malaviya, assisted by Krishna Kant Malaviya, took up their legal defence. His advocacy before the higher court secured the acquittal or commutation of most of these death sentences; only a small number were finally executed.

Why Gandhi withdrew. He felt people had not fully grasped non-violence. A violent movement would be easily crushed by the colonial state and give it an excuse to use force. The movement was also showing fatigue. The Khilafat issue itself dissolved when Mustafa Kemal Pasha deprived the Sultan of power in 1922 and abolished the caliphate in 1924.

Evaluation. The movement brought urban Muslims into the national fold. But it also, to an extent, communalised politics, as leaders failed to lift Muslim consciousness from a religious to a secular plane. Yet its great achievement was that nationalist sentiment reached every corner and politicised millions, peasants, workers, women, the urban poor, giving the movement a revolutionary character. The masses lost their fear of colonial rule and its repressive power.

The withdrawal of the movement and Gandhi's arrest (March 1922) left the nationalist ranks disorganised and demoralised. A debate began over what to do in this passive phase:

• Swarajists: led by C.R. Das, Motilal Nehru and Ajmal Khan, they wanted to end the boycott of the legislative councils. Their plan was to enter the councils, expose their weaknesses, and use them as an arena of political struggle. Their slogan was "end or mend": obstruct the councils' working if the government did not respond.
• No-Changers: led by C. Rajagopalachari, Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad and M.A. Ansari, they opposed council entry. They favoured constructive work and quiet preparation for resuming civil disobedience.

The Swarajists' "end or mend" proposal was defeated at the Gaya session (December 1922). C.R. Das and Motilal Nehru then resigned their Congress posts and founded the Congress-Khilafat Swarajya Party (the Swarajist Party), with Das as president and Motilal Nehru as a secretary.

Both sides wanted to avoid a 1907-type split. They kept in touch with the jailed Gandhi and valued a united front. A compromise at Delhi (September 1923) allowed the Swarajists to contest the November 1923 elections as a group within the Congress. They accepted the Congress programme, with the one difference that they would enter the councils.

The Swarajist manifesto (October 1923) took a strong anti-imperialist line. It argued that the British governed India for their own selfish interests and that the reforms were a "blind" to continue exploitation. The Swarajists would present the demand for self-government in the councils. If that demand was refused, they would wreck the councils from within by uniform, continuous obstruction.

The party did well at the polls. It won 42 of 141 elected seats and a clear majority in the Central Provinces assembly. With Liberals and independents like Jinnah and Malaviya, it also held a majority in some other legislatures. Gandhi was released in February 1924. He was initially opposed to council entry but moved towards reconciliation. At the Belgaum session (December 1924), the only Congress session he presided over, it was agreed that the Swarajists would work in the councils as an integral part of the Congress.

But the party weakened from the mid-1920s. Communal riots hurt it. A split also emerged between the Responsivists (Lala Lajpat Rai, Madan Mohan Malaviya, N.C. Kelkar), who wanted cooperation with the government and protection of "Hindu interests", and the rest of the party. The Swarajists lost Muslim support when they did not back the tenants' cause against the (mostly Hindu) zamindars in Bengal. The death of C.R. Das in 1925 was a heavy blow. The main leadership withdrew from the legislatures in March 1926. The Swarajists finally walked out in 1930, following the Lahore Congress resolution on purna swaraj (complete independence) and the start of Civil Disobedience.

Despite their decline, the Swarajists achieved a great deal in the councils:

• with coalition partners they out-voted the government several times, even on budget grants, and passed adjournment motions;
• they agitated through powerful speeches on self-government, civil liberties and industrialisation;
• Vithalbhai Patel was elected Speaker of the Central Legislative Assembly in 1925;
• they defeated the Public Safety Bill (1928), aimed at deporting "undesirable" foreigners spreading communist ideas;
• they filled the political vacuum while the movement recouped its strength, exposed the hollowness of the Montford reforms (the Montagu-Chelmsford constitutional reforms of 1919), and showed the councils could be used creatively.

Their limitations: they lacked a policy to link their militancy inside the councils with mass struggle outside. They relied wholly on newspapers to reach the public. They could not sustain their coalitions and failed to resist the perks of office.

The same post-war ferment that fed the Khilafat agitation also produced India's first communist organisation, born not in India but in Soviet Central Asia. Many muhajirs, Muslims who left India during the Khilafat agitation hoping to fight for Turkey, ended up in Soviet Russia and came under the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Comintern (the Communist International, the Moscow-based body coordinating communist parties worldwide).

In October 1920, a group of these Indian revolutionaries gathered at Tashkent and set up the Communist Party of India in exile. The group was headed by M. N. Roy, the Bengal revolutionary who had become a leading figure in the Comintern. Abani Mukherji was among his associates. This émigré party at Tashkent must be distinguished from the later foundation of the party on Indian soil, at the Kanpur conference of December 1925.

• M. N. Roy: headed the Tashkent group that founded the CPI in October 1920.
• Tashkent, October 1920: the émigré birth of Indian communism, under Comintern patronage.
• Kanpur, December 1925: the CPI was formally founded inside India.
• P. C. Joshi: a later CPI general secretary, not the Tashkent founder.