Khilafat, Jinnah and the RSS

By Anil Nauriya
The Khilafat demand, which arose in and after the first world war, pre-dated non-co-operation and was not as such initiated by Gandhi. The non-co-operation movement of the
1920s, led by the Congress, was based on three issues : The Punjab wrongs , that is the military violence in Punjab in 1919, the demand for swaraj and support for the Muslim
grievances related to Khilafat. The last involved not simply the question of the Caliphate but the impropriety of Indian troops being used against countries with which India had
no animosity. Although the RSS, in its current narratives, has been critical of the Khilafat cause, some leading Hindutva figures were part of or supported non-co-operation.
These included Dr B.S Moonje of the Hindu Mahasabha, a signatory to the October 1921 manifesto calling for non-cooperation, Dr Hedgewar who was arrested in the 1920s for
his participation in the movement and Bhai Parmanand. Incidentally, Subhas Bose also approved of the Khilafat issue being raised as part of the movement. His only objection,
by hindsight, was an organizational one. In the 1930s, while reiterating the validity of the Congress stand on the Khilafat issue, he wrote that the Khilafat Committees should not
have been allowed to function separately from the Congress organization.
The former chief of the RSS, Mr Sudarshan, has now argued that the question of the Caliph of Turkey was of little import to the Indian people and that issue was unnecessarily
raised by Gandhi in disregard of Jinnah’s wishes.
The fact, however, is that Jinnah supported the Khilafat cause. On August 27, 1919 Jinnah and three others, sent to Lloyd George, the then British Prime Minister, a representation
on behalf of the All-India Muslim League on the Khilafat question. The representation was concerned with the position of the Sultan of Turkey as the Khalifa. The penultimate
paragraph of the representation is:
“We need not add that if Great Britain becomes a party in reducing H.I.M. the Sultan of Turkey and the Khalifa of the Muslim world to the status of a petty sovereign, the
reaction in India will be colossal and abiding.”
The representation was signed by M.A. Jinnah, Hasan Imam, Bhurgari and Yaqub Hasan. [ Sharifuddin Pirzada, (ed.) Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah’s Correspondence, pp 71-73.]
In his presidential speech at the Calcutta session of the Muslim League in September 1920, Jinnah described the Khilafat demand as one “which we consider, from a purely
Musalman point of view, a matter of life and death”. (italics added) [Sharifuddin Pirzada (ed.), Foundations of Pakistan: All India Muslim League Documents: 1906-1947, Vol 1,
p.544 ] What Jinnah, who originated essentially in the liberal school, was opposed to was not the Khilafat cause but mass action. It is the statements expressing that reluctance
which are generally cited by some scholars under the mistaken belief that he was opposed to the Khilafat demand itself.
The Khilafat demands were fortified by promises made by the British Government in the course of the war and many of those who supported the demands did so because they saw
that the Government was reneging on assurances given. Seervai described the Khilafat movement as “the agitation led by two brothers, Mohamed Ali and Shaukat Ali against the
abolition of the Khalifate in Turkey after the Ist World War for the Khalif (sic) was the spiritual head of Muslims”. (Seervai, Constitutional Law of India, Vol 1, 1991, p.6) This
description of the Khilafat issue, which is both inadequate and inaccurate, conforms to a pattern adopted by some writers, especially in the last 25 years. Mr Sudarshan has given
vent to a similar idea which reduces the movement to the question of the Caliphate. But if the Indian Rising of 1857 were to be summed up merely as a move to reinstate Bahadur
Shah Zafar as Emperor, this may tell us something about the symbolical expression of the Rising, but not necessarily much about its causes or objectives.
The origin of the Khilafat agitation in India has to be understood in the context of the utilization of Indian, including Muslim, soldiers “for the purpose of crushing the national
spirit of the Egyptians, the Turks, the Arab and other nations”. ( Congress Working Committee Statement, October 1921, quoted in M.R. Jayakar, The Story of My Life, Vol. 1, p.
448) The use of Indian soldiers against countries towards which they had no feelings of hostility and in a fight in respect of which some of them had a legitimate conscientious
objection lay at the core of the so-called Khilafat issue.
As Srinivas Sastri reminded the Imperial Conference in June 1921 in the Great War of 1914-1918 as many as 1,274,000 men or “over half the total overseas forces employed in the
war” came from India. (Indian Annual Register, 1922-1923 Vol. II). And as Montagu admitted after resigning as Secretary of State in March 1922, “Turkey was beaten in the
main by Indian soldiers”. In order to secure such participation by Indians, the British administration had made definite promises throughout the land. Maulana Azad referred to
these on February 28, 1920 at the Bengal Provincial Khilafat Conference. Azad noted that in November 1914 the Government proclaimed that “no operations will be conducted
against the sacred seat of the Muslim Khilafat”. Azad observed that the proclamation was widely circulated : “So much so that in every division, every district, every seat of
government and in every town, the Moslems were called to assemble and copies of this declaration were read to and distributed among them by local officers”. Azad added : “No
Muslim home in British India was left in ignorance of this declaration.” (Khilafat address, pp. 287-288).
It is vital to remember, therefore, that the first mobilisation stressing Khilafat and its sanctity was done by the Government of British India itself so as to secure troops for the
war. A year after Lloyd George’s own assurances, offered in 1918 in the British Parliament, came the Rowlatt Bills in India and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The public feting
of Gen. Dyer in England followed thereafter. The Treaty of Sevres was signed in August 1920 though its terms had become known in May of that year. The treaty reduced Turkey
virtually to a land-locked country; French, Italian, Greek and other states were to be established on mainland Turkey. An already prevailing sense of betrayal in India, and a sense
of having been used, was understandable. The rest is history.
There had been widespread displays of Hindu-Muslim unity in the course of the Khilafat movement. But the petering out of the movement had a less pleasant aftermath with a
renewal of inter-communal tensions. In due course, these communal tensions began to be attributed to the movement itself. Some, like the RSS ex-chief, Mr Sudarshan, have
gone so far as to relate partition itself to these post-Khilafat communal tensions. But this narrative requires to be treated with some caution. First, attributing subsequent
communal tensions to the Khilafat movement could be a classic case of the fallacy of “after this, therefore because of this”. Secondly, there is an aspect of this question that needs
attention. In post-independence India, inter-communal tensions and even riots have invariably invited an enquiry into the role of the state. Why is the role of the Colonial State not
a subject of enquiry in the context of riots which occurred in the wake of the Khilafat movement? According to the late President Rajendra Prasad, the first indication at the time
of the “seeds of disruption” in (north) India came from the incidents in Multan in 1922, about six months after Gandhi’s arrest. Prasad recorded that the British Deputy
Commissioner in Multan at the time was believed to be at the “root of the trouble”. ( Rajendra Prasad, At the Feet of Mahatma Gandhi, 1961, pp. 135-136). Scholarship requires
that such leads on the post-Khilafat scenario be followed up as well.