The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  In Ahmedabad, besides inadvertently providing Gandhi a new non­violent tactic of fasting—which he would deploy sixteen more times during the next thirty years—the latest episode gave him an urban, industrial base. It would lead to the formation of the twenty-thousand-strong Ahmedabad Textile Labor Association, which practiced moderate trade unionism compared to that advocated by the Communist Party’s All India Trade Union Congress. At the same time Gandhi’s traditionally cordial relations with textile mill owners and other industrialists enabled him to secure donations from them to fund the running of the Congress Party as it expanded its narrow base. Above all else, the events in Champaran and Ahmedabad gave Gandhi an unprecedented publicity through both the press and, in a 93 percent illiterate society, word of mouth. Other politicians, including Jinnah, envied the renown he had gained within a few years.

  When the lieutenant governor of Bihar and Orissa kept his word by signing the Champaran Agrarian Law (Bihar and Orissa Act I of 1918) in March 1918, Gandhi felt vindicated. On April 27 he attended the viceroy’s War Conference in Delhi and addressed it in Hindi. Two months later he toured Kaira District in Gujarat to urge young, able-bodied farmhands to enroll in the army and boost the empire’s war effort.29 He re­assured women in religious terms: he told them that if their husbands died while performing their duty—dharma—the couples would be together again in their “next incarnation.” He urged potential recruits to “fight unconditionally unto death [along] with the British.” The skeptical villagers were largely unconvinced.30

  Whereas Gandhi built up a mass following by getting involved in the economic struggles of peasants and workers, Jinnah’s credentials as a nationalist were underscored by his performances as a member of the viceroy’s Imperial Legislative Council (ILC) and president of Bombay Presidency’s Home Rule League. In early 1918 Bombay Presidency’s governor, Lord Willingdon, acknowledged Jinnah’s political status when he included Jinnah in a list with Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, an eminent Congressman; Bal Gangadhar Tilak (jailed by the British for six years); and Annie Besant (interned in 1917), “who were among those extremists who had no feeling for their duty towards [the] Empire in a crisis.”31

  Jinnah wore this label as a badge of honor. Jinnah married Ruttie Dinshaw, a young nationalist to the core, in April 1918. On converting to Islam, she acquired the name of Maryam, and the wedding took place in South Court, Jinnah’s palatial mansion in Bombay, on Mount Pleasant Road in upscale Malabar Hill.

  A year later Jinnah vociferously criticized the report by Montagu and Viceroy Lord Chelmsford on reforming the administration of India by introducing diarchy: three of the seven members of the viceroy’s executive council would be Indian but charged with such minor ministries as education, health, and agriculture.

  Jinnah and other nationalist leaders had expected self-government for India after the Allied victory in November 1918. They had fully backed the British Empire in that armed conflict during which the draconian Defense of India (Criminal Law Amendment) Act, passed in March 1915, was set to remain in force six months after the war.

  As the expiration date of this act neared, Viceroy Chelmsford proposed replacing it, indefinitely, with the Rowlatt Act—named after Sir Sidney Rowlatt, chair of the Committee on the Defense of India Act—empowering him to detain or expel any “suspected terrorist” without any charge or trial. While the Indian minority on the ILC rejected the bill, the British majority backed it. In protest, Jinnah resigned from the ILC.

  When the Rowlatt Act came into force on March 10, 1919, the Congress Party accepted Gandhi’s proposal for satyagraha on the issue by calling for a one-day general strike and the wearing of black armbands, on March 30. The black armband tactic proved very effective—even winning the support of pro-British Indians, when the rumor spread fast in the crowded bazaars that this gesture was in honor of the 62,000 Indian soldiers who were killed in the war. Gandhi later changed the protest date to April 6. But the general strike went ahead in Delhi. Strikers were shot dead by police, further increasing tensions in the capital and Punjab.

  On April 6, Jinnah voiced his support for the strike at a rally in Bombay, thus invigorating the protest. Four days later two Congress leaders—a Hindu and a Muslim—were arrested at a rally in the Punjabi city of Amritsar under the Rowlatt Act and taken to an unknown detention area. Their detention sparked protests, which led to an orgy of arson and violence. It left five Europeans dead. Additional troops summoned by Punjab’s jug-eared, thin-lipped lieutenant governor, Sir Michael Francis O’Dwyer, arrived in Amritsar under the command of the fifty-five-year-old brigadier general Reginald Dyer. Defying his age, he had retained his haughty looks. O’Dwyer’s immediate ban on further assemblies was poorly communicated in the absence of nationwide radio broadcasting, which did not start in India until 1930.

  On Sunday, April 13—coinciding with Baisakhi, a spring festival celebrated by Hindus and Sikhs—between five thousand and ten thousand unarmed protestors gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, a park enclosed by walls with only two gateways. After persuading Viceroy Chelmsford to declare martial law in Punjab, Dyer, leading ninety Indian and Nepalese soldiers, marched into the park.

  Without warning, he ordered his men to open fire. Finding the troops blocking the larger exit, the terrorized people herded toward the narrower one, while others tried to climb the high walls to escape. By the time Dyer ordered a cease-fire ten minutes later, 1,650 rounds of ammunition had killed 379 (according to the official report, but unofficially 530) people and injured about 1,150. Dyer then withdrew his force. The following day there was more rioting and arson as Dyer advocated a strategy of “frightfulness” to quell disturbances. This episode won Dyer the moniker of the Butcher of Amritsar.32

  The massacre outraged Indians of all political hues. Though poorly recreated, this episode marks one of the high points in the biopic Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough. “When the government takes up arms against its unarmed subjects, then it has forfeited its right to govern,” declared Gandhi after the massacre. “It has ruled that it cannot rule in peace and justice. . . . Nothing less than the removal of the British and complete self-government could satisfy injured India. . . . [The Battle of] Plassey [in 1758] laid the foundation of the British Empire, Amritsar has shaken it.”33 He suspended the satyagraha on April 18.

  In retrospect the massacre in Amritsar proved to be the beginning of the end of the British Raj in the subcontinent.

  Congress officials held their annual convention in Amritsar; their Muslim League counterparts did the same. By the time these sessions were convened at the end of December, the British parliament had passed the Government of India Act 1919, which incorporated the diarchy system recommended by Montagu and Chelmsford. It involved restructuring the present single-chamber legislature into a bicameral one, with the upper house, called the Council of State, reviewing the bills passed by the Central Legislative Assembly. At the Congress session Jinnah seconded the resolution that described the 1919 Act as “inadequate, unsatisfactory and disappointing.”34 Gandhi argued against the resolution, but in vain.

  At the Muslim League conference, Jinnah was elected president for three years. His place in the sun came at a time when Gandhi’s reputation suffered a setback.

  Amritsar was also the venue of the Second All India Khilafat Conference, a fledgling body of Muslims that had emerged after October 30, 1918. On that day the defeated Ottoman Sultan-Caliph Mehmet VI—a sad-eyed ruler with a walrus mustache and an astrakhan cap embossed with the Islamic crescent and star—signed an armistice with the victorious Allies. That posed a threat to the future of the caliphate—called khilafat, derivative of khalifa, meaning “successor” in Arabic and Urdu, in India—which had been based in Istanbul since 1517. The caliph was recognized as the religious leader of all Muslims in a world where those living in India formed his largest constituency.

  2: Gandhi’s Original Sin

  Injecting Religion
into Politics

  The seed of the All India Khilafat Conference was planted at the meeting of fifteen thousand Muslims in Bombay in March 1919, when public outrage at the Rowlatt Act was running high. It established the Bombay Khilafat Committee, presided over by Muhammad Chotani, an affluent businessman, who was respectfully addressed as Seth (Hindi: merchant or banker) Chotani. It contacted the Muslim League Council. Together they decided to form a broad-based body since the League at the time had only 777 paid-up members, mostly lawyers and religious scholars, called ulema.1

  What drove the Muslim elite to take this step was its historical perspective. It perceived the fall of the Ottoman Empire as analogous to the downfall of the Mughal Empire in 1807 at the hands of the British—albeit not so precipitately. The Ottomans were brought down by an alliance in which imperial Britain was preeminent. Among those who shared this view, Muhammad Ali Jauhar stood out.

  The Ali Brothers

  Born in 1878 into an aristocratic family in the princely state of Rampur in the United Provinces—today’s Uttar Pradesh—he graduated from Aligarh College and pursued further education at Oxford. Diverting from a study of law, which was then popular with Indians, he opted for history. On his return home he served as education director first in Rampur and then in the much larger princely state of Baroda. In 1911 he moved to Calcutta, then capital of British India, where he founded the weekly Comrade. He was a gifted writer and poet with the pen name of Jauhar (Urdu: jewel). His Oxford education, superb mastery of English, and hand-tailored suits marked him as a man of distinction.

  When British India’s capital was moved to Delhi in 1913, he followed suit. There, assisted by his elder brother Shaukat Ali, he established the Urdu weekly Hamdard (Compassionate). With the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, he urged Ottoman Sultan-Caliph Mehmet VI to stay neutral. But when Ottoman Turkey declared war against the Allied Powers in November, he reaffirmed his loyalty to the British crown. At the same time, in a long article he outlined Turkey’s grievances against Britain. That was enough to cause the closure of his journal by an official diktat. Later, because he and Shaukat Ali were seen as pro-Turkey, the government jailed them under the Defense of India Act 1915 in an obscure central Indian town, Chhindwara, and held them there until December 1919.

  A close study of the Quran in Urdu by the imprisoned Jauhar turned him into a pious Muslim. The same happened to Shaukat Ali. Both of them grew beards and switched to wearing knee-length tunics and baggy pajamas, along with a tall, astrakhan cap. They became known as the Ali Brothers. Jauhar was sometimes invited to deliver the weekly sermon after Friday’s congregational prayer at the local mosque. He proved an eloquent speaker with a sense of humor.

  While in prison the Ali Brothers were allowed to maintain censored correspondence with friends and allies, and they read newspapers published under wartime censorship. They endorsed the Lucknow Pact of December 1916 between the Congress Party and the Muslim League. Earlier they had heard Ghandi’s 1915 address to students in Calcutta, in which he had said, “Politics cannot be divorced from religion.”2 They saw in him a Hindu personage ready to blend religion with politics in order to attract a mass following.

  They asked the government to let Gandhi visit them in prison, but in vain. On his part, after attending the viceroy’s War Conference in Delhi in April 1918, Gandhi appealed to him to release the Ali Brothers. Lord Chelmsford refused. Gandhi continued to correspond with them in jail, and they supported his Rowlatt Act satyagraha in April 1919.

  With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, gloom descended on the Ali Brothers. Hailing the sultan-caliph as “the personal centre” of Islam, Jauhar warned Britain against reducing the sovereignty of the caliph, the warden of Islam’s holiest shrines in Arabia, Palestine, and Iraq, or parceling out his empire, which, Jauhar believed would enfeeble the temporal power of Islam. His views were shared widely by many literate Muslims. This led to the convening of four hundred delegates in Lucknow in September 1919. They decided to set up the Khilafat Committee, with Chotani as its president and the imprisoned Shaukat Ali its secretary.

  The Khilafat Committee declared October 17, 1919 (the first anniversary of the armistice signed by Turkey, according to the Islamic lunar calendar), Khilafat Day. It urged Muslims to fast and pray and observe a general strike on that day, and it appealed to Hindus to join them. Gandhi backed their call. Bazaars in major cities remained closed on that day. In Bombay Gandhi addressed a Muslim congregation after weekly prayers. In Delhi a meeting of fifty thousand was addressed by Muslim notables as well as Swami Shradhanand, leader of the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reformist group.3

  Alarmed at this development, Jinnah advised Gandhi “not to encourage fanaticism of Muslim religious leaders and their followers.”4 Gandhi spurned his advice. The Khilafat Committee was so impressed by Gandhi’s spirited advocacy of its cause that it invited him to preside over the First Khilafat Conference in Delhi on November 23–24. Hindu-Muslim unity was a recurring theme in the speeches at the assembly, and due sensitivity was shown to Hindus’ opposition to the killing of cows. “The Muslims honor would be at stake if they forget the cooperation of the Hindus,” said Maulana Abdul Bari. “I for my part will say that we should stop cow-killing, because we are children of the same soil.”5

  The conference urged Muslims to boycott official peace celebrations scheduled for December. It resolved that Muslims should withdraw cooperation from the government if the settlement with Turkey was unjust. The assessment of what the victorious Allies imposed on Turkey was to be made by a special committee. If it considered the settlement with Turkey unjust, then Muslims would boycott European goods. Gandhi was a staunch supporter of these resolutions.6

  On the eve of the conference Jinnah had sent a goodwill telegram from Bombay to the conveners, in which he backed the cause of Turkey while lambasting the British Raj for committing atrocities in Punjab.7 But he strongly disapproved of the adoption of such unconstitutional tactics as boycotting European goods.

  The Second Khilafat Conference, convened at the end of December in Amritsar, was dominated by the freshly released Ali Brothers. Their long incarceration had given them the halo of martyrs and earned them the religious title of maulana (derived from mawla, Arabic: master or learned man). The delegates charged them with drafting the Khilafat Manifesto.

  In January 1920, a delegation led by Muslim League president Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari met Viceroy Lord Chelmsford to press the British government not to deprive Sultan-Caliph Mehmet VI of his suzerainty over Muslim holy places. Gandhi was part of the delegation.8

  Working closely with Gandhi, the Ali Brothers produced the Khilafat Manifesto two months later. It called on Britain not to diminish the status of the caliph and urged Indian Muslims to hold Britain accountable on the caliphate issue. The document also incorporated the concept of nonviolent noncooperation with the government as elaborated by Gandhi for the first time. Such a campaign would consist of ascending levels. Starting with the renunciation of government titles and honors, it would involve boycotting courts, British-supported educational institutions, local council elections, and foreign goods—rising to resignations from the civil service and then the police and military. The final step would be refusal to pay taxes. After issuing the manifesto, Jauhar sailed to Europe as leader of the Khilafat delegation to lobby for Turkey in Paris and London.

  The Third Khilafat Conference on April 17 in Madras was chaired by Shaukat Ali. It adopted the Khilafat Manifesto.9 Between then and early September, when the Special Session of Congress voted for noncooperation, several events helped Gandhi to consolidate his spiraling influence.

  At the end of April, Gandhi condemned the resolution of the League of Nations’ Supreme Council at its meeting in San Remo, Italy, to let Britain and France decide the nature of the mandates for the non-Turkish parts of the Ottoman Empire. He called for noncooperation to express Indian anger at the San Remo decision.

  The Internal
and External Turning Points

  On May 15, 1920, the Allied Powers published the draft of the peace treaty with Ottoman Turkey, proposing the severance of all non-Turkish parts from the Ottoman Empire. Gandhi condemned the document. Domestically, what sharpened anti-British sentiment was the publication on May 28 of the report by an inquiry commission headed by Lord William Hunter: Report of the Committee Appointed by the Government of India to Investigate the Disturbances in the Punjab, Etc.

  According to the report, there were five thousand to ten thousand people in the Jallianwala Bagh, none of them armed. Brigadier General Reginald Dyer posted twenty-five soldiers on each of the sides on a higher ground. When the firing started, the multitude rushed toward the side of the Bagh with the lowest wall, about five feet high. Dyer ordered his men to aim at that spot. In his own dispatch to the military superiors, he wrote, “It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of sufficient moral effect not only on those who were present, but more especially throughout the Punjab” (emphasis in original).10 The report criticized Dyer and condemned some aspects of the martial law administration but gave general approval to the martial law policy in Punjab. Gandhi immediately combined protest of the Hunter report with noncooperation with the government as advocated by Khilafat leaders.

  However, Shaukat Ali calculated that if Muslims were to resign their civil service posts, these would be quickly filled by aspiring Hindus. He was therefore reluctant to start the noncooperation campaign without the active support of Hindu leaders. Here the intervention of Gandhi, as a leading Hindu, became critical.

  Gandhi drew much of his nationalist inspiration from the traditional myths, beliefs, and symbols of Hinduism. As he once explained, “My bent is not political but religious. And I take part in politics because I feel there is no department of life that can be divorced from religion.”11