by Dilip Hiro
Following his abandoning of the civil disobedience program, Gandhi undertook a five-day fast of penance as part of his periodic crucifixion of the flesh. All this reinforced his saintly image as a mahatma among the illiterate and deeply religious masses.
There was, however, no letup in his campaign against the British Raj. “How can there be any compromise whilst the British lion continues to shake its gory claws in our face?” he asked. “The rice-eating, puny millions of Indians seem to have resolved upon achieving their own destiny without further tutelage and without arms. . . . The fight that was commenced in 1920 is a fight to the finish.”38
This article was one of three judged to be seditious, the earlier ones having appeared on September 19 and December 21 of the previous year in Young India. Gandhi was arrested on March 10, 1922, found guilty of sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison. As a result of his unexpected surgery for acute appendicitis, he would be freed in February 1924.
During his absence from the political stage, the landscape changed radically.
Retreat and Reaction
The shattered hopes for self-government within a year and the abrupt ending of the civil disobedience movement led to disappointment and frustration among the leaders and the led. There was split among Congress dignitaries, with several of them abandoning noncooperation and deciding to participate in elections to be held under the Government of India Act of 1919.
Some at the top who had disagreed with Gandhi’s radical agenda started to drift away from the Congress Party. Among them was Madan Mohan Malaviya, who had been the party’s president twice. He transferred his loyalty to the All India Hindu Mahasabha (Hindi: Grand Council), a communal organization founded in 1914 as a counterforce to the All India Muslim League. Addressing the Hindu Mahasabha’s annual conference in late December 1922, Malaviya detailed the grievances of Hindus. He referred to the atrocities visited on them by Mopila Muslim peasants in the southern Malabar region (now called Kerala) since August 1921. In the communal rioting in the Punjabi city of Multan in September 1922, Hindus had witnessed the desecration of their temples by Muslim hooligans, he noted. There were similar instances in Amritsar.39
On their part, the leaders of the Arya Samaj, a Hindu social reform movement founded originally in 1875 to purge contemporary Hinduism of the caste system and idolatry, started the Shuddhi (Sanskrit: purification) movement to return converted Indian Muslims to Hinduism. Some Muslim notables were upset by this effort. Justifying the Shuddhi campaign, Malaviya claimed that during the past year one hundred thousand Hindus had been converted to Islam in Gujarat, an alarming phenomenon. “If when now we are badly treated with a numerical strength of 22 crores [220 million out of 300 million Indians], what would be our condition in future with a much reduced Hindu population if we allow this rate of conversion from Hinduism and do not allow re-conversion into Hinduism?”40
Relations between Hindus and Muslims were deteriorating. There was a major outbreak of Hindu-Muslim violence in Calcutta in 1923. To reverse the trend, Congress delegates honored Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar by electing him the party’s president at their 1923 session within months of his second release from jail. He became the sixth Muslim president of the organization in its thirty-eight-year history. (Five years earlier, when he was still imprisoned, he had been elected president of the Muslim League.)
Jinnah kept well clear of the noncooperation and civil disobedience campaigns. In April 1923 he resigned formally from the Congress Party. In September he was elected a Muslim member representing Bombay in the newly established Central Legislative Assembly, the successor to the old Imperial Legislative Council. In the chamber he continued to press his demand for “a fully responsible government,” first promised by Edwin Montagu in 1917.
Gandhi had hardly recuperated fully from his debilitating surgery after his release from jail when he and Khilafat leaders suffered a major political setback. On March 3, 1924, at the behest of the Turkish president, General Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Grand National Assembly in Ankara deposed Caliph Abdul Majid and abolished the 1,292-year-old office of the caliph. With that, both planks of Gandhi’s noncooperation campaign collapsed.
To Jinnah, a secular public figure, the fate of the caliphate mattered little, if at all. Indeed, he had watched with deepening unease the rising influence of Muslim preachers—bearing the title of maulavi (another derivative of mawla, Arabic: master or learned man)—in the community on the issue of the caliph and his continued control over Islam’s prime holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. With the abolition of the caliphate, Jinnah’s stature in the Muslim League rose. Its delegates elected him the party’s president in 1924 for a three-year term.
As someone who believed that politics should be the privilege only of the highly educated, he deplored the way Gandhi had opened it up to semiliterate and illiterate agitators. It was this phenomenon that, in his view, had led to the rising tensions between Muslims and Hindus.
On his part, Gandhi tried to reverse this worrying trend. For weeks he listened to both sides and made independent inquiries. The end result was his article “Hindu-Muslim Tension: Its Cause and Cure” in Young India on May 29, 1924. Its extraordinary length of six thousand words could not mask its flaws. It summarized the common perceptions of Hindus about Muslims, and vice versa. It examined a few cases of communal rioting. It castigated each community for its seemingly irrational behavior. He recycled his earlier argument that “we [Hindus] say nothing about the slaughter [of cows] that daily takes place on behalf of Englishmen [living in India]. Our anger becomes red hot when a Muslim slaughters a cow. . . . [But] the cows find their necks under the butcher’s knife because Hindus sell them.”41 What it did not do was to provide an in-depth analysis of the problem in terms of history, sociology, and economics. In the absence of a fair grasp of these disciplines, the task was beyond his intellectual powers.
As for the cure for this centuries-old malady, he concluded that Hindu-Muslim unity was possible because “it is so natural, so necessary for both, and because I believe in human nature.”42 This circular argument was in essence a cop-out.
Unsurprisingly, his overlong article in English had no impact on the situation on the ground. Periodic rioting continued. But the one that stood out occurred in the town of Kohat (population, forty-four thousand) in North-West Frontier Province (later Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) in September 1924.
The local branch of the Sanatan Dharma Sabha (Sanskrit: Eternal Law Council), a Hindu revivalist organization like the Arya Samaj,43 published a pamphlet containing a scurrilous poem about Islam purportedly as a riposte to an anti-Hindu poem printed earlier in a Muslim news sheet. This infuriated Muslims, who were 92 percent of the local population. They were not satisfied by the apologies offered by the local Hindu leaders. A three-day rampage, September 9–11, with looting, arson, and violence, left 155 Hindus dead. The authorities evacuated 3,500 Hindus to the town’s military cantonment area for their safety.44
Fifty-four-year-old Gandhi decided to act in his own peculiar way. In order to “reform” those who loved him, he would fast. This was his attempt to reach out to the belligerents’ hearts so that they could share his feelings and react the way he did. On September 17 he announced a twenty-one-day fast in the house of Muhammad Ali Jauhar in Delhi. He was attended by two Muslim doctors. This would show Hindus that their saintly politician trusted Muslims with his life, and that the world would see Mohandas and Muhammad as bosom friends.
On October 8 Gandhi broke his fast with a Muslim preacher reciting the opening verses of the Quran, followed by the singing of the hymn “When I survey the wondrous Cross,” and ending with the Hindu hymn, “Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram/ Patita Pavan Sitaram” (“Chief of Raghu’s house, King Rama/Uplifter of the fallen, Sita and Rama”).45 It was all very moving and widely publicized. But it made little difference at the popular level.
Gandhi’s hunger strike was altogether different from what
he had done in Ahmedabad in March 1918. The textile workers’ strike was a local issue. The mill owners were a small, cohesive group, apprehensive of Gandhi dying. In stark contrast, the Hindu-Muslim issue existed on a national scale and concerned vast, amorphous social entities even if only their urban members were taken into account. The intercommunal misperceptions and prejudices that had grown over centuries could not be dissipated by an ascetic politician voluntarily abstaining from food.
In late December 1924 in Belgaum, the day after the end of the Congress session he presided over, Gandhi attended the cow protection conference. It decided to found an All-India Cow Protection Organization. His strategy was to persuade Muslims to refrain from killing cows and eating beef voluntarily. “Mussalmans claim that Islam permits them to kill the cow,” he wrote in the Young India on January 29, 1925. “To make a Mussalman, therefore, to abstain from cow-killing under compulsion would amount in my opinion to converting him to Hinduism by force.”46
On a contemporary issue such as the rioting in Kohat, Gandhi was unable to reconcile his assessment with Shaukat Ali’s. Their joint visit to Kohat to collect evidence had to be scrapped when they were barred from entering the town by the viceroy. They decided to conduct their hearings in Rawalpindi. They ended up viewing the virulent episode from different perspectives. In January 1925, Shaukat Ali declared that arson and the concomitant shootings were accidental, and that there was no preplanned jihad against Hindus. Gandhi, then serving as the Congress Party’s president, stated that the Muslim fury was so intense on September 10 that if Hindus had not been evacuated en masse, many more would have been butchered.47
Gandhi-Jinnah—Parting of Ways
A disheartened Gandhi now channeled some of his time and energy into a campaign to end untouchability practiced by caste Hindus in their treatment of outcastes. At the same time, to bolster support for swaraj, he resorted to presenting its realization in religious terms. He argued that the end of the British Raj would lead to the onset of Ram Raj, the golden age of ancient India, when justice and equity prevailed in a realm ruled by Lord Rama. This scenario mesmerized particularly the unlettered Hindu masses in villages but left Muslims cold and alienated. They could not relate to the Hindu god-king Rama and his kingdom, which supposedly existed around 700 to 300 bce—two millennia before the founding of Islam.
On his part, Jinnah remained an active participant in the 145-member Central Legislative Assembly. He was elected to the assembly’s committee charged with exploring the possibility of establishing a military defense academy in India. In that capacity, he spent several months touring major European countries and North America. Among those who accompanied the committee members during their visit to Sandhurst Military College in Britain was Captain Douglas Gracey—later Sir General Douglas Gracey, commander in chief of the Pakistani Army. Recalling Jinnah’s arrogant behavior toward the British officers appearing before the committee, Gracey said, “I had to protest and point out that the officers were giving evidence voluntarily . . . and that they had the right to be treated with courtesy. . . . Once Jinnah was challenged, he became reasonable, and he would never bear malice afterwards.”48
Despite the leadership Jinnah provided the Muslim League, its membership in 1926 shrank to 1,330.49 That made him immerse himself further into politics at the cost of neglecting Ruttie. They became estranged.
In November 1927 Lord Birkenhead, secretary of state for India, appointed a seven-member commission of MPs, headed by John Simon, to recommend a revision of the 1919 Government of India Act. The Congress session in December decided to boycott the Simon Commission because it lacked any representatives from India. Guided by Jinnah, the Muslim League’s Council followed suit but by a narrow majority, which caused a split in the party. Lord Birkenhead challenged Indian politicians to draft a constitution that would be accepted by the leaders of various communities.
High Congress officials took up the challenge. They invited all non-Congress leaders to an All Parties Conference in Delhi in February 1928. At the second such gathering in May, a committee of ten members was formed to outline broad principles of the constitution. It was chaired by Motilal Nehru, an eminent Congressman. Its nine members included two Muslims—Sir Ali Imam, former Muslim League president, and Shuaib Qureshi—and one Sikh, Mangal Singh. Its unanimously agreed-on draft, called the Nehru Report, was published on August 10. The third All Parties Conference in Lucknow at the end of the month endorsed it.
The salient features of the Nehru Report were as follows. India should be granted the status of a dominion within the British Empire with a federal form of government in which residual powers—that is, the powers not assigned specifically to the center or the provinces—would be vested with the center; Muslims should be given one-quarter representation in the Central Legislature commensurate with their proportion in the population; there should be no separate electorate for any community, but reservation for minority seats could be allowed in the provinces where minorities totaled at least 10 percent; and the official language should be Hindustani, written in Devanagari or Urdu script or in any of the other six major scripts.
The Nehru Report’s elimination of separate electorates was rejected by Jauhar, who quit the Congress Party and joined the Muslim League. In late December 1928, two months after his return from a trip to Europe, Jinnah went to Calcutta on the eve of the Congress session to lobby an amendment to the Nehru Report. “Majorities are apt to be oppressive and tyrannical, and minorities always dread and fear that their interest and rights, unless clearly safeguarded by statutory provisions, would suffer,” he said. (He could have referred to the way majority-caste Hindus had oppressed the minority Untouchables for centuries.) He warned that the alternative to a settlement might be “revolution and civil war.”50 His plea fell on stony ground. At most, Congress leaders were prepared to raise the Muslim representation from 25 to 27 percent.
“Jinnah was sadly humbled, and went back to his hotel,” recalled his Parsi friend, Jamshed Nusserwanjee, who would later become mayor of Karachi. “Next morning . . . at the door of his first-class compartment, he took my hand. He had tears in his eyes as he said, ‘Jamshed, this is the parting of the ways.’”51 Jinnah’s statement would prove prophetic: it would be seen in retrospect as marking the first of the three milestones leading to the partitioning of the subcontinent.
At the Congress session, Gandhi proposed a resolution accepting the Nehru Report with a rider that the British government must grant India dominion status within one year. If freedom had not been won under dominion status by December 31, 1929, then “I must declare myself an Independence-wala,” concluded Gandhi.52
In March 1929 Jinnah came up with his manifesto of fourteen points,53 the most important of which were the following: India should have a federal form of government in which residuary powers are vested with the provinces; all cabinets at the central or provincial level as well as the Central Legislature should have at least one-third Muslim representation; the separate electorate system should continue; Muslims should be given an adequate share in all the services of the state; and there should be adequate safeguards for the protection and promotion of Muslim education, language, religion, personal laws, and charitable institutions. Despite his position as the Muslim League’s president, he failed to win the vote of the League’s council for his manifesto. Its meeting in Delhi dissolved into chaotic argument.54
Jinnah received this political setback at a vulnerable point in his life. On February 20, 1929, Ruttie, his twenty-nine-year-old, estranged wife, who had developed abdominal cancer, had died of the disease in Bombay while he was lobbying his manifesto in Delhi, where the League was headquartered. He rushed to Bombay and at her burial could not help weeping—for him a rare display of emotion in public.
In June 1929 Labor leader Ramsay MacDonald became the prime minister of Britain. India’s viceroy, Lord Irwin, a balding man with a professorial appearance, spent much of the summer in
London. On his return to Delhi he stated on October 31 that the British government envisaged a “Round Table Conference” of British and Indian delegates, and added that “the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress . . . is the attainment of Dominion status.” But when Conservative leaders in Parliament opposed the idea, he backpedaled. In his meeting with top-level Indian leaders on December 23, he said that “he was unable to prejudge or commit the [Round Table] Conference at all to any permanent line.”55 The Indian deputation included Gandhi as well as Jinnah. It would be the last time that the two of them participated in a joint political exercise.56
A week later Congress went into session in Lahore. At the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1929, the conference adopted a resolution, moved by the forty-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru, who was presiding over the session: “The British government has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom, but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally and spiritually,” it stated. “We believe, therefore, that India must sever the British connection and attain purna Swaraj or complete independence.”57
The convention adopted a green-white-saffron flag with a spinning wheel in the middle white strip as the emblem for independent India. It called on its members and friends to withdraw from legislatures, and it sanctioned civil disobedience and nonpayment of taxes. It authorized the Congress Working Committee to decide how and when satyagraha should commence. In practice, the decision rested with Mahatma Gandhi.