God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  Taylor was now desperate to salvage something from the political disaster for which he himself was largely responsible. He accepted this compromise, with the proviso that the expulsion and destruction should be real and not merely nominal, and to this end it was agreed that he and a small escort should accompany the Bunerwals. The latter would send a force of two thousand tribesmen led by four of their chiefs, and Taylor would accompany them, together with an escort of seven British officers and four companies of Guides Infantry. ‘Bobs’ Roberts, who had a quite extraordinary knack of finding himself in the thick of the action, was one of the officers selected to accompany Taylor.

  On the afternoon of 19 December Reynell Taylor and the officers mounted their horses and set off across the Chamla valley with their infantry escort and the four Buner khans. But instead of the two thousand flintlockmen promised by the Bunerwals, there were barely a hundred. Furthermore, the Bunerwals’ private agreement had angered the several smaller Yusufzai tribes who had their homes in the Mahabun Mountains, particularly the Amazais, who had suffered heavy casualties defending their land on the Laloo ridge. ‘The Amazais’, Roberts later wrote in his autobiography, ‘did not attempt to disguise their disgust at our being present in the country, and they gathered in knots, scowling and pointing at us.’

  Despite the Amazais’ hostility, Malka was reached late on 21 December. Inevitably, it was deserted. But it was also far more substantial than had been anticipated, ‘containing several large edifices amongst which the Moulvie’s hall of audience, barracks for the soldiers, stabling and a powder manufactory formed conspicuous objects. There was no regular fortification but the outer walls of the houses were connected and formed a continuous line of posterns.’ The next morning the British officers watched as every building was set on fire, sending up columns of smoke visible for miles around. Also viewing this spectacle was a large and very angry crowd of Amazai, who became visibly more agitated with every passing minute, pressing forward until the British officers and their escort were hemmed in on every side.

  All thoughts of pursuing the Hindustanis any further had to be abandoned. ‘We were a mere handful compared to the thousands who had gathered,’ wrote Roberts. ‘Our position was no doubt extremely critical, and it was well for us that we had at our head such a cool, determined leader.’ Reynell Taylor went over to the Amazai headman and told him in a firm voice that since the object of their visit had been accomplished, they were now ready to retrace their steps. But at this the Amazais became still further excited: ‘They talked in loud tones, and gesticulated in true Pathan fashion, thronging round Taylor, who stood quite alone and perfectly self-possessed in the midst of the angry and dangerous-looking multitude.’

  At this moment of crisis a grey-bearded Buner khan with one arm and one eye, ZAIDULLA KHAN of Daggar, forced his way through to Taylor’s side, raised his one arm and called for silence. He then made what Roberts termed a ‘plucky speech’, telling the assembled Amazai that they could of course kill the Englishmen and their escort, but that to do so, ‘“You must first kill us Bunerwals first, for we have sworn to protect them, and we will do so with our lives.”’ It was a remarkable demonstration of the Pathan code of nanawati. As Zaidulla Khan’s later conduct demonstrated, he regarded the British as his enemies; yet having agreed to accompany them to Malka and back, he felt honour-bound to protect them with his life.

  Although the journey was frequently interrupted by ‘stormy discussions’ between the Amazais and the Bunerwals, Taylor and his escort returned safely to Ambeyla. The military camp at the head of the pass was at once broken up and by Christmas Day 1863 both the Ambeyla Pass and the Mahabun Mountain were free of the taint of the infidel. ‘The colony of fanatics’, wrote Major James in his final report, ‘so perversely hanging on our borders, a blemish on our administration . . . has been half-destroyed, forced to retreat to more inhospitable and uncongenial regions, and will shortly, I trust, be eradicated for ever.’ Army records indicate that in excess of seven hundred Wahhabi mujahedeen died in the fighting. Yet the fact was that Amir Abdullah Ali and perhaps as many as two hundred of his fellow Hindustanis lived to fight another day.

  So too did an Afridi tribesman named SHERE ALI, a cavalry trooper who had served first Hugh James and then Reynell Taylor as his mounted orderly. Shere Ali was at Taylor’s side throughout the Ambeyla campaign and was rewarded by him with a horse, a pistol and a certificate. As his personal orderly Shere Ali subsequently attended Taylor ‘with eager zeal and devotion in rough work, and in peace he had been the playfellow of my children, one little girl having him entirely at her beck and call. In his rough posteen [sheepskin jacket] and boots, and armed always like men of his clan with sword and knife, he would carry her all over the place and attend her on her pony rides.’ But popular as Shere Ali was among the European officers he served, he was nevertheless Afridi to the core: ‘Like the rest of his tribe, he was constantly involved in blood feuds, and I well remember the look on his face when he informed me he had obtained a month’s leave for the purpose of killing some hereditary enemies who taken advantage of his absence to shoot a woman of his family while drawing water.’

  This blood feud had been maintained in Shere Ali’s family for generations and it continued after Taylor’s departure, when as their mounted orderly Shere Ali served two more Commissioners of Peshawar. However, in March 1867 he spotted a kinsman involved in his family feud walking near the house of the then Commissioner, Frederick Pollock, and killed him. He duly appeared before Pollock and was found guilty of murder, but because of the extenuating circumstances and his long record of service Pollock declined to sentence him to death, and instead ordered him to be transported for life. This was badly received by Shere Ali, who before his removal from the court begged that his sentence might be commuted to death. Pollock refused, so Shere Ali was sent away in chains to the Government of India’s penal colony on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. There, lost to the outside world and forgotten, he continued to believe that Pollock and the British Raj he represented had done him a great injustice.

  8

  The Wahabees on Trial

  Our prison gates have closed upon batch after batch of unhappy misguided traitors; the Courts have sent one set of ring-leaders after another to lonely islands across the sea; yet the whole country continues to furnish money and men to the Forlorn Hope of Islam on our Frontier and persists in its blood-stained protest against Christian rule.

  Sir William Hunter, Our Indian Mussulmans: are they Bound in Conscience to Rebel against the Queen?, 1876

  In 1884 a remarkable autobiography was published in Delhi. It was entitled Kala Pani: Tarikh e Ajeeb (The Black Water: a Strange Story) and was the first printed memoir by an Indian Wahhabi, telling of his arrest, trial and transportation across the kala pani or black water – in this instance, the salt waters of the Bay of Bengal – to the Andaman Islands, where he spent sixteen years in exile. Its author was Muhammad Jafar of Thanesar, the petition-writer named by the mounted police daffadar Ghazan Khan in the evidence collected by his son and presented to the district magistrate at Thanesar in the late autumn of 1863: evidence suggesting that ‘Munshi Ja’far of Thaneswar, whom the men call Khalifa, was the great man who passed up the Bengalis and their carbines and rifles.’

  Muhammad Jafar’s autobiography begins with a brief history of his early years: how after losing his father as a child he had lived like a vagabond until he taught himself to read and write, becoming a petition-writer at a magistrate’s court. Then a chance meeting with a Wahhabi preacher changed his life and he came to regard his association with British infidel justice as highly corrupting. Muhammad Jafar glosses over any activity that presents him as anything other than a victim of injustice, but nevertheless implies that when the Sepoy Mutiny broke out in 1857 he headed a group of Wahhabis who went up to Sittana. He was then twenty-one years old. After General Cotton’s break-up of the Hindustani Fanatics in 1858 he returned to Thanesar and resumed hi
s former profession. This was ‘by order of a Certain Person, and for a Hidden Object’. His work as a court petition-writer now became a front, for the ‘Hidden Object’ was jihad against the British Government and the ‘Certain Person’ was the Amir of the Wahhabis in Patna, Ahmadullah, one of the three Wahhabi mullahs detained by Commissioner William Tayler in the summer of 1857. Since the death of his co-detainee from natural causes Ahmadullah had assumed the leadership of the Wahhabi movement, while his younger brother Yahya Ali had become the movement’s senior imam. Unknown to the British, these two brothers were now joint leaders of the Indian Wahhabis in plains India.

  But then came the day in December 1863 when a friend with contacts in the judiciary in Thanesar arrived at Muhammad Jafar’s house to warn him that the policeman Daffadar Ghazan Khan had made a ‘false complaint’ against him to the British authorities. Later that same night a party of policemen led by Captain Q. D. Parsons, Superintendent of Police in Amballa, raided his house and immediately found what Muhammad Jafar himself termed a ‘dangerous letter’, written but not yet sent. ‘That letter’, admitted Jafar, ‘was addressed to the head of the Mujaheddin caravan and there was a coded message about the despatch of a few thousand coins.’ The letter and other incriminating papers were seized, but no arrest was made. Next morning Muhammad Jafar gave out that he was going to Amballa, and fled. Captain Parsons, who can perhaps be best described as a rogue policeman with psychopathic tendencies that finally drove him to insanity, was furious. He had all the male members of Muhammad Jafar’s household beaten up until his younger brother revealed that he had taken refuge in Delhi.

  It was at this point that Sir Herbert Edwardes, the Commissioner at Amballa, grasped the full import of Muhammad Jafar and his letter. The military expedition against the Hindustani Fanatics was on the point of being launched under Neville Chamberlain’s command, and here was the first hard evidence to show who was orchestrating the fighters in the Fanatic Camp in the mountains – and how. A reward of ten thousand rupees for information leading to Muhammad Jafar’s arrest was authorised, and Delhi now became the scene of a major manhunt led by Captain Parsons. Jafar initially evaded the police net and fled with two companions in a phaeton to Aligarh. But Parsons got to hear of it, telegraphed ahead, and Muhammad Jafar was arrested on his arrival and brought back to Amballa in irons. Over the next few days the Wahhabi petition-writer was repeatedly roughed up by Parsons and his policemen in an effort to get him to reveal the names of ‘the participants and supporters of the Jihad’. He was told that if he agreed to act as an ‘approver’ he would be released and given a high post, but that if he refused he would be hanged.

  The use of approvers, miscreants who turned Queen’s evidence against their fellow conspirators or partners in crime in return for a pardon, was a standard weapon in the British judicial armoury. In his autobiography Muhammad Jafar rails against these approvers and their lies, but the details he supplies show that it was the incriminating evidence he himself inadvertently provided, combined with his actions in leading the authorities to other branches of his organisation while on the run, which resulted in the series of arrests that destroyed the Wahhabi leadership in the 1860s and early 1870s.

  Muhammad Jafar’s letters led Captain Parsons to Patna and to Elahi Bux, aged head of one of the three Patna families and father of the two most important members of the Wahhabi council, Maulvis Ahmadullah and Yahya Ali. Acting on Parsons’ telegraphed information, the Patna city magistrate arrested the old man in his own house and then released him on a surety of ten thousand rupees. Already forewarned by news of the arrest of Muhammad Jafar and his contacts in Amballa and Delhi, Elahi Bux’s two sons set about burning all the incriminating documents stored in the Sadiqpore chota godown. This process appears to have been still incomplete when on 21 January 1864 Parsons himself arrived in Patna and, with the local magistrate and a large body of police, raided the Wahhabi headquarters. He was too late to catch Maulvi Ahmadullah, who had just left for Calcutta to attend a meeting with the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, but his younger brother Yahya Ali and two other members of the organisation were arrested and more papers seized. By Muhammad Jafar’s account, Patna’s disgraced former commissioner William Tayler was present at these arrests, which must have given him immense satisfaction.

  The papers recovered mostly concerned money transactions and were not in themselves sufficient to build a case against anyone in the household at Sadiqpore, but they led the indefatigable superintendent of police to a number of suspects in Bengal. Two of these were persuaded by Parsons – by means unknown but which may be guessed at – to testify that they had stayed in the small godown at Patna while on their way up-country from Bengal to the frontier to wage war against the British. There they had met the imam of the Wahhabis, Yahya Ali, and had heard him preach jihad. When three of those arrested in Amballa after Muhammad Jafar’s flight also turned approver, the cases against him, Yahya Ali, Elahi Bux and eight others were considered complete.

  In the opinion of the Deputy-Commissioner of Amballa there was also sufficient evidence to charge Yahya Ali’s elder brother Ahmadullah, but this was disputed by the Government of Bengal. Maulvi Ahmadullah was now held in high esteem by Government, he still had influential friends such as Sir Frederick James Halliday in England and, moreover, he occupied several important public positions in Patna, including that of Deputy Collector of Income Tax, and was a member of the Committee of Public Instruction. After the grave injustice he had suffered at the hands of William Tayler in 1857 it was was unthinkable that he should be arrested a second time except on the strongest evidence. So Ahmadullah was left untouched, no doubt greatly to the disappointment of Tayler, who was following these goings-on with the closest interest from his legal firm’s offices in Patna.

  Amid much general excitement and newspaper comment, the trial of eleven Wahhabis on the charge of waging war against the Queen opened at Amballa in April 1864 at the court of the Sessions Judge, Sir Herbert Edwardes, assisted by two Muslim and two Hindu Assessors. Yahya Ali refused to defend himself, so it was arranged by friends that he and his father should be represented by a young European barrister, persuaded to take on the case by a very large fee. Nevertheless, Yahya Ali remained aloof from the proceedings, endlessly reciting verses from the Quran and seemingly resigned to his fate. In his account of the trial Muhammad Jafar makes much of the way many of the several dozen witnesses called ‘would look at us and weep bitterly’ as they gave their evidence. He asserts that all were kept in police custody until the trial was over, and threatened with execution if they failed to testify as they had been coached to do. He cites the example of a boy who worked in his household and who at a preliminary hearing failed to give his evidence convincingly: ‘On the same day he was beaten so brutally at night that he died before he could appear as witness in the sessions court. In order to avoid the embarrassment Mr Parsons announced that the boy had died of an illness.’ The use of approvers’ testimonies was always open to abuse, but it is hard to take Jafar’s complaints of a mistrial too seriously when he himself acknowledges that there was indeed a conspiracy to make war against the Government of India and that he was part of it.

  All eleven accused were found guilty. According to Muhammad Jafar, when the verdicts and sentences were pronounced not only the spectators in court but even the four Indian assessors had tears in their eyes: ‘They wished our release at heart, but when they found the judge and the commissioner inclined on punishing us, they got frightened and wrote that the crime had already been proved.’ Three of the prisoners were condemned to death and the remaining eight sentenced to transportation for life. In pronouncing sentence Sir Herbert Edwardes was in no doubt as to who was the most serious offender. ‘It is proved against the prisoner Yahya Ali,’ he declared,

  that he has been the mainspring of the great treason which this trial has laid bare. He has been the religious preacher, spreading from his mosque at Patna, under the most solemn sanctions, the hateful
principles of the Crescentade. He has enlisted subordinate Agents to collect money and preach the Moslem Jihad. He has deluded hundreds and thousands of his countrymen into treason and rebellion. He has plunged the Government of British India, by his intrigues, into a Frontier War, which has cost hundreds of lives . . . He belongs to a hereditarily disloyal and fanatical family. He aspires to the merit of a religious reformer, but instead of appealing to reason and to conscience . . . he seeks his end in political revolution.

  Muhammad Jafar was the next to receive the court’s judgment. In his version of events, which conflicts in several material points with the official record, he declares that he heard with pride Edwardes’ closing remarks about how he had used his great intelligence to conspire against the Government, and that Edwardes would be happy to see him hanged: ‘I listened to the whole statement very calmly but in response to the last sentence I said, “It is God who decides about life and death. These things are not within your power. God has the power to finish you even before I die.” He was very angry to hear my response.’

  The Wahhabi trial was Sir Herbert Edwardes’ last public duty before his early retirement, and he left for England as soon as it was over. His death from pneumonia three and a half years later was seen by Muhammad Jafar as God’s punishment.

  As soon as sentence had been passed the convicts had their heads shaven and their long beards cut off, and their white robes and turbans were exchanged for rough prison garb consisting of a saffron-coloured suit of coarse dungaree cloth – to all intents, orange overalls. By Muhammad Jafar’s account, he and Yahya Ali rejoiced at their death sentences, the latter asserting that he felt as if he was ‘in heaven and was watching heavenly nymphs’. They were placed in the condemned cell in Amballa Jail, where their continuing high spirits astonished their many visitors, European and Indian: ‘Often they used to ask, “Soon you will be hanged. Why are you so happy?” We would only say that in our religion we attain martyrdom on being killed in this cruel way in the path of God and that was the reason for our happiness.’