India: A History. Revised and Updated (88 page)

PURNA SWARAJ

In 1920–2 India was convulsed by a crescendo of
satyagrahas
,
swadeshi
boycotts, strikes and disturbances in the greatest display of mass non-co-operation and organised protest yet witnessed. Gandhi at last emerged as its inspiration and, with the death of Tilak in 1920, he also became the dominant figure in Congress. At his instigation the organisation was transformed into a more permanent, representative and effective institution, with the subscription reduced to attract a mass membership, a new structure of committees headed by a standing ‘working committee’, and more frequent meetings at national and provincial level. As well as repeal of the Rowlatt Acts and redress for the subsequent atrocities, protest focused on two other issues: the political opportunities opened by the Montagu– Chelmsford reforms, and a wild-card grievance dear to Muslim opinion concerning the plight of the caliphate, or
khilafat.

The office of caliph, the supreme political and religious institution according to many exponents of Muslim law, had long since passed from Baghdad to Cairo and then on to Constantinople and the Ottoman sultans of Turkey. It had therefore been to Constantinople that in the 1780s Tipu Sultan had appealed for recognition of his Mysore sovereignty. When Turkey entered the First World War as a German ally, some Indian Muslims had raised objections to Muslim troops being used against their ‘spiritual leader’. The British had largely allayed these by insisting that the caliphate would be respected in any eventual peace treaty. Some Khilafatist supporters had nevertheless been interned during the war. Released in 1919, and fearing that the government of India would prove unwilling and perhaps unable to influence the peace process, these activists immediately began to apply what pressure they could.

Gandhi had worked closely with Muslims in Natal. He realised the importance of Hindu–Muslim collaboration in the struggle for
swaraj
, and adopted the Khilafatist cause as a means to that end. A non-co-operation programme was organised and, when the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres revealed that the caliph would indeed lose out to the extent of ceding control over the holy places of Islam to the Arabs, it swung into action. Medals were to be returned, appointments declined, schools and government institutions boycotted.

Additionally a
hijra
, or ‘flight’ like that of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina, saw about thirty thousand Muslims flee from infidel rule in the Panjab to Islamic brotherhood in Afghanistan. Most soon trailed back, penniless and exceedingly bitter. In India those of their brethren who urged Muslim sepoys to disobey orders were quickly arrested. The movement served to unite many shades of Islamic opinion and to politicise some of the poorer sections of Muslim society. Thanks to Gandhi’s leadership, it also gave the impression of a united Hindu–Muslim front against the British. But in reality ‘Hindus and Muslims were fairly launched not upon a common struggle but upon a joint struggle; they worked together but not as one.’
²⁴

The chosen issue of the caliphate emphasised the allegiance of Muslims not to Indian sovereignty but to an external sovereignty of the
dar-ul-Islam
, the ‘world of Islam’. Gandhi hoped that joint action would create its own bond; and for a time it did. The non-co-operation movement, started by Gandhi and the Khilafatists in mid-1920, had quickly spread to Congress, whose members, already in an uproar over the Panjab atrocities, were at last examining the implications of the long-delayed Montagu–Chelmsford reforms.

These significantly increased Indian representation at all levels of government; they also introduced a new principle, known as dyarchy, whereby certain subjects – agriculture, health, education, local government – were devolved from the central government to the provincial governments. Since the provincial governments were now to have ministers who would be chosen from, and responsible to, the provincial legislative councils which themselves now consisted mainly of elected Indian members, dyarchy meant that the devolved subjects passed into Indian control – save, that is, for the casting veto of the governor. Additionally, Indian representation in the viceroy’s Executive Council was increased from one to three members, while his central Legislative Council became two chambers, one a Legislative Assembly, the other a Council of State; both were to have a majority of elected members but, again, the viceroy retained a superior prerogative.

Before the war these provisions would have caused a sensation, but by 1921 they were barely acceptable. In recognition of her wartime contribution, India had sent representatives to the peace conference at Versailles and had been enrolled in the League of Nations. The appetite for full nationhood could no longer be met by the drip-feed of heavily diluted constitutional concessions. It was only browbeating by Gandhi which wrung from Congress a grudging vote of thanks for the new reforms, and this was more from policy than gratitude. To him, as to most Congress members in the aftermath of Amritsar, dyarchy sounded too much like a lame apology for ‘Dyer-archy’. Moreover the powers reserved to the governors and viceroy clearly negated the veneer of self-rule. As for the new seats and offices on offer, they became simply targets for renunciation as Congress endorsed the new wave of non-co-operation.

At its Calcutta meeting in September 1920 Gandhi narrowly won a trial of strength in persuading the majority of Congress to endorse the new programme of boycott. By December, when elections under the new dispensation had nevertheless been held and various dissident groupings had successfully contested them, Congress was ready to take a much sterner line. Support for non-co-operation at every level was now overwhelming as Gandhi, not without a sense of triumphalism, promised
swaraj
within one year.

On a state visit in 1921 the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII) processed through streets that were empty and silent as the boycott took effect. Cultivators rallied to the cause in UP and elsewhere to form
kisan sabhas
, ‘peasant societies’, pressing agrarian grievances. Industrial workers from Bombay to Bengal organised strikes and formed themselves into
unions. Amongst the tens of thousands arrested and sentenced to short gaol terms were both Nehrus.

But 1921 ended with Gandhi’s promised
swaraj
still unattained. Indeed he looked to be losing control of the situation. Like
satyagraha
, he interpreted
swaraj
in a personal as well as a national sense. It could as well be translated as ‘self-control’ or ‘self-reliance’ as ‘self-rule’. Political emancipation lay through economic emancipation from dependency on manufactured and imported products, through ideological emancipation from the materialism of the West, and through individual emancipation from the tyranny of self and the violence of desire. His obsession with spinning, with the nationwide distribution of spinning wheels, and with the wearing of homespun
khadi
looked to many like a wildly eccentric distraction at this time of national upheaval. Gandhi, though, saw in it the discipline and the dignity of a more profound and universal resurgence. In short, like everyone else, he had his own agenda. While Khilafatists looked to the crescent of international Islam, India’s first communists brandished the Marxist hammer and socialists like Jawaharlal Nehru took up the
kisan
’s sickle. Hindu revivalists saw
swaraj
as
Ram-raj
(the utopia of the
Ramayana
), Sikhs as a return to the rule of the
khalsa
(the ‘pure’), and practically every caste and language group as a chance for self-promotion. Meanwhile Gandhi fixed his gaze on human redemption.

In early 1922, in a bid to refocus the movement, he announced a new phase of civil disobedience which was to start at Bardoli in Gujarat and to include the ultimate defiance of refusing to pay taxes. Imprisoned activists sensed a climax; India braced itself for the great showdown. Then Gandhi called it all off. Hindu–Muslim collaboration was already crumbling at the edges. M.A. Jinnah had walked out on Congress over the boycotting of the new reforms and what he regarded as Gandhi’s rabble-rousing techniques; in distant Kerala the
moplahs
of Calicut and Cannanore (Muslims who claimed descent from the first Arab traders to settle on the Malabar coast) had taken up arms against Hindus as well as Europeans; and in the north Madan Mohan Malaviya’s
Mahasabha
, a Hindu revivalist movement like the
Arya Samaj
, stood accused of forcibly converting Muslims with a form of Hindu baptism. Then came news from UP of mob violence in which twenty-two Indian constables had been burnt to death in their own police station. For Gandhi it was the last straw. India was obviously not ready for ‘self-rule’. He retired to his spinning wheel, was promptly arrested for past incitements, pleaded guilty, and successfully secured the maximum six-year sentence; he thought of it more as a penance.

Partly out of frustration, partly out of ambition, in that same year
Motilal Nehru and others successfully argued in Congress that the limitations of the new reforms could be more effectively exposed, and
swaraj
promoted, from within the system. Known as the ‘Swarajists’, these Congress members then stood for election, assumed office, and fitfully suborned the operation of government. But since they were always overruled by the powers reserved to the governors and viceroy, their ardour soon cooled and they lapsed into a more collaborative mode.

Thus by 1923 many Congress members had ceased their protest, and Muslim Khilafatists were already feeling betrayed by their Hindu colleagues. A worse betrayal awaited them from the caliphate itself. In 1924 it was, of all people, a Turk, in fact Kemal Ataturk, who simply abolished the whole institution when he overthrew the last Ottoman sultan. Indian Muslims now felt more isolated than ever. They were left, in the words of a noted authority, ‘politically ‘‘all dressed up with nowhere to go’’ … [They] had hitched their wagon to the crescent of the caliphate and it had dragged them ‘‘up the garden path’’.’
²⁵
After this bitter experience it would be more than a decade before pan-Indian Muslim sentiment would again unite on a single issue. By then Jinnah would have joined the Muslim League, and the ideal of an Indian
dar-ul-Islam
would have replaced that of the caliphate.

While Gandhi languished in gaol some of his disciples, like Rajendra Prasad, continued to boycott government office and to concentrate on the social programmes dear to their leader. From 1925 onwards these programmes included the support and education of those downtrodden members of Hindu society who were conventionally regarded as ‘untouchable’ but whom Gandhi renamed as ‘Harijans’ (‘Children of God’). Jinnah, meanwhile, stood aloof from both Congress groups. And ‘communal strife’, the Indian euphemism for Hindu–Muslim conflict, worsened; in 1926 riots in Calcutta left over a hundred dead.

The British, not unhappy about this evidence of nationalist disarray, quietly removed two long-standing grievances: access to the elite Indian Civil Service (the senior administrative cadre) and to officer-training in the army was made less difficult for Indian applicants; and by establishing India’s fiscal autonomy, much of the ‘drain theory’ critique was negated. Duties on imported cloth were soon raised, thus removing the preferential status enjoyed by Lancashire’s products. ‘The British still had a great economic interest in India, but the principle of tariff autonomy was established and the days of the old economic imperialism were over.’
²⁶

Political advances remained much more contentious. The Montagu– Chelmsford reforms had contained provision for a review and further progress towards ‘responsible government’ within ten years. In 1928, therefore,
a parliamentary commission under Sir John Simon arrived to assess the situation and make proposals. By what is sometimes described as an ‘oversight’, it contained not a single Indian. Moreover Baldwin’s Conservative government was known to be out of sympathy even with the ‘Montford’ reforms, let alone any advance on them. Massive demonstrations greeted the wretched commissioners throughout India. Congress united around a strict boycott of them, and Gandhi, released on medical grounds, at last returned to the political fray.

Where all else had failed, British pig-headedness had again provided India with an issue on which most nationalists were in agreement. Anticipating the Simon Report, Congress had already called an All Parties Convention which demanded a dominion status for the ‘Commonwealth of India’ equivalent to that enjoyed by Canada or Australia. In late 1928 the young Jawaharlal Nehru went one better, piloting through Congress a resolution demanding
purna swaraj
, ‘complete self-rule’. This meant independence. At the December 1929 Congress the green, saffron and white flag was unfurled to shouts of ‘Long Live the Revolution’; the first Independence Day, when all endorsed a long pledge to resist British rule and assert
purna swaraj
, was celebrated on 26 January 1930.