Was Mahatma Gandhi responsible for partition of India?

Immediately after and till 1919, Communal tension between Hindus and Muslims was at the lowest. The mutual relationship was at its best. It was all going on the right track with the Gadar movement & the influence of Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The ideology of the Gadar party was strongly secular. In the words of Sohan Singh Bhakna, who later became a major peasant leader of Punjab: "Our religion was patriotism". Had this atmosphere prevailed India we would never have never been partitioned on the basis of religion.

But everything changed with the Khilafat. A movement that would never gathered momentum unless supported by Gandhiji.

What is Khilafat movement?

The Ottoman empire, having sided with the Central Powers during World War I, suffered a major military defeat. The Treaty of Versailles (1919) reduced its territorial extent and diminished its political influence but the victorious European powers promised to protect the Ottoman emperor's status as the Caliph. However, under the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), territories such as Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt severed from the empire.

In September 1919, Maulana Muhammad Ali and his brother Shaukat Ali, together with Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, and Hasrat Mohani, started a new organization, the Khilafat Movement. The Khilafat movement (1919-1924) was a political campaign launched mainly by Muslims in British India to influence the British government in favor of Ottoman Empire and to protect the Ottoman Empire during the aftermath of World War I. Their avowed aim was to use whatever leverage they had with the British, as residents of a British colony, to protect the Caliphate. They organized Khilafat Conferences in several northern Indian cities. In 1920 they published the Khilafat Manifesto.

The Ali brothers then made a strategic alliance. They convinced Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to join a Hindu-Muslim alliance for self-rule (Indian Independence, or Swaraj {Self Rule}). Gandhi's followers would support the Khilafat Movement if the Muslims would support Gandhi's efforts for Swaraj {Self Rule}. Gandhi became a member of the Central Khilafat Committee and at the Nagpur session (1920) of the Indian National Congress Gandhi proposed a non-cooperation campaign, of non-violent satyagraha, in support of Swaraj {Self Rule} and Khilafat. Gandhiji, the apostle of Hindu-Muslim unity claimed: "We talk of Hindu- Mohammedans unity. It would be an empty phrase if the Hindus hold aloof from the Mohammedans when their vital interests are at stake." This ‘vital interest’ was the restoration of the Khilafat in far away Turkey at the cost of national freedom! and asked Hindus to support rule of Khilafat. The Khilafat-Non-Cooperation movement is singular because it is the only movement led by Gandhi that was centered on a religious issue: the preservation of the Sultan of Turkey as the Caliph of all Muslims.

KHILAFAT & HINDU-MUSLIM DISUNITY?

If a hundred million Muslims are more vitally interested in the fate of far away Muslim Country-Turkey than they are IN the fate of India, they can hardly be regarded as a unit of Indian nation. By his own admission that the Khilafat question was a vital one for the Indian Muslims, Gandhi himself in a way admitted that they formed a separate nation; they were in India, but not of India. "

The Khilafat movement became a disaster in more ways than one. Indian history books written under congress influence carefully leave out the Khilafat fiasco, or if they mention it all they present it as a unifier of Hindus and Muslims. The reality is quite different. The Hindu-Muslim alliance soon dissolved in communal violence. It resulted in a massacre of tens of thousands of innocent Hindus all over India. It was particularly virulent in Kerala where a Jihad (Holy War against infidels) called the Mopla Rebellion erupted. In August 1921, the poor Muslim peasants of Malabar (now part of Kerala state) erupted in the Moplah rebellion. After a pitched battle with British troops, the peasants attacked their predominantly Hindu, upper-caste landlords. In 1920, some 18,000 Muslim peasants, mostly from Sind and the North Western Provinces, voluntarily emigrated to Afghanistan. They believed that India was Dar al-Harb, a non-Islamic land, and wished to live in Dar al-Islam, an Islamic polity.

To make matters worse for Gandhi, Muslim leaders like the Ali brothers, whom he had sponsored and supported during the Khilafat, publicly humiliated him;

Mohammed Ali even said that a Muslim thief was better than Gandhi, simply because of the thief’s faith in Islam! "

Gandhiji's support to Khilafat led to following factors:

1) Indian Muslims realized that it is right to have pan-Islamic agenda. It is right to fight for Turkey's caliph when their own country is under foreign rule.

2) The movement itself was for a wrong cause when the majority in Turkey themselves wanted democracy.

3) With Turkey's adopting democracy under Kamal Ataturk, Khilafat became a laughing stock, making the Indian leadership also laughing stock.

4) The end of Khilafat saw Moplah riots, the bloodiest in India's history when Hindus were made to pay the price because the Turks refused caliph's rule.

5) Gandhji praised the moplahs saying that they are "god-fearing" (when the whole country including Ambedkar & Annie Besant was shocked at the cruelty). This gave Muslim community a belief they can never be wrong.

6) FINALLY, KHILAFAT LAID THE FOUNDATION OF PARTITION. BECAUSE IT WAS CLEAR THAT THE AGENDA OF HINDU & MUSLIM COMMUNITY WERE DIFFERENT.

THAT IS HOW INDIA WAS PARTITIONED.