enthusiasts for the movement: they were too moderate, too timid, they
feared the irrational masses and preferred the safe environment of the
debating chamber (indeed, the government hoped that Gandhi’s appeal
to the uneducated masses would alienate the educated classes and push
them closer to the government). But the criticism raised a question
that had emerged before. Religion as a mobilisational tool in Indian
nationalist politics was not new. The great Maharashtrian nationalist,
Bal Gangadhar Tilak (who coincidentally died just as Non-Cooperation
was launched) had already turned the Maratha king Shivaji into a proto-
nationalist who fought the ‘foreign’ Mughals for the sake of a ‘Hindu’
nation, and the festival of the elephant-god Ganapati into a tool of polit-
ical mobilisation. The newness lay in the use of religion not as a sectarian
but as a unifying force.
Jawaharlal was somewhat troubled by the over-use of religious
rhetoric during the movement, both on the Hindu and Muslim sides. But
he suppressed these doubts, in part at least for instrumental reasons- Gandhi had an amazing ability to reach out to ‘the masses’ and this
rhetoric seemed to be working very well – and then again, Gandhi was
the movement’s dictator: ‘having put our faith in him we gave him
an almost blank cheque, for the time being at least.’^14 In common with
others, Jawaharlal decided that something that worked so well was not to
be questioned. Gandhi had his peculiarities; his description of impending
Swarajas Ramarajya, a utopian state of political and spiritual harmony
stemming from the restoration of the mythical king Rama, was vague
and fraught with religious connotations; no one was any the wiser about
what either term ought to mean in practical terms and many were not
altogether convinced of non-violence as a creed for all time. And yet
Jawaharlal admired the moral and ethical side of satyagraha; the spiritu-
alisation of politics was morally uplifting as long as it was not meant in a
narrow, religious sense, and he noted that he had not felt so almost-
religious since his early boyhood and his infatuation with Theosophy.
Despite misgivings, very few saw or wished to acknowledge at the time
that the movement was often no more than a coalition of sectarianisms - in his socialist avatar, Jawaharlal was to look back at the Khilafat
movement as a ‘strange mixture of nationalism and politics and religion
and mysticism and fanaticism’, with the nationalism itself being a mixture
of a Hindu nationalism, a Muslim nationalism and a broader Indian
nationalism – all held together by Gandhi.^15
44 THE YOUNG GANDHIAN