THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT AND THE PARTITION OF INDIAby arguing that since the Congress had not rejected the reform outright, it
should have the decency to thank Montagu for it.
Two different trends converged in the subsequent months which made
Gandhi adopt a much more radical attitude. The first was the rapidly
increasing groundswell of the Khilafat movement of Indian Muslims; the
second was growing Indian indignation over the British report on the
events in the Panjab. In late 1919 Gandhi had still tried to keep these two
issues strictly apart. He was in touch with the Bombay Khilafat Committee
and had made attempts to communicate the Muslim grievances to the
Hindus, as he saw a chance of improving national solidarity in this way.
But for this very reason he did not want to mix up this issue with the
Panjab problem: he felt that the Muslims should not get the idea that the
Hindus took note of the Khilafat issue only in order to win Muslim
support for a different campaign. Furthermore, Gandhi’s contacts were still
with Bombay’s Muslim traders, who tended to be moderate and would not
have sponsored a campaign such as the one for a boycott of foreign
cloth—these merchants were themselves selling it. But in 1920 the
leadership of the Khilafat movement was assumed by North Indian ulema
(Islamic scholars) and journalists like Maulana Azad and the Ali brothers.
Azad had spent the war in prison and had already advocated a programme
of non-cooperation similar to that envisaged by Gandhi. When they met
for the first time in January 1920 they soon agreed on a joint programme
of action.
‘Swaraj in one year’In May 1920 a special concatenation of events precipitated Gandhi’s
decision for a radical course of action. The Congress report on occurrences
in the Panjab was published and soon thereafter the official British report
also appeared. Gandhi had written a large part of the Congress document
and had seen to it that only proven facts were included and all hearsay and
polemics were eliminated—in this way the contrasts with the official
British version appeared even more striking because that report tried to
whitewash many of the misdeeds perpetrated by the Panjab regime. The
conditions imposed on the caliph by the Treaty of Sevres also became
known at the same time, thus making it impossible any longer to separate
the reaction to the Panjab wrongs from the Khilafat movement. Gandhi
now outlined the main features of a campaign of non-cooperation: boycott
of British textiles, British schools, universities and law courts; rejection of
all honours and titles bestowed by the British on Indians. As an
afterthought and almost in passing, Gandhi (in June 1920) added to this
list the boycott of the forthcoming elections. This last move later proved to
be the most crucial decision—the one which set the pace for the future
course of the freedom movement.