Mohammed Ali’s (1878-1931) riposte to The Times editorial on “The Choice of Turks” in his Comrade on September 26, 1941, marked an entwinement of his politics with Turkey and the Khilafat Movement. Indeed, it stands out as a watershed in his politics and public career. Till then, he had embraced Sir Syed’s loyalist plank without the least bit of reservation. Even his editorial was in that strain: it had categorically stated that should Turkey go in for war with England, “the Muslims would stand by their government (in India) and would not, in any way, add to the embarrassment of their rulers.”
But his unjustified internment in Chindawara and, later, in Betul jail for some 55 months led him to realize “the necessity of agitational methods for the redressal of grievances,” and turned him into a reckless revolutionary.
Persistent demands for his and his elder brother’s release kept the Ali brothers in the public eye, and their refusal to avail conditional release in 1917 endeared them all the more. Upon their release on December 28, 1919, they boarded a train to Amritsar, where the Congress, the League and the Second Khilafat Conference were in session. They received a hero’s welcome and were accepted as leaders. Their erstwhile commitment to pan-Islamic causes enabled them to embrace the Khilafat plank without much ado, making it all their own.
Of the two brothers, Mohammed Ali was the more famous. And for the role of Muslim leadership, he was eminently qualified: well-educated with a grounding in the culture of the West but a thorough-going Muslim; an ardent advocate of Islam and of Indian freedom at the same time; an effective speaker who could give eloquent expression to what the people merely thought and vaguely felt, a warm and exciting personality exuding enthusiasm and inducing instant loyalty and admiration; energetic, enthusiastic, sincere, passionate, impressive and daring. For the sort of romantic and emotion-laden movement that was developing among Muslims, Mohammed Ali alone seemed to be eminently cut out for the leadership role. For “no other Muslim leader had the...spark of passion necessary to touch off an instant response in his listeners” that was the crying need of the hour, and that Mohammed Ali had in such abundance.
A month later, Mohammed Ali headed a deputation to England and Europe, to plead the Khilafat cause, but met with little success. Back in India, he, along with Shaukat Ali and their aged mother, Bi-Amma, toured the country from one end to the other, often in the company of Gandhi and other Hindu leaders. For now, the constant refrain from a thousand pulpits that reverberated from Khyber to Cape Camorin was: “Exhorted the mother of Mohammed Ali: “Son! Give your life for Khilafat!”
Actually, till his arrest in September 1921, Mohammed Ali was all the time on the move — addressing mammoth gatherings at Nagpur and in western India during January, at Calcutta and in eastern India during February, at Bombay and Aligarh during March, and at scores of other places, besides wayside appearances. Khilafat committees had sprung up almost everywhere, and the campaign was extended to the countryside, that became infected with the Khilafat enthusiasm and reverberated with the Khilafat demands. “I have heard the children in country villages singing Khilafat songs,” reported Gwynn, a British journalist who was touring the Gujarat villages in western India during the time. As a result, the Congress, Khilafat and Swaraj, as well as Gandhi and the Ali brothers, became household names. Among Muslims, no leader was heard or accepted unless he spoke from the Khilafat platform, and those who, thought believing in the Khilafat cause, had yet some mental reservations about the techniques and tactics adopted to promote that cause, such as Jinnah, came to be eclipsed for the time being.
The Khilafat and Congress appeals, often couched in emotional terms, touched the masses to the quick, prepared them for revolt and revolution, and spawned a real mass movement for the first time, setting the whole of India astir and afire. The government was naturally alarmed, but was also keen to avoid a collision, hoping that the movement would spend itself out unless provided with a causus belli. The movement, it was obvious, needed martyrs to keep it going at an accelerated tempo, but the government refused to oblige. Indeed, it chose to play cool and resort to diplomacy rather than force. But the Ali brothers often made violent speeches, that were highly inconsistent with Gandhi’s claim of the non-violent character of the movement. And this was promptly seized upon by the Viceroy to get Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence, inveigled into inducing the usually belligerent, but somewhat gullible and simplistic Ali brothers to regret publicly “the unnecessary heat of some of the passages” in their speeches, and to hold out “a public assurance and promise...not (to), directly or indirectly, advocate violence at present, or in the future....” This admission was exploited by the government to the hilt. It promptly publicized the statement as an apology, putting the Ali brothers in an extremely awkward position.
Fast on its heels came two other major setbacks. First, the refusal of the Aligarh College to sever its connections with the government, that Mohammed Ali had called for. Second, the Moplah rebellion in August 1921, whose excesses, that caused serious cleavages in the Khilafat leadership, and were, moreover, readily exploited by Hindu rightist leaders to wean the Hindus away from the movement. Now that the movement had begun to lose steam, the government chose to strike. It arrested Mohammed Ali, along with six other Khilafatists, on September 14. He was tried for “sedition” at Karachi, and sentenced to two years’ rigorous imprisonment in November.
Three months later, Gandhi suspended the non-cooperation movement, due to start on February 12, 1922, in the wake of the Chauri Chaura massacre. And within a year of Mohammed Ali’s release in 1923, the institution of Khilafat itself came to be abolished, and this at the hands of Ghazi Mustapha Kemal Pasha, on whom the Muslims had pinned such high hopes, in respect of the restoration of the caliphal office to its pristine glory. Nothing could be more shattering for Mohammed Ali as his prime political ideal stood repudiated beyond redemption, and the decade-long entwinement of his politics with the fate of Turkey and of Khilafat came to be finally sundered. Thus, for the next seven years, a bitter and disillusioned Mohammed Ali had to live without his most cherished cause.
