7. The Khilafat Movement

Hindu–German Conspiracy

As indicated by Rubin and Schwanitz, referring to Max von Oppenheim’s Jihad plan, “aside from Egypt and Arabia, the main German target was India.”[1] After 1920, under Gandhi’s leadership, the Indian National Congress (INC) became the principal leader of the Indian independence movement.[2] Among Gandhi’s leading followers were Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Maulana Azad, and others. Intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore, Subramania Bharati, and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay spread patriotic awareness. At the time, Gandhi led his non-violent nationalist movement as a protest against government repression, and to enlist Muslim support in his cause, he supported the Khilafat Movement, a political campaign launched in British India, in collaboration with the Aga Khan III’s All-India Muslim League (AIML), against the planned dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.[3] Vallabhbhai Patel, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and other Hindu and INC leaders also supported the movement. Generally described as a protest against the sanctions placed on the Ottoman Empire after the Treaty of Sèvres, the movement is also noted for promoting Hindu-Muslim unity.[4]

The Khilafat Movement was a legacy of Sultan Abdul Hamid II having sent Jamal ud-Din al Afghani to India to spread his Pan-Islamic initiatives.[5] At the British Foreign Office, it was feared that a revitalized Turkey, following the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, and having shaken off the binds of Western imperialism, would also inspire other Asian nations against British rule.[6] Earl Grey (1851 – 1917), a close friend of Cecil Rhodes, wrote to Lowther, the chief Dragoman in Istanbul, on July 31, 1908, just a week after the beginning of Turkey’s Second Constitutional Era on July 24:

 

If Turkey really establishes a Constitution, and keeps it on its feet, and becomes strong herself, the consequences will reach further than any of us can yet foresee. The effect in Egypt will be tremendous, and will make itself felt in India. Hitherto, wherever we have had Mahometan [sic] subjects, we have been able to tell them that the subjects of the countries ruled by the head of their religion were under a despotism which was not a benevolent one; while our Mahometan [sic] subjects were under a despotism which was benevolent… But if Turkey now establishes a Parliament and improves her Government, the demand for a Constitution in Egypt will gain great force, and our power of resisting the demand will be very much diminished.[7]

 

The Tehreek-e-Reshmi Rumal (“Silk Letter Movement”), refers to a movement organized by Deobandi leaders between 1913 and 1920, and, according to Saul Kelly, “its conspirators were not only involved in these events but in the Khilafat agitation after that war, thus demonstrating that the conspiracy was a key milestone in the development of the Indian Pan-Islamic movement.”[8] The Silk Letter Movement was part of an extension of von Oppenheim’s Jihad plan, what has been referred to as the Hindu–German Conspiracy, a series of attempts between 1914 and 1917 by Indian nationalists to create a Pan-Indian rebellion against the British Empire during World War I. During World War I, several Indian revolutionaries, who were devising plans for liberating their homeland through armed struggle, found it necessary to leave India and assembled in anti-British hubs such as Berlin and Istanbul.[9]

The entry of Turkey in World War I in 1914 on the side of Germany roused a widespread Pan-Islamic and nationalist sentiments among the millions of Muslims in South Asia, including Afghanistan.[10] Sultan Mehmed V wrote a letter to the Amir of Afghanistan, Habibullah Khan (1872 – 1919),  asking him to proclaim a crusade against the imperialists and not to refrain from announcing a Jihad against Britain.[11] Habibullah was the brother of Nasrullah Khan and grandson of Afzal Khan, for whom Afghani worked as an advisor, and the grandson of Dost Mohammed Khan, for whom Josiah Harlan, “the man who would be king,” worked as a military advisor. A rebellion was planned between the Indian revolutionary underground and exiled or self-exiled nationalists in the United States. The conspiracy, which began at the start of World War I, with extensive support from the German Foreign Office, headed by von Oppenheim, as well as the German consulate in San Francisco, and some support from Ottoman Turkey and the Irish republican movement, involved the Ghadar Party and the Berlin Committee in Germany. Oppenheim coordinated the Niedermayer–Hentig Expedition, also known as the Kabul Mission, a diplomatic mission to Afghanistan sent by the Central Powers in 1915–1916, to encourage Afghanistan to declare full independence from the British Empire, enter World War I on the side of the Central Powers, and attack British India.

When the plot was unsuccessful, the conspirators turned to the new Bolshevik regime, who had just attained power following the October Revolution of 1917. A particularly influential German operation in the Ottoman Empire had involved Israel Lazarevich Gelfhand (1867 – 1924), known as Alexander Parvus. Moving to Switzerland and Germany, Parvus became a Marxist and became friends with Lenin, joining his Bolshevik group.[12] Escaping from Siberia where he had been incarcerated for his participation in the 1905 revolution in Russia, and despite being one of the richest men in Germany, Parvus went on to become one of the most important Marxist and socialist thinkers. It seems that it was a dispute between Parvus, the German socialists, and the novelist and playwriter, Maxim Gorki, over who had rights to the novelist’s royalties which played a role in Parvus’ leaving for Istanbul where he remained for more than four years.[13] Parvus lived in Istanbul, from 1910 until 1914, where he also cooperated with Le Jeune Turc, and became the financial and political advisor of the CUP.[14] He worked closely with Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha, Djemal Pasha and Finance Minister Mehmed Cavid.[15]

Hans von Wangenheim, who oversaw Max von Oppenheim’s successful attempt to induce Mehmed V to declare Jihad against the Triple Entente, was also an admirer, and sent Parvus to Berlin in March 1915 with a proposal to use German money in support of the Bolsheviks for the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II and taking Russia out of the war. Funds were channeled to Lenin through Parvus’s networks in Denmark and Istanbul.[16] Parvus seems to have been instrumental in arranging for Lenin and his fellow Bolshevik exiles to traveled from Switzerland to Russia through Germany to Russia on the famous sealed train in April of 1917.[17] In 1918, Scheubner-Richter and Alfred Rosenberg moved to Germany from Russia with the returning German Army and became members of the Aufbau Vereinigung, a far-right organization composed of White Russian émigrés, chiefly responsible for introducing the Nazis to the Protocols of Zion, providing them the excuse that the Bolshevik Revolution was a Judeo-Masonic plot.[18]

 

Berlin Committee

The conclusion of the Niedermayer–Hentig Expedition was the creation of the Provisional Government of India was a provisional government-in-exile established in Kabul, Afghanistan on December 1, 1915, by the Indian Independence Committee,  also known as the Berlin Committee, during World War I with support from the Central Powers. The Provisional Government was composed of members of an eighteen-member group known as the Berlin Committee, established by in Berlin and Switzerland by Max von Oppenheim’s network, who, as a German document described them, “were willing to die and kill any traitors.”[19] A number of Indians, notably Shyamji Krishna Varma (1857 – 1930), had formed the India House in England in 1905, which was supported by Dadabhai Naoroji, a Mason of the Empire Lodge and founding member of the INC.[20] Varma’s guru was Dayananda Saraswati, founder of the Arya Samaj.[21] Influenced by Saraswati’s approach of cultural nationalism, and of Herbert Spencer, Varma believed in Spencer’s dictum: “Resistance to aggression is not simply justified, but imperative.”[22]

Following the example laid by the original India House, India Houses were opened in the United States and in Japan. In 1906, in New York, with the help of the Irish nationalists, Mohamed Barakatullah Bhopali (1854 – 1927), who had become closely associated with Varma during a previous stay in London, co-founded the Pan-Aryan Association, mirroring the India House and modelled after the Indian Home Rule Society.[23] After about a year spent in America, in 1904 Barakatullah left for Japan, where he was appointed Professor of Hindustani at the University of Tokyo. In Japan, Barakatullah had come into contact with Japanese Pan-Asianism, and published a journal called Islamic Fraternity, which British intelligence services described as advocating “an alliance of the Asiatic nations against the domination of the white races.”[24] Myron Phelp, an acquaintance of Varma and an admirer of Vivekananda, founded an India House in Manhattan in 1908. India House was suppressed after one of its members shot and killed William Hutt Curzon Wyllie, the political aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India in 1909. A number of fugitives moved to Paris, and some to Germany, where they would form the Berlin Committee, later known as the Indian Independence Committee, in 1914, for the purpose of promoting the cause of Indian Independence.

Barakatullah was also one of the founders of the Ghadar Party, formed in 1913 in San Francisco, under the leadership of Har Dayal (1884 – 1939). Dayal moved to the United States in 1911, where he served as secretary of the San Francisco branch of the Industrial Workers of the World, alongside Fritz Wolffheim (1888 – 1942), a German Jewish communist who would become a leading figure in the National Bolshevism tendency that was briefly influential in Germany after World War I. Called the Fraternity of the Red Flag, the group was given land and a house in Oakland, where Bose founded the Bakunin Institute of California, which he described as “the first monastery of anarchism.”[25] The Ghadar Party quickly gained support from Indian expatriates, especially in the United States, Canada and Asia, and meetings were held in Los Angeles, Oxford, Vienna, Washington, D.C., and Shanghai.[26] The ultimate goal of the Ghadar Party, which viewed the INC as too soft, was the overthrow British colonial authority in India by means of an armed revolution. To that end, in November 1913, Ghadar established the Yugantar Ashram press in San Francisco, which produced the Hindustan Ghadar, which espoused the philosophies of anarchism and revolutionary terrorism against British interests in India. The party established contact with prominent revolutionaries in India, including Rash Behari Bose (1886 – 1945), who was behind the Delhi-Lahore Conspiracy to assassinate the Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, in 1912. These events led the British government to pressure the American State Department to suppress Indian revolutionary activities and Ghadarite literature.[27]

When German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg authorized German activity against British India as World War I broke out in September 1914, Germany decided to actively support the Ghadarite plans.[28] Exploiting links established by the German Foreign Office, von Oppenheim tapped into the Indo-Irish network in the United States. An operation was conducted in the then-neutral United States by Franz von Papen (1879 – 1969), future Chancellor of Germany. During World War II, von Papen was part of the Zionist and Round Table plotters associated with the Propaganda Kabinett, whose members included George Sylvester Viereck, who operated The Fatherland with Aleister Crowley, and whose contributors included Golden Dawn member and Zionist Samuel Untermyer.[29] In 1913, von Papen, had entered the diplomatic service as a military attaché to von Bernstorff, the German ambassador in the United States. Working out of the New York offices of the Hamburg-America Line, von Papen was Heinrich Albert’s chief accomplice in sabotage operations in the US, until their activities were exposed when Albert’s briefcase was stolen by an American secret service agent in 1915.[30]

Franz von Papen had established an arms business, the Bridgeport Company, to make explosives and buy up weapons for the German war effort, some which were destined for anti-British revolutionaries in India. In 1914, the Berlin Committee obtained an official German promise of arms and funds to fight for Indian independence.[31] An Indian revolutionary, Manabendra Nath Roy (1887 – 1954, better known as M.N. Roy, traveled to Java to take delivery. Roy was expelled from the Harinavi Anglo-Sanskrit School after attending a Surendranath Banerjee, and was then introduced to Anushilan Samiti, an underground society for anti-British revolutionaries.[32] Anushilan Samiti led by the nationalists Sri Aurobindo and his brother Barindra Ghosh, influenced by philosophies like Italian Nationalism, and the Pan-Asianism of the Japanese scholar and art critic Kakuzo Okakura (1863 – 1913).[33]  Okakura traveled to Europe, the United States and China, and lived two years in India when he engaged in dialogue with Swami Vivekananda and Forte Kreis member Rabindranath Tagore.[34] Tagore, a strong supporter of Pan-Asianism, met Japanese premier Count Terauchi and Count Okuma, a former premier, in an attempt to enlist support for the Ghadarite movement.[35]

Like many other Indian revolutionaries, Roy was likewise inspired by the writings of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838 – 1894) and Vivekananda.[36] Bankim was the composer of Vande Mataram, a poem personifying India as a mother goddess, set to music by Tagore, that was adopted as the national song of the Republic of India in 1950. Von Papen’s plot involving Roy was discovered by the British and blocked.[37] When Hindu–German Conspiracy Trial the following year in San Francisco of eight of von Papen’s Indian agents revealed his involvement in a range of espionage and sabotage activities in the United States, he declared him persona non grata. Von Papen became chief of staff of the German army’s Asia Corps under General Erich von Falkenhayn (1861 – 1922) on the Iraqi front. During his service, von Papen developed contacts with many Ottoman officers and political figures, including Atatürk, and also befriended a young staff officer Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893 – 1946).[38]

 

Niedermayer–Hentig Expedition

Enver Pasha conceived an expedition to Afghanistan in 1914, as a Pan-Islamic venture directed by Turkey, with some German participation. The German delegation was chosen by von Oppenheim.[39] Ultimately, due to various complications, the expedition was aborted. In 1915, a second expedition was organized, mainly through the German Foreign Office and the Indian leadership of the Berlin Committee. Lala Har Dayal was expected to lead the expedition. When he declined, the exiled Indian prince Raja Mahendra Pratap (1886 – 1979) was named leader.[40] The expedition was headed by Pratap, and the German Army officers Oskar Niedermayer (1885 – 1948) and Werner Otto von Hentig (1886 – 1984). The Turks were represented by Kazim Bey (1882 – 1968), a close confidante of Enver Pasha. Other participants included members the Berlin Committee, including Chempakaraman Pillai (1891 – 1934) and Barakatullah.[41] The mission brought members of the Indian movement to India’s border, and also brought messages from the Kaiser, Enver Pasha and Abbas II, the displaced Khedive of Egypt, expressing support for Pratap’s mission and inviting the Amir of Afghanistan, Habibullah Khan, to move against British India.[42]

This group met the Deobandis in Kabul in December 1915. A key conspirator was Ubaidullah Sindhi (1872 – 1944), a political activist of the Indian independence movement, was born to Sikh parents in the district of Sialkot, Punjab, British India, northeast of Lahore, Buta Singh Uppal. He converted to Islam at age 15, and later enrolled in the Darul Uloom Deoband, where he was associated with other noted Deobandi scholars, including Maulana Rasheed Gangohi and Maulana Mahmud al-Hasan. Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (1828 – 1905), the cofounder of the Deoband school, had issued a Fatwa in 1898 that “Indian Muslims were bound by their religion to be loyal to the British Government even if it were engaged in war with the Sultan of Turkey.”[43] Ubaidullah Sindhi was among the leaders of the Deoband School, who, led by Maulana Mahmud Hasan Deobandi (1851 – 1920), also known as Shaykh al-Hind, left India to seek support among other nations of the world for a Pan-Islamic revolution in India in what came to be known as Silk Letter Movement, aimed at gaining Indian independence from British rule by forming an alliance with the Ottoman Empire, the Amirate of Afghanistan and the German Empire. To achieve his aim of overthrowing the British Raj in India, Mahmud Hasan focused on two geographic areas: Afghanistan and India. The goal was to prepare the people of India for a rebellion if the Afghan and Turkish governments could provide military support. Mahmud Hasan himself traveled to the Hijaz to secure German and Turkish support in 1915 during World War I.[44]

At Kabul, Ubaidullah, along with a number of students who had gone to Turkey to join the Sultan’s “Jihad” against Britain, decided that the Pan-Islamic cause would be better served by focusing on the Indian Freedom Movement.[45] The group was met by the Niedermayer–Hentig Expedition in December 1915.[46] Afterwards, Ubaidullah and his companions designed the Provisional Government of India as a government-in-exile, to enroll support from the Afghan Amir as well as Russia, China, and Japan for the Indian nationalist movement.[47] The provisional government was composed of Mahendra Pratap as President, Maulana Barkatullah Barakatullah as Prime Minister, Ubaidullah Sindhi as Home Minister, Deobandi Maulavi Bashir as Minister of War, and Champakraman Pillai as Foreign Minister.[48] Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, Pratap’s Provisional Government corresponded with the Soviets. In 1918, Pratap met the Russian leader and Freemason Leon Trotsky in Petrograd before meeting the Kaiser Wilhelm II in Berlin, urging both to mobilize against British India.[49] Under pressure from the British, the Afghans withdrew their cooperation and the mission closed down.[50]

 

Silk Letter Movement 

In the summer of 1916, the series silk of letters written by Ubaidullah Sindhi to Mahmud Hasan outlined a new structural approach to the unification of the Muslim world. In his selection of leaders, the Ottoman caliph emerged as simply one triumvir. The “General headquarters” were located by “Ubayd-Allah not at the seat of the caliphate but in Madina, where Mahmud al-Hasan had established himself after the outbreak of the war.”[51] Ubaidullah advocated a hierarchical league much like that attributed to Afghani and put forward by Kawakibi. “This is a special Islamic society based on military principles,” Ubaidullah wrote. “Its first object is to create an alliance among Islamic kings.”[52] Ubaidullah then gave full details on the projected membership of this secret society, which he entitled Junud al-Rabbaniyya, translated by British authorities as the “Army of God.” The association was to have three “patrons”: Sultan Mehmed V, Ahmad Shah Qajar of Iran, and Habiballah, Amir of Afghanistan. Below them served a dozen “field marshals”: Enver Pasha, the Young Turk triumvir, the Ottoman heir apparent, the Ottoman Grand Vizier, the ex-Khedive Abbas II, the Sharif of Mecca, the Navib al-Saltanah at Kabul, the Mu’in al-Saltanah at Kabul, the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Nawab of Rampur, the Nawab of Bahawalpur, and the Ra’is al-Mujahidin, the leader of the remnant of that colony established by Syed Ahmad Barelvi along the Afghan border, where he declared himself Caliph, following his victory in the in the battle of Akora Khattak in 1826 against the Sikh Empire.[53]

The plot was uncovered by the Punjab CID with the capture of letters on yellow silk from Ubaidullah Sindhi to Mahmud Hasan.[54] Mahmud Hasan was arrested in December 1916, alongside his companions and students, Hussain Ahmad Madani and Uzair Gul Peshawari, by Sharif Hussain who handed them over to the British, who imprisoned them in the Fort Verdala in Malta. While the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms in 1917 initiated the first rounds of political reform in the Indian subcontinent, a “Sedition Committee” called the Rowlatt Committee, was instituted in 1918, which evaluated the links between Germany, the Berlin Committee, Pratap’s enterprise and the militant movement in India. Although the committee did not find any evidence of Bolshevik involvement, it confirmed a definite German link. On the recommendations of the committee, the Rowlatt Act, an extension of the Defence of India Act 1915, was enforced in response to the threat in Punjab and Bengal.[55]

In Afghanistan, the Niedermayer–Hentig mission was the catalyst to a rapid radical and progressive political process and reform movement that is culminated in the assassinations of Habibullah in 1919 and his succession by Amanullah Khan (1892 – 1960) that subsequently precipitated the Third Anglo-Afghan War. On May 3, 1919, Amanullah Khan declared a Jihad against the British in the hope to proclaim full independence, and, taking advantage of the unrest in the country, sent forces to invade British India. With British and Indian troops potentially invading Afghanistan, Amanullah signed Anglo-Afghan Treaty which ended the war on August 8, which resulted in the Afghans re-gaining control of foreign affairs from Britain, and the Afghans recognizing the Durand Line as the border.[56]

 

Central Khilafat Committee

According to Ubaidullah’s Army of God program, numerous additional officers of lesser rank followed. Named, among others, were Max von Oppenheim’s agent Shaykh Abdul Aziz Jawish; Maulana Azad (1888 – 1958); and Mohammad Ali Jauhar (1878 – 1931)—a co-founder of the All-India Muslim League and a member of the Aligarh movement—along with his elder brother Shaukat Ali (1873 – 1938). These later became the leading figures in the Khilafat movement.[57] The intellectual definition of the Khilafat movement was developed by Azad, who was educated at Mecca, had come deeply under the influence of Muhammad Abduh, was steeped in the political thinking of Afghani, and had modelled his paper al-Hilal on al-Urwa al-Wuthqa. Accordingly, one of Azad’s primary contentions was that the decline of Islam has been due to the decline and suspension of Ijtihad.[58] Like Afghani, he attacked Syed Ahmad Khan’s attitude to the Ottoman Caliphate, and he argued on the authority of the Quran that Jihad was obligatory against those who had occupied a part of the Dar al-Islam.[59]

The first stirrings in favor of the Khilafat Movement in Bengal occurred on December 30, 1918, at the 11th Session of the All-India Muslim League (AIML) held in Delhi. In his presidential address, A.K. Fazlul Huq (1873 – 1962), President of the AIML and general secretary of the INC—who would later become the first and longest Prime Minister of Bengal during the British Raj—voiced concern over the attitude of Britain and her allies engaged in dividing and distributing the territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire. When the Paris Peace Conference confirmed these concerns, Khilafat leaders held a public meeting in Calcutta on February 9, 1919, to enlist public support in favor preserving the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and the institution of Khilafat.[60]

Gandhi became a member of the Central Khilafat Committee.[61] Gandhi’s call for protest against the Rowlatt Act achieved an unprecedented response of furious unrest. In February 1919, the Rowlatt Act was passed by the Imperial Legislative Council, allowing certain political cases to be tried without juries and permitted internment of suspects without trial. This resulted in widespread discontent and culminated in the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, in Amritsar, on April 13, 1919. In response to the large crowd that gathered to protest the act, the temporary brigadier general R.E.H. Dyer surrounded the group with his Gurkha and Sikh infantry regiments of the British Indian Army. After blocking the exit with his troops, Dyer ordered them to shoot at the crowd, continuing to fire even as the protestors tried to flee. Estimates of those killed vary from 379 to 1,500 or more people, and over 1,200 were injured.[62]

The demonstration was to demand the release of two popular leaders of the INC, Satyapal (1885 – 1954) and Saifuddin Kitchlew (1888 – 1963), both proponents of the Satyagraha movement led by Gandhi, who had been arrested by the government and moved to a secret location. The massacre was supported by some Britons and parts of the British media as a necessary response. Gandhi in Ahmedabad, on the day after the massacre in Amritsar, did not criticize the British and instead criticized his fellow countrymen for not exclusively using “love” to deal with the “hate” of the British government. Gandhi demanded that the Indian people stop all violence, stop all property destruction, and went on fast-to-death to pressure Indians to stop their rioting.[63]

Kitchlew joined the All India Khilafat Committee formed at Bombay in July.[64] The first Khilafat Conference at Delhi in November was arranged in which the INC leaders like Gandhi and Nehru took part. The second Khilafat Conference was held in at Amritsar in December. Ali Jauhar and Shaukat Ali joined the session after being released from prison.[65] Khilafat Conferences were organized in several cities in northern India. A Central Khilafat Committee, with provisions for provincial branches, was constituted at Bombay with Seth Chotani, a wealthy merchant, as its President, and Shaukat Ali as its Secretary. In 1920, the Ali Brothers produced the Khilafat Manifesto.[66] The Central Khilafat Committee started a Fund to organize the Khilafat Movement at home and to help the Turkish National Movement, organized in 1919 under Atatürk’s leadership to resist the dismemberment of Turkish-speaking areas.[67]

 

Jamia Millia Islamia

Muhammad Ali Jauhar worked hard to expand the Aligarh Muslim University, then known as the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, and was one of the co-founders of the Jamia Millia Islamia in 1920, a public and research university located in Aligarh, which was later moved to Delhi, and which was one of the several prominent educational institutions established in response to the call of non-cooperation by Gandhi. The university was founded by Jauhar, Saifuddin Kitchlew, Muhammad Iqbal, Mahmud Hasan Deobandi, Gandhi and Maulana Azad. Its foundation stone was laid by Mahmud Hasan Deobandi.[68] Hakim Ajmal Khan (1868 – 1927), became the Jamia Millia Islamia’s first chancellor in 1920. Khan was also the sole person elected to the Presidency of the INC, the AIML—having participated in its founding—and the Khilafat Committee.[69] Jauhar became Vice Chancellor, as Muhammad Iqbal could not accept an invitation offered through Gandhi. Rabindranath Tagore called it “one of the most progressive educational institutions of India.”[70]

In 1920, a formal alliance was made with Gandhi’s INC and the Khilafat leaders promising to work and fight together for the causes of Khilafat and Swaraj, or self-rule. Gandhi, who had returned to India and become a widely respected leader and highly influential in the INC, called for forms of political action against the British initiated by Tilak, such as the boycotting of goods and passive resistance, which he later adopted and called satyagraha.[71] Gandhi’s proposal gained broad Hindu support, and was also attractive to many Muslims of the Khilafat Movement. These Muslims, supported by Gandhi, sought the preservation of the Ottoman caliphate, which was believed to supply spiritual leadership to many Muslims. Gandhi had achieved considerable popularity among Muslims because of his work during the war on behalf of killed or imprisoned Muslims.[72]

Assuming leadership of the INC in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women’s rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, and, above all, achieving Swaraj. In 1921, Jauhar formed a broad coalition with Gandhi and other nationalist leaders, who then enlisted the support of the INC and thousands of Hindus, who joined the Muslims in a demonstration of unity against the British government.[73] In 1921, the Government of Bengal declared the activities of the Khilafat and Congress volunteers illegal. Shaukat Ali, Jauhar’s older brother, was imprisoned from 1921 to 1923 for his support to Gandhi and the INC during the Non-Cooperation Movement. His fans accorded him and his brother the title of Maulana.

 

Baku Congress

Although the Provisional Government found significant support from the Afghan government, the Amir refused to declare open support, and ultimately, under British pressure it was forced to withdraw in 1919. When the war ended without Ubaidullah having fulfilled his mission, he decided that Afghanistan was not a suitable place for further activism. Ubaidullah, who had wanted to establish contacts with the Russians to gain their assistance for the Indian freedom movement, sent own nephews Khushi Muhammad and Aziz Ahmad to Tashkent.[74] Along with Mahendra Pratap, Ubaidullah left for Russia. In Moscow, they met Lenin and discussed with him the strategies to fight British colonialism.[75] Pratap had already reached Soviet Russia in February 1918, where he received official reception from the Bolshevik representatives at Petrograd, and presented his book titled The Religion of Love to Lenin.[76] Barakatullah visited Moscow in March 1919, as “ambassador extraordinary” of Amir Amanullah Khan, and signed a bilateral treaty, securing financial, monetary and material support from the Bolsheviks.[77] A special mission of Indian Provisional Government, under the leadership of Barakatullah, reached Tashkent on March 31, 1920.[78] In Tashkent, the Bolshevik government had established an Eastern University for training the Asians for propaganda against the Imperialist powers and to propagate Bolshevik ideas among them. Roy was in charge of the Indian section. However, the Afghan government, declined to allow the Indian revolutionaries to pass through its territory and access the freedom fighters engaged in war against the British India on the North West frontier of India.[79]

Roy reached Moscow at the time of Second Congress of the Communist International, held in Petrograd and Moscow from July 19 to August 7, 1920.[80] At the Congress, Roy devised a plan with the Bolshevik leaders in Russia for the liberation of India.[81] From Tashkent, Roy was to raise, equip and train an army of Indian liberation, who, responding to a call of the Khilafat Committee, had left India for Afghanistan. However, after the Russians suspected the Afghan’s of wanting to exploit the arrangement to acquire arms and gold, the plan was abandoned.[82] Roy, however, not discouraged from the failure, started providing political and military training to about 125 Muhajireen—Indian Muslim emigrants—in the school in Tashkent, and also organized the Indian Communist Party.[83]

A body calling itself “the Indian revolutionary organization in Turkistan,” also formed in Tashkent, sent a petition to the First Congress of the Peoples of the East held at Baku on September 1, 1920, asking for help for the oppressed 315 millions of the people of India but asking that “this help should be granted without any interference in the domestic or religious life of those who await liberation from the yoke of capitalism and imperialism.”[84] Congress of the Peoples of the East, also known as the Baku Congress, held in Baku, then the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan, as described by Grigory Zinoviev as the “second half” of the Second Congress.[85] The congress was attended by nearly 1,900 delegates from across Asia and Europe and marked a commitment by the Comintern to support revolutionary nationalist movements in the colonial East. Russian revolutionary Grigory Zinoviev was elected Chairman of the Congress by acclamation and his associates Lenin and Leon Trotsky were honored additionally as “honorary chairmen.”[86] Representing Turkey was Enver Pasha.[87]

The Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement of March 1921 succeeded in curtailing the activities of Indian revolutionaries in Central Asia and compelled Roy to leave Tashkent for Moscow. After Amanullah signed a treaty with Britain on November 22, 1921, Pratap, Ubaidullah and Barakatullah left Afghanistan. Ubaidullah, along with his party of nine companions set out for Russia on October 15, 1922. “It was at this point,” explains Martin Kramer, “that the syncretic strand in his religious beliefs manifested itself most clearly.”[88] Ubaidullah left Kabul for Moscow in late 1922, during which time he studied the ideology of socialism and met with Lenin. He proceeded to Ankara in 1923, and then established himself in Istanbul, initiating the third phase of the Shah Waliullah Movement. He was profoundly influenced by the secularization of the Turkish state, and advocated its adoption, which he called “Europeanism,” through all Islam, favoring such controversial reforms as the romanization of Arabic-based alphabet and the adoption of full Western garb.[89]

Pratap, for his part, became devoted to the cause of Pan-Asianism. In 1922, Pratap visited Japan where he met with Ghadarite Rash Behari Bose, who was to become a lifelong friend and ally. In Japan, Pratap spoke regularly on the subject of the unity of Asia and of changing tides, because “New opinions of King Amanullah, Comrade Lenin and Dr Sun Yat-sen were prevailing in the East.”[90] After returning to Kabul, Pratap asked for permission from the government to embark on another trip around the world to raise funds and promote for his cause of a united Asia. Pratap’s plan was approved, and he was dispatched with the parting message from the Amir: “It is not now time for Pan-Islamism, we should all work for Asian unity.”[91] Pratap, who was now aiming to develop Buddhist network, wrote to the Dalai Lama in February 1926. Although he full of praise for Pratap’s mission, the Dalai Lama would not allow him to proceed to Lhasa. Pratap then went on to China where he received an invitation to attend the first Pan-Asiatic Conference at Nagasaki in the summer of 1926. Although he was not able to attend, he participated in the Second Pan-Asiatic Conference in Shanghai in 1927.

It was at around this time that Pratap’s plan to form a “province of Pan-Asia,” which he also referred to as the “Province of Buddha,” was first formulated: “I just want to see our Aryan developed into a free, powerful State, as a part of an autonomous Asia, in our World Federation. My services will go… to arouse the peoples of Aryan to carve out their destiny!”[92] His attempts to further his plan by organizing a Third Pan-Asiatic Conference in either Tehran or Kabul fell through for lack of interest. In 1929, his World Federation Movement was founded in 1929 with the start of his journal of the same name. Rash Behari Bose and prominent Pan-Asianists Imazato Juntaro, Shumei Okawa, and Yonezo Fujiwara, declared themselves directors of the Pan-Asiatic League alongside Pratap. They published their new venture in the Calcutta-based New Forward. Pratap would spend the better part of the next decade working towards creating “the province of Pan-Asia.”[93]

 


[1] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 49.

[2] “Information about the Indian National Congress.” Open University (Arts & Humanities Research council). Retrieved from https://www5.open.ac.uk/research-projects/making-britain/content/indian-national-congress

[3] Sufia Ahmed. “Khilafat Movement.” Banglapedia (Bangladesh Asiatic Society). Retrieved from http://en.banglapedia.org/index.php?title=Khilafat_Movement

[4] S. Tejani. Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 1890-1950 (Indiana University Press, 2021), p. 145.

[5] Ahmed. “Khilafat Movement.”

[6] Oke. “Professor Arminus Vambery and Anglo-Ottoman Relations (1887-1907),” p. 24.

[7] G.P. Gooch and H. Temperley (eds.). British Documents on the Origins of the War (1898-1914), vol. V, doc. no. 204, Grey to Lowther, July 31, 1908; cited in Oke. “Professor Arminus Vambery and Anglo-Ottoman Relations (1887-1907),” p. 24.

[8] Saul Kelly. “‘Crazy in the Extreme’? The Silk Letters Conspiracy.” Middle Eastern Studies, 49: 2 (2013), p. 163.

[9] Jawad ur Rahman, Junaid Ali & Muhammad Zaher Shah. “Early Contact of Indians with Soviet Russia and the Spread of Communist Ideas Among Indians.” Journal of Asian Development Studies, 12: 3 (September 2023), p. 533. Retrieved from https://www.poverty.com.pk/old/uploads/JADS%2012-3-97%20Draft.pdf

[10] Zahid Anwar. “Indian Freedom Fighters in Central Asia (1914–1939).” Journal of the Research Society of Pakistan, 45: 2 (2008), p. 147.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 37.

[13] Olson. Imperial Meanderings and Republican By-Ways, p. 108.

[14] Ibid., p. 109.

[15] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 37.

[16] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 37.

[17] Olson. Imperial Meanderings and Republican By-Ways, p. 108.

[18] Michael Kellogg. The Russian Roots of Nazism (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[19] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 49.

[20] Simon Deschamps. “Masonic Ritual and the Display of Empire in 19th-Century India and Beyond.”

[21] S. Radhakrishnan. Living with a Purpose (Orient Paperbacks, 2005), p. 34.

[22] Moniruddin Qur. History of Journalism (Anmol Publications, 2005), p. 123.

[23] Harald Fischer-Tine. “Indian Nationalism and the ‘world forces’: Transnational and diasporic dimensions of the Indian freedom movement on the eve of the First World War.” Journal of Global History, 2: 3 (2007), p. 334.

[24] C.M. Stolte. “Orienting India : Interwar Internationalism in an Asian Inflection, 1917-1937.” Leiden University dissertation (2013, October 8). Retrieved from https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A2940392/view

[25] Paul Avrich. Anarchist Portraits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 30.

[26] B. R. Deepak. “Revolutionary Activities of the Ghadar Party in China.” China Report, 35: 439 (Sage Publications, 1999), p. 441.

[27] Ibid., p. 439.

[28] Karl Hoover. “The Hindu Conspiracy in California, 1913–1918.” German Studies Review, 8: 2 (May 1985), p. 251

[29] Levenda. Unholy Alliance, p. 255.

[30] James P. Duffy. Target America: Hitler's Plan to Attack the United States (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), p. 7.

[31] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 49.

[32] “Roy, Manabendra Nath.” Banglapedia. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20150701122119/http://en.banglapedia.org/index.php?title=Roy,_Manabendra_Nath

[33] Peter Heehs. The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900–1910 (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 116-117.

[34] Emiko Shimizu. “Kakuzō Okakura in cultural exchange between India and Japan: Dialogue with Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore.”In: Madhu Bhalla (ed.). Culture as Power (Routledge India, 2020).

[35] Giles Brown. “The Hindu Conspiracy, 1914–1917.” The Pacific Historical Review, 17: 3 (August 1948), p. 306

[36] Sibnarayan Ray. In Freedom’s Quest: Life of M. N. Roy, Vol. 1: 1887–1922 (Calcutta: Minerva, 1998), p. 15.

[37] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 49.

[38] Ibid., p. 50.

[39] Thomas L. Hughes. “The German Mission to Afghanistan, 1915–1916.” German Studies Review, 25: 3 (October 2002), pp. 447–476.

[40] Peter Hopkirk. On Secret Service East of Constantinople (Oxford; New York: Oxford Paperbacks, 2001), p. 98

[41] Thomas L. Hughes. “The German Mission to Afghanistan, 1915–1916.” German Studies Review, 25: 3 (October 2002), pp. 447–476..

[42] Ursula Sims-Williams (1980). “The Afghan Newspaper Siraj al-Akhbar.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 7 Seidt, Hans-Ulrich. “From Palestine to the Caucasus-Oskar Niedermayer and Germany’s Middle Eastern Strategy in 1918.” German Studies Review, 24: 1 (2001), pp. 1, 3.

[43] M. Naeem Qureshi. Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 1918-1924 (Social, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia), p. 79–82.

[44] Raj Kumar Trivedi. “Turco-German intrigue in India in Workd War I.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. 43. Indian History Congress (1982), p. 659.

[45] Ibid., p. 515.

[46] Ibid., p. 516.

[47] K.H. Ansari. “Pan-Islam and the Making of the Early Indian Muslim Socialist.” Modern Asian Studies, 20: 3 (Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 509–537.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Thomas L. Hughes. “The German Mission to Afghanistan, 1915–1916.” German Studies Review, 25: 3. (Oct., 2002), p. 474.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 59.

[52] Ibid.

[53] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 59

[54] M. Naeem Qureshi. Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 1918-1924 (Social, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia), p. 79–82.

[55] Hugh Tinker. “India in the First World War and after.” Journal of Contemporary History, 3: 4 (1918-1919), p. 92

[56] Michael Barthorp. Afghan Wars and the North-West Frontier 1839–1947 (London: Cassell, 2002), p. 157.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Ahmad. “Sayyid Aḥmad Khān, Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and Muslim India,” p. 74.

[59] Ibid., p. 76.

[60] Ahmed. “Khilafat Movement.”

[61] Ibid.

[62] India. Committee on Disturbances in Bombay, Delhi, and the Punjab (1920). Report; disorders inquiry committee 1919–1920. pp. xx–xxi, 44–45, 116–117.

[63] Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments With Truth, 2nd ed. (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1940), p. 82.

[64] Sayed Jafar Mahmud. Pillars of modern India, 1757-1947 (APH Publishing, 1994), p. 40.

[65] “The Khilafat Movement.” CSS PMS Notes. Retrieved from https://www.csspmsnotes.com/pak-affairs-notes/the-khilafat-movement

[66] Ahmed. “Khilafat Movement.”

[67] Ahmed. “Khilafat Movement”; “Atatürk and the Turkish Nation.” Country Studies (US Library of Congress). Retrieved from https://countrystudies.us/turkey/13.htm

[68] “History.” Jamia Millia Islamia. Retrieved from https://jmi.ac.in/About-Jamia/Profile/History/History

[69] “Who was Hakim Ajmal Khan?” Biographies. Retrieved from https://www.biographies.net/people/en/hakim_ajmal_khan

[70] “History” Jamia Millia Islamia. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20111007080709/https://www.jmi.ac.in/aboutjamia/profile/history/historical_note-13

[71] Editors. “Bal Gangadhar Tilak.” Encyclopedia Britannica (Decemember 5, 2024). Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bal-Gangadhar-Tilak

[72] Jaswant Singh. Jinnah: India-Partition and Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 90–93; Yasmeen Niaz Mohiuddin. Pakistan: A Global Studies Handbook (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2007), p. 61.

[73] “Mohammad Ali Jauhar profile.” Storyofpakistan.com website. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20181030191816/http://storyofpakistan.com/maulana-muhammad-ali-jouhar

[74] Anwar. “Indian Freedom Fighters in Central Asia (1914–1939),” p. 154.

[75] “Of socialism and Islam.” Dawn ( July 8, 2011). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20231215210443/https://www.dawn.com/news/642407

[76] Rahman, Ali & Shah. “Early Contact of Indians with Soviet Russia and the Spread of Communist Ideas Among Indians”, p. 540.

[77] Ibid.

[78] Ibid., p. 541.

[79] Anwar. “Indian Freedom Fighters in Central Asia (1914–1939),” 154.

[80] Ibid.

[81] Ibid.

[82] Ibid.

[83] Ibid.

[84] Ibid., p. 153.

[85] John Riddell. To See The Dawn: Baku, 1920: First Congress of the Peoples of the East (New York: Pathfinder Books, 1993), p. 63.

[86] Ibid., p. 62.

[87] Ibid., pp. 114-136.

[88] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 61.

[89] Ibid.

[90] Stolte. “Orienting India,” p. 135.

[91] Stolte. “Orienting India,” p. 135.

[92] WBSA, Police Files, 126/1929 n. 234/29 Confidential: Pan-Asiatic League; cited in Stolte. “Orienting India,” p. 136.

[93] Stolte. “Orienting India,” p. 136.

Divide & Conquer