ANKARA
As the world observes the 73rd anniversary of the assassination of Indian freedom icon Mahatma Gandhi on Saturday, experts recalled that the events which unfolded in Turkey a century ago actually helped and shaped his leadership in India.
Soon after returning to India from South Africa in 1915, the Balkan War and then colonial powers’ attempts to dismember Turkey after World War I triggered Gandhi to launch his famous non-cooperation movement against the British government.
According to author R. K. Sinha, Gandhi’s program of non-cooperation was adopted at the Khilafat Committee meeting in Mumbai in May 1920. “Soon after this conclave, Gandhi went to an extensive tour to rally the people behind the Turkish cause,” he said.
In his scholarly book, The Turkish Question Mustafa Kemal and Mahatma Gandhi, Sinha maintained that the movement to help Turkey was also a brief moment of communal amity between Hindus and Muslims in India. In a letter to British Viceroy Lord Chelmsford, Gandhi protested the British treatment of Turkey and warned him that non-cooperation policy would intensify after Aug. 1, 1920 if it implemented the Treaty of Sevres.
But the Allies of World War I went ahead and forced the Ottoman Empire to sign the treaty on Aug. 19, 1920, ceding large parts of Turkish territory to France, the UK, Greece, and Italy and also created large occupation zones within the Ottoman Empire.
At the call of Gandhi and Indian Muslim activist Maulana Mohammad Ali Jouhar, people gave up titles conferred on them by the government and boycotted foreign goods.
Writing in the June 1921 edition of Young India, an English weekly journal published from 1919-1931, Gandhi appealed to Hindus to join the movement against the dismemberment of Turkey.
“India is not ready today, but if we would be prepared to frustrate every plot that may be hatched for the destruction of Turkey or for prolonging our subjection, we must secure an atmosphere of enlightened non-violence as fast as possible, not the non-violence of the weak but the non-violence of the strong, who would disdain to kill but would gladly die for the vindication of truth,” he wrote.
According to Muhammad Naeem Qureshi of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Gandhi made clear to the British viceroy that he, as a Hindu, cannot remain indifferent to the cause of Muslims, who were extremely hurt due to the indignity heaped on Turkey.
“Their (Muslims) sorrows must be our sorrows, “he added.
Gandhi rejects to withdraw non-cooperation
On Nov. 23, 1919, at the first session of the All-India Khilafat Conference in Delhi in presence of Gandhi, a resolution was passed to boycott the peace and end of World War I celebrations. Another significant outcome of this gathering was the formation of the Jamiat-ul-Ulama-i-Hind, a religio-political body of the religious scholars which later played an important role as an ally of Congress.
According to records when Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, the rightest leader, asked Gandhi to suspend the campaign till other members of Congress also sit and discuss it, he declined it.
“Non-cooperation had become a religious duty and could not wait for the Congress decisions. In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place,” Gandhi said.
Historians believe that this movement to help Turkey put an indelible mark on Indian politics. It was the single pan-South Asian movement that people responded cutting across religious affiliations and involved Punjab, Sind, the Frontier, Bombay, Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh.
At a meeting held at the Sonapur Mosque in Mumbai in 1919, Gandhi proposed Hindu-Muslim unity to fight for the retention of Turkey as a sovereign nation. He also asked Muslims to present their case before the world firmly, unflinchingly, but peacefully.
On July 24, 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne was signed to the entire satisfaction of the Turkish people.
“This treaty is a document expressing the final failure of the plot against Turkey, a plot laid a century ago, a plot which was to have succeeded with the Treaty of Sevres. It is a diplomatic victory the like of which is not recorded in the Ottoman history,” remarked Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of the Republic of Turkey.
According to Benazir Banu, a scholar at the Jamia Millia Islamia, a Delhi-based central university, the Treaty of Lausanne was the outcome of the famous Turkish swords backed by India’s unforgotten memorable moral support provided by Gandhi, who was at that time in the British prison due to the Turkish agitation.
Assassination and plot
But exactly 24 years later, just six-months after India’s independence, the apostle of non-violence and peace was assassinated by Hindu communalists.
Speaking to Anadolu Agency, journalist and author Vivek Shukla, who has written extensively on Gandhi’s stay in Delhi, said just three days before his assassination, Gandhi had visited the dargah of Turkic Sufi Saint Khwaja Bakhtiyar Kaki (1173-1235 AD), which had been ransacked.
Thousands of Muslims had taken refuge inside, waiting to be transported to Pakistan. “He asked Muslims to stay back in India and asked Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to repair the dargah,” said Shukla.
On Jan. 30, 1948, at the prayer meeting in the compound of Birla House -- now Gandhi Smriti -- a large mansion in New Delhi, the assassin Nathuram Godse, a member of Hindu ultra-nationalist party the Hindu Mahasabha and a past member of the patron organization of Hindu nationalists Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, shot Gandhi dead.
Godse was captured by a crowd nearby and handed over to police. In total, nine people -- including top Hindu nationalist leader Vinayak Damodar Savarkar -- were arrested for conspiring the murder. Savarkar was accused of being the mastermind behind the plot.
Ironically, he has been designated a national hero by the current government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In November 1949, a court sentenced Godse and his accomplice Narayan Apte to death.
According to historian A G Noorani, Savarkar was acquitted merely on technical grounds. Paradoxically, a portrait of Savarkar adorns the walls of the Central Hall of Indian Parliament, alongside that of Gandhi.
The Justice Jivanlal Kapur Commission, which probed the conspiracy behind the assassination, found that Hindu nationalists were seething against Gandhi’s opposition to the Indian government’s decision to withhold the payment of 550 million rupees ($7.5 million) to Pakistan’s share of cash balances at the time of Partition.
Quoting witnesses, the commission report stated that even then Governor-General Lord Mountbatten had also put moral pressure on Gandhi to push the Nehru government to release payments to Pakistan as it was tarnishing the fair name and honor of India.
The first attempt on the life of Gandhi was made on Jan. 20, 1948, when Madanlal Pahwa threw a bomb at the prayer meeting.
He was arrested on the spot, while three of his accomplices escaped. The incident was enough for the police to unearth conspiracy and increase protection to Gandhi, but he was shot by Godse at the same place on Jan. 30, 1948 while he was proceeding to the prayer meeting.
Investigations later concluded that he was the accomplice of Pahwa 10 days ago, when he had attempted to throw the bomb at Gandhi, which missed the target.
Mainstreaming of Gandhi killers
Historians in India now fear that Gandhi’s killers, who had been spurned and isolated over the past 70 years and pushed to fringe, were now being treated as a cult and mainstreamed in India. In recent years attempts are being made by Hindu nationalists to give respectability to Godse, by referring to him as a misunderstood patriot, who till now was condemned as a traitor and terrorist. “The cult of Nathuram Godse is no more marginal; but mainstream,” says Ramachandra Guha, biographer of Gandhi.
He feared that as centuries ago India turfed out the Lord Buddha’s teachings for their opposition to social inequality, many Indians are now wishing to turf out Gandhi for his ideas of inter-faith harmony. “Perhaps we should let the rest of the world own and affirm Gandhi, just as they have owned and affirmed the Buddha,” he wrote in his blog on http://ramachandraguha.in.
