Khilafat movement

Background

The Ottoman Sultan held the title of Caliph, regarded by many Sunni Muslims as the symbolic head of the global Muslim community. Indian Muslim opinion had watched the Ottoman Empire's decline with concern since before the First World War, and Britain's wartime alliance against the Ottomans, followed by the harsh peace terms imposed at the war's end, were seen as a direct threat to the caliphate's territorial integrity and religious authority. The All India Khilafat Committee was formed in 1919 under the leadership of the Ali brothers, Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, along with Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, to campaign for the preservation of Ottoman sovereignty over Muslim holy places and the institution of the caliphate itself.

Alliance with Non-Cooperation

The Khilafat leadership sought and secured the support of Mohandas Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, which saw in the grievance an opportunity to draw Muslim political energy into a joint campaign against colonial rule alongside the wider Non-Cooperation Movement launched in 1920. Gandhi argued that Hindu-Muslim unity forged through the Khilafat cause was essential to any successful mass movement against British rule, and the two campaigns proceeded together through 1920-21: the boycott of government institutions, schools, courts and legislative councils, the surrender of British titles and honours, and public meetings drew on Khilafat networks as much as Congress ones. The alliance produced an unprecedented, though short-lived, degree of coordinated Hindu-Muslim political mobilisation.

Collapse

The joint movement lost momentum after Gandhi called off Non-Cooperation in February 1922 following the Chauri Chaura incident, in which a violent clash left police personnel dead, a decision that disappointed many Khilafat activists who wished to press on. The underlying cause of the movement was in any case overtaken by events in Turkey itself: the nationalist government under Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) abolished the Sultanate in 1922 and then the caliphate altogether in March 1924, ending the office the movement had been organised to defend. Without its founding cause, the Khilafat movement dissolved, and its collapse was followed in India by a marked rise in communal tension through the mid-1920s, a shift historians commonly link to the loss of the shared platform the movement had briefly provided.