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ANKARA
As the world observes the 73rd anniversary of the assassination of Indian freedom icon Mahatma Gandhi on Saturday, experts recalled that events that unfolded in Turkey a century ago actually helped and shaped his leadership in India.
Shortly after returning to India from South Africa in 1915, the Balkan War and attempts by the colonial powers to dismember Turkey after World War I prompted Gandhi to launch his famous non-cooperation movement against the British government.
According to author RK Sinha, Gandhi’s program of non-cooperation was adopted at the Khilafat Committee meeting in Mumbai in May 1920. “Shortly after this conclave, Gandhi went on an extensive tour to rally the people behind the Turkish cause. “, said.
In his academic book, The Turkish Question Mustafa Kemal and Mahatma Gandhi, Sinha argued that the movement to help Turkey was also a brief moment of communal friendship between Hindus and Muslims in India. In a letter to the British viceroy Lord Chelmsford, Gandhi protested the British treatment of Turkey and warned him that the policy of non-cooperation would intensify after August 1, 1920 if he implemented the Treaty of Sevres.
But the Allies of World War I went ahead and forced the Ottoman Empire to sign the treaty on August 19, 1920, ceding much of the Turkish territory to France, the United Kingdom, Greece and Italy and also created large occupation zones within of the Ottoman Empire. Empire.
At the call of Gandhi and the Indian Muslim activist Maulana Mohammad Ali Jouhar, the people renounced the titles given to them by the government and boycotted foreign products.
In the June 1921 issue of Young India, an English weekly published between 1919 and 1931, Gandhi appealed to Hindus to join the movement against the dismemberment of Turkey.
“India is not ready today, but if we are prepared to thwart every plot that may be hatched for the destruction of Turkey or to prolong our subjugation, we must ensure an atmosphere of enlightened non-violence as quickly as possible, not the non-violence of the weak but not violence from the strong, who would disdain to kill but would gladly die for the vindication of the truth, “he wrote.
According to Muhammad Naeem Qureshi of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, Gandhi made it clear to the British viceroy that he, as a Hindu, cannot remain indifferent to the cause of Muslims, who were deeply wounded by unworthiness. accumulated. in Turkey.
“Their (Muslim) pains must be our pains,” he added.
Gandhi refuses to withdraw the lack of cooperation
On November 23, 1919, at the first session of the All India Khilafat Conference in Delhi in the presence of Gandhi, a resolution was passed to boycott the peace and end the World War I celebrations. Another significant result of this meeting was the formation of the Jamiat-ul-Ulama-i-Hind, a politico-religious body of religious scholars who later played an important role as an ally of Congress.
According to the records, when Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, the most suitable leader, asked Gandhi to suspend the campaign until other members of Congress also sat down and discussed it, he rejected it.
“Non-cooperation had become a religious duty and he could not wait for the decisions of Congress. In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place, ”Gandhi said.
Historians believe that this move to help Turkey left an indelible mark on Indian politics. It was the only pan-South Asian movement that people responded to that cut across religious affiliations and involved Punjab, Sind, the border, 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 called on Muslims to present their case to the world in a firm, unshakable, but peaceful manner.
On July 24, 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne was signed to the satisfaction of the Turkish people.
“This treaty is a document that expresses the final failure of the plot against Turkey, a plot hatched a century ago, a plot that would have succeeded with the Treaty of Sevres. It is a diplomatic victory that is not recorded in Ottoman history, ”said Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of the Republic of Turkey.
According to Benazir Banu, a researcher at Jamia Millia Islamia, a Delhi-based central university, the Treaty of Lausanne was the result of the famous Turkish swords backed by the unforgettable and unforgettable moral support of India provided by Gandhi, who at the time was in the British prison due to the Turkish unrest.
Murder and plot
But exactly 24 years later, just six months after the independence of India, the apostle of nonviolence and peace was assassinated by Hindu communalists.
Speaking to Anadolu Agency, journalist and author Vivek Shukla, who has written extensively about Gandhi’s stay in Delhi, said that just three days before his assassination, Gandhi had visited the dargah of the Turkish Sufi saint Khwaja Bakhtiyar Kaki (1173 -1235 AD), which had been looted.
Thousands of Muslims had taken refuge inside, waiting to be transported to Pakistan. “He asked Muslims to stay in India and asked Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to repair the dargah,” Shukla said.
On January 30, 1948, at the prayer meeting in the compound of Birla House, now Gandhi Smriti, a large mansion in New Delhi, the murderer Nathuram Godse, a member of the Hindu ultra-nationalist party, the Hindu Mahasabha, and a past member of the sponsoring organization of Hindu nationalists Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, shot Gandhi dead.
Godse was captured by a nearby crowd and turned over to the police. In all, nine people, including the top Hindu nationalist leader Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, were arrested for conspiring to the assassination. Savarkar was accused of being the mastermind of 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 AG Noorani, Savarkar was acquitted simply on technical grounds. Paradoxically, a portrait of Savarkar adorns the walls of the Central Hall of the Indian Parliament, next to that of Gandhi.
The Jivanlal Kapur Justice Commission, which investigated the conspiracy behind the assassination, found that Hindu nationalists were furious at Gandhi’s opposition to the Indian government’s decision to withhold payment of 550 million rupees ($ 7.5 million) to Pakistan’s share of cash balances at the time of Split.
Citing witnesses, the commission’s report stated that even then Governor General Lord Mountbatten had also exerted moral pressure on Gandhi to push the Nehru government to release payments to Pakistan, as it was tarnishing India’s just name and honor. .
The first attempt on Gandhi’s life was carried out on January 20, 1948, when Madanlal Pahwa dropped 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 uncover the conspiracy and increase Gandhi’s protection, but Godse shot him in the same spot on January 30, 1948 while on his way to the prayer meeting.
Investigations later concluded that he was an accomplice of Pahwa 10 days ago, when he had tried to throw the bomb at Gandhi, which he missed.
Integration of Gandhi’s assassins
Historians of India now fear that Gandhi’s assassins, who had been shunned and isolated for the past 70 years and driven to the sidelines, would now be treated as a cult and become mainstream in India. In recent years, Hindu nationalists have tried to give Godse respectability, referring to him as a misunderstood patriot, who has so far been condemned as a traitor and a terrorist. “The cult of Nathuram Godse is no more marginal; but ordinary, ”says Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi’s biographer.
He feared that, like centuries ago, India discarded the teachings of Lord Buddha for his opposition to social inequality, many Indians now wish to discard Gandhi for his ideas of interfaith harmony. “Perhaps we should let the rest of the world possess and affirm Gandhi, just as they have possessed and affirmed the Buddha,” he wrote on his blog at http://ramachandraguha.in.
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