Chapter 10
The Weapon of the Prophet
I am going to give you such a weapon that the police and the army
will not be able to stand against it. It is the weapon of the
Prophet (Sllalhu-Alehe-Wasllam), but you are not aware of it. That
weapon is patience and righteousness. No power on earth can stand
against it.
When you go back to your villages, tell your brethren that there is
an army of God and its weapon is patience. Ask your brethren to join
the army of God. Endure all hardships. If you exercise patience,
victory will be yours.
ON THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT, December 31, 1929, a deafening roar
swelled over the ancient city of Lahore and spilled into the dark
Indian countryside. It was the cry of freedom. Five thousand
Congress delegates, closely watched by some twenty five thousand
sympathetic onlookers, had spent the previous week arguing India’s
future. Should they demand independence outright-and unleash a
revolution- or go on reasoning and pleading with the British? On
close examination, there was no argument. The British had been given
a year to think the matter over and their purposeful silence was
answer enough. India, in their eyes, would remain British
indefinitely.
Thus the cry. The five thousand delegates decided to declare
themselves and all Indians free men and women, henceforth and
forever. Their declaration echoed the small band of American
colonials at Philadelphia in July of 1776:
We believe that it is the inalienable right of the Indian people, as
of any other people, to have freedom and to enjoy the fruits of
their toil and have the necessities of life so that they may have
full opportunities of growth. We believe also that if any government
deprives a people of these rights and oppresses them, the people
have a further right to alter it or to abolish it. The British
Government in India has not only deprived the Indian people of their
freedom, but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses and
has mined India economically, politically, culturally and
spiritually. We believe, therefore, that India must sever the
British connection and attain complete independence. We hold it to
be a crime against man and God to submit any longer to a rule that
has caused this fourfold disaster to our country.
The young Jefferson could not have phrased the words with cleaner
accuracy. No doubt the image of the American colonials must have
loomed in the minds of many under the sprawling pavilion-as did
images of the American Revolution itself.
Yet there was a difference. This was the Indian Revolution, not the
American, and the words were Gandhi’s. The end was the same, but the
means would be utterly, startlingly different. The resolution went
on:
We recognize, however, that the most effective way of gaining our
freedom is not through violence. We will prepare ourselves by
withdrawing, so far as we can, all voluntary association from the
British government, and will prepare for civil disobedience,
including the nonpayment of taxes. We are convinced that if we can
but withdraw our voluntary help, stop payment of the taxes, without
doing violence even under provocation, the end of this inhuman rule
is assured.
The Indian tricolor was raised and the gathering exploded in
celebration. Two hundred Pathans led the way, locking their arms in
a great circle. Their drums thumped and the circle swayed in one of
the wild Pathan dances so reminiscent of the Cossacks. Even Nehru
put on a Pathan turban and kicked up his patrician heels. India was
free! All she had to do now was prove it to the British.
That was Gandhi’s job. He would choose the day and the issue on
which India would begin satyagraha-nonviolent resistance.
Ghani told Indians to prepare themselves for the final plunge while
he waited for the inner voice. When the call came he would now
it-and give the signal.
Indian waited and simmered. Like monsoon clouds boiling on the
horizon, the whole country of three hundred million waited for the
storm to break. January passed, then February. There was no word
from Gandhi. The British murmured in their offices and clubs about
the storm brewing-and waited. They were not about to make some thing
out of nothing. Let Gandhi show himself.
On March 2, 1930, Gandhi sent the viceroy what has been described as
“the strangest communication the head of a government ever
received.” After a detailed, reasoned review of why he “regarded
British rule as a curse,” he informed Lord Irwin respectfully that
unless he “opened a way for a real conference between equals,”
nationwide civil disobedience would begin in nine days. He did not
stay what would happen or where.
Irwin acknowledged receipt of the letter.
On March 12, Gandhi left his ashram on the Sabarmati River and began
a twenty-four-day march to the seaside village of Dandi. On the
morning of April 6, with thousands of cheering Indians surrounding
him, he picked up a pinch of sea salt from the Dandi beach and broke
the law restricting the making and selling of salt to the government
monopoly. The great Salt Satyagraha had begun.
A pinch was sufficient. Gandhi’s act signaled Indians across the
country to break the salt law, one of the more onerous forms of
exploitation in a tropical land where salt is as essential as water.
The law not only monopolized the market for salt but levied a tax on
it which, until recently, had been the government’s second largest
source of revenue. Every one in India, rich or poor, had to use
salt. Every one was touched by the salt law. Therefore, Gandhi
reasoned, everyone was in a position to break it. The salt law was a
perfect symbol of colonial tyranny, which the simplest Indian
peasant could understand.
A monsoon of resistance broke over the country. In open defiance,
Indians by the million made, sold, and bought millions of pounds of
illegal salt. It was the unmistakable gesture of a people who had
declared themselves free and were now beginning to act like it.
By the end of the month, India was convulsed by revolution. The
British had never seen anything like this- no government had in all
of history. Their armies and police beat down the unarmed crowds
with lathis (steel-tipped staffs), raided Congress offices,
confiscated property, and eventually arrested every major political
leader except Gandhi, assuming that the movement would collapse from
under him. Meetings were banned and newspapers shut down. One
hundred thousand people ended up in jail.
But the storm only grew. Every arrest or beating only brought forth
new resisters. Finally, unable to bear the mounting criticism form
London, the viceroy arrested Gandhi on May 4. Gandhi went with one
simple message for his countrymen: to carry on the struggle with
complete nonviolence. Memories of the aborted movement of a decade
ago, called off by Gandhi because some policemen had been killed by
demonstrators, were still fresh in Indian minds. This time they
would not try their Mahatma’s patience. In spite of intense
repression, there was no violence on the part of Indians.
On the Frontier, repression reached another order of magnitude.
After the first week of April, no reporters were allowed in or out
of the province, and local newspaper reports came out heavily
censored. Rumors of firings on unarmed crowds, beatings, and
humiliations ran rampant; no one on the outside could sort out the
truth. Congress appointed an inquiry committee under Vithalbhai
Patel, to visit the Frontier and come up with an accurate account of
events. The Government countered with its own Suleiman Inquiry
Committee-and turned the Congress representatives back at the
border. Patel and his colleagues stayed in Rawalpindi, just outside
the Frontier, and opened their inquiry there. After interviewing
seventy nine witnesses, they released a three hundred fifty page
report which the Government promptly banned. It told a chilling
story of brutality on a scale Indians had never seen before. But
along with the brutal details, contraband copies brought to the rest
of India a first heartening glimpse of the heroism that is possible
when the strong and fearless renounce arms and use love and
nonviolence as their only weapons.
The story of the Peshawar “disturbances” begins, appropriately, with
Badshah Khan.
On January 1, 1930, the declaration of independence at Lahore had
been repeated in mass meeting all over India, including several
locations in the Frontier. Khan and his red shirted Servants of God
immediately embarked on an intensive campaign of education and
organization, touring villages throughout the Frontier. The British,
apprehensive but unwilling to provoke the Pathans, stalled. Then the
Chief Commissioner of Peshawar ordered Khan in to see him and told
him to stop what he was doing.
“This is basically a social movement,” Khan replied, “not a
political movement. Indeed, the government itself should have
launched it. I am doing your work; you should extend your help and
cooperation.”
The Commissioner did not take Khan’s advice, nor did khan take his.
He told the Khudai Khidmatgars to continue their organizing in the
villages. A few weeks later Gandhi arrived at the seashore of Dandi
and picked up his historic pinch of salt. Within days, it has been
estimated; almost the entire population of Peshawar had broken the
salt laws. Throughout the Frontier, the British felt hopelessly
outnumbered among an alien people they feared and could not control.
In their minds it was all too likely that-as in the past-the
Frontier would erupt in violence.
On April 23, 1930, Khan rose before a mass meeting in Utmanzai and
exhorted his people to join in civil resistance. He then set out for
Peshawar to make a similar appeal and was arrested in a town called
Naki. The town’s people, true Pathans, promptly declared themselves
all Khudai Khidmatgars from that time on. Word of Khan’s arrest
spread rapidly, and soon thousands of demonstrators had gathered and
surrounded the jail. Khan’s elder brother, Dr. Khan Saheb, arrived
in time to remind the crowd to remain nonviolent, while Badshah Khan
and four of his co-workers were take out of the Frontier without
incident and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.
Meanwhile, the frontier was exploding-nonviolently. In Peshawar
other Khudai Khidmatgar leader had been arrested in the early hours
of that same day, and by mid-morning a spontaneous general strike
was in effect all over the city. A large crowd gathered in Qissa
Khawani Bazaar to protest the arrests. Troops were called in from
the nearby army base and arrived with three armored cars. By that
time all the arrests had been concluded peacefully, and the sub
inspector of police commanded the crowd to remain nonviolent and go
home. They had began to do so, the Congress Inquiry Committee report
relates in its matter-of-fact way, when “all of a sudden two or
three armored cars came at great speed from behind without giving
warning of their approach and drove into the crowd. Several people
were run over, of whom some were injured and a few killed on the
spot. The people were not armed-[not even with] stones or breaks.
The crowd behaved with great restraint, collecting the wounded and
dead.”
More people collected. The troops were ordered to fire. “Several
people were killed and wounded,” the report continues,
And the crowd was pushed back some distance. At half past eleven,
endeavors were made by one or two outsiders to persuade the crowd to
disperse and the authorities to remove the troops and the armed
cars. The crowds were willing to disperse if they were allowed to
remove the dead and the injured and if the armored cars and the
troops were removed. The authorities, on the other hand, expressed
their determination not to remove the armored cars and the troops.
The result was that the people did not disperse and were prepared to
receive the bullets and lay down their lives. The second firing then
begins and, off and on, lasted for more than three hours….
In his study of nonviolent movements, Gene Sharp of Harvard includes
a description of the firing in Qissa Khawani Bazaar:
When those in front fell down wounded by the shots, those behind
came forward with their breasts bared and exposed themselves to the
fire, so much so that some people got as many as 21 bullet wounds in
their bodies, and all the people stood their ground without getting
into a panic. A young Sikh boy came and stood in front of soldier
and asked him to fire at him, which the soldier unhesitatingly did,
killing him. The crowd kept standing at the spot facing the soldiers
and were fired at from time to time, until there were heaps of
wounded and dying lying about.
The Anglo-Indian paper of Lahore, which represents the official
view, itself wrote to the effect that the people came forward one
after another to face the firing and when they fell wounded they
were dragged back and others came forward to be shot at. This state
of things continued from 11 till 5 o’clock in the evening. When the
number of corpses became too many the ambulance cars of the
government took them away [and burned them].
Throughout the afternoon the government troops chased unarmed
Pathans through the Bazaar and down the Streets of the Storytellers
and the Silversmiths, shooting on sight. The Congress report
estimated that two to three hundred were killed and many more
wounded.
At one point the government ordered its track Garhwal Rifles to fire
on the crowds. Faced with unarmed men, women, and children lying
sown to be slaughtered, the Garhwalis refused. “You may blow us from
your guns, if you like,” they told their officers. (Indians in the
“Mutiny of 1857” had been shot from cannon as punishment.) “We will
not shoot our unarmed brethren.”
When word of the Gharwalis’ heroism got out, it moved all India. The
soldiers paid a high price for it. The whole platoon was arrested,
and seventeen men were court-martialed and sentenced: one to
banishment in an overseas penal colony for life, another to fifteen
years’ imprisonment, and the rest to rigorous prison terms.
This was one of the most famous regiments in the world, known for
their loyalty as well as their courage, and their refusal to obey
orders gave the British a chilling reminder of the “Great Mutiny.”
They were determined to check it. Even after an eventual truce freed
all of the one hundred thousand political prisoners of the Salt
Satyagraha, the Garhwalis were exempted from the general amnesty and
served their full terms.
Peshawar itself fell into chaos, as the troops and police tried to
quell the demonstrations. For the next two days, the committee
reports, “Peshawar became a hell to live in, owing to the atrocities
of the British troops.” Then, on the night of the twenty-fifth, both
the military and the police evacuated the city, leaving it in the
hands of the Khudai Khidmatgar volunteers. A few days later the
police and the military reappeared and took control of the city
again. One of their first acts was to declare the Khudai Khidmatgars
illegal and close down their office, scattering all their papers and
removing their cash. “From that day onward,” the Congress report
concluded,
The city has been for all practical purposes under martial law.
Life, liberty or property of no one in Peshawar is safe….
The province has become a forbidden land to the outside world. It is
isolated from the rest of India and no public leader is allowed to
step in there…In spite of all this the spirit of the people has
remained unbroken and strict nonviolence has been observed.
That same day repression began also in Khan’s village. Dr. Khan
Sahib, after dispersing the crowds that had surrounded his brother’s
jail in Peshawar, heard that a mass meeting had been called in
Utamnzai and rushed to the scene to help. “Here,” says the man who
was later to be elected prime minister of his province, “I made my
first political speech in a public place.” Dr. Khan spoke for
nonviolence. As he concluded his speech, the Guides cavalry arrived.
The Guides commander announced that his men were going to open fire
and ordered the crowd to disperse. When no one heeded him, he
appealed to Dr. Khan for help. “The best thing for you to do,” Dr.
Khan told him, “is to go back and let us march to our destination.
But if you want to do any shooting, you must start now, because once
we leave the place, shooting would not a very brave thing.” After
some bluffing the cavalry left and the Khudai Khidmatgars proceeded
to march. On the road they were attacked by cavalry. “The officials
lost their heads,” Dr. Khan reported tersely, “and repression was
intense. But the Khudai Khidmatgars stood their ground without
retaliating, “the result,” he concludes, “Was that by the end of
September we had over eighty thousand volunteers.”
What alarmed the British—and stunned and inspired Indians-was the
nonviolence of the Pathans. No one expected it, and the British were
clearly unnerved. “The British feared a nonviolent Pathan more than
a violent one,” Khan wrote later. “All the horrors the British
perpetrated on the Pathans had only one purpose: to provoke them to
violence.” Much of the Government’s extreme behavior during the
months that followed can be understood only as attempts to goad the
Pathans into breaking their nonviolent vow. If the broke down and
retaliated, the British would be back on familiar ground.
Here British ingenuity came to the fore. They knew on what fine
points a Pathan’s honor turned, and they bent themselves to pushing
the Khudai Khidmatgars to the breaking point. Government troops
returned to Utmanzai before dawn on the morning of May, 13 1930.
Eight hundred British troops, a regiment of Indian cavalry, and a
special crops of shock troops with four Lewis field cannon “and
numerous other guns” surrounded the village under cover of darkness.
(Utmanzai at that time probably numbered no more than five thousand
inhabitants all told.) At dawn the troops entered the village and
surrounded the little shop over which Khudai Khidmatgar headquarters
was located. Unable to break in the front gate, they scaled the
walls and posted themselves around the balcony. Inside, Rabnawaz
Khan, the Khudai Khidmatgar commander, told all the volunteers in
the building-including Khan’s fourteen-year-old son, Wali-to
remember their vow of nonviolence. The British Deputy
Commissioner-apparently the same man who had ordered his men to open
fire in Qissa Khawani Bazaar-commanded the Pathans to go down into
the street and take off their red uniforms. They refused. The deputy
commissioner drew his revolver and held it to the chest of one of
the Pathans. “Remove your clothes!”
“Saheb, it is impossible,” replied the Khudai Khidmatgar. “The
trousers of a Pathan cannot be taken off as long as he is alive.”
A rifle struck him across the head and he fell unconscious. His
clothes were stripped from his body and se was beaten.
A man named Faiz Muhammad was next. He too refused, and the soldiers
started to strip him forcibly. The man was tall and powerfully
built, and although he did not fight back, he did not cooperate.
Eight or nine men were required to strip him, and even then he too
had to be beaten into unconsciousness.
One by one, other volunteers received the same treatment. Some were
pushed from the second-story balcony into the street. None fought
back-nor did they run away.
The soldiers came to Muhammad Naquib Khan, a Khudai Khidmatgar
captain. He too was beaten mercilessly, and they finally succeeded
in taking off his shirt. But when he was ordered again to take off
his trousers, some thing snapped. The blood drained from the
Pathan’s face. Badshah Khan had said they must be prepared to face
death, and the captain was willing-but this was worse than death. He
turned to run for a gun. He would die fighting-like a Pathan!
“Muhammad Naquib!” boomed the voice of his commander. “Is your
patience exhausted so soon? You swore to remain nonviolent until
death!”
“Muhammad Naqib!” was proud and volatile even for a Pathan. His
commission as a captain in the district’s volunteer corps might well
have raised eyebrows: virtually every man in the corps had a history
of violence, and was accustomed to dishing out punishment rather
than receiving it. Now his eyes burned as his position became clear
to him. He turned back toward the waiting soldiers. They were not
smiling. Across the face of the captain appeared a trace of grin. It
was the defiant smile of the Pathan warrior caught in open
cross-fire, knowing his defeat is imminent, taunting his pursuers
that though they may have conquered his body; his Pathan spirit is
winging its way to paradise. The shaggy head reared back and
Muhammad Naquib Kan started to walk slowly, with majestic Pathan
swagger, back to the English officer.
Young Wali Khan was standing in uniform when the commissioner got to
him. “Who are you?” the Englishman demanded. “I am the son of Khan
Abdul-Ghaffar-Khan!” Wali answered, in a voice meant to be heard
across the street. The commissioner began to abuse him, and a
British a soldier threatned him with his bayonet. One of the Indian
soldiers, a Muslim, could not stand by any longer. He stepped
forward and push the bayonet away, and in the confusion a Pathan
named Hassan Khan grabbed Wali, jumped with him from the balcony,
and took him to refuge in the mosque.
The soldiers then set to work. They burnt the office building to the
ground and looted the village. Villagers could not go out of their
homes to farm or graze their cattle or even to answer calls of
nature. Cows seen outside their compound were shot or bayoneted.
Anyone with a red shirt was stripped, beaten, and taken to jail.
Finally the village was cleared. No volunteers were left to arrest.
“Any more red shirt?” bellowed the commissioner provocatively.
It was too much for one old villager name Abbas Khan. He was not a
red shirt. What had he to do with these radical reformers? But
arrogance like this could not be borne.
He went to his home, doused a shirt in some red fluid, put it
on-still wet-and ran back into the street. “Here is a shirt!” the
old man barked into the face of the British commissioner.
Pathan pride will out. Abbas Khan was the rule rather than the
exception. Where Khan had been able to recruit only a thousand or so
Khudai Khidmatgars, British repression and effrontery converted
eighty thousand men and women to the movement by the end of the
summer.
Undaunted, the government tried other methods. Martial law was
declared in August and the province was placed completely in the
hands of the military, Khudai Khidmatgars were stripped and flogged
and made to run the gauntlet through cordons of soldiers who prodded
them with riffles and bayonets as they passed. One enterprising
assistant superintendent, a Mr. Jameson, had volunteers stripped and
physically humiliated in public, then thrown into nearby cesspools.
For some the strain was too great. They choose suicide rather than
break their vow of nonviolence.
The British also tried to subvert the movement by insinuating a
Bolshevik influence among the Red Shirts. An order was sent from the
British commissioner to all the village chiefs:
You must prevent Congress volunteers wearing red jackets from
entering your villages. They call themselves Khudai Khidmatgars
(Servants of God). But in reality they are the servants of Gandhi.
They were the dress of Bolsheviks. They will create the same
atmosphere as you have heard of in the Bolshevik dominion.
“The two years that followed.” Says a Pathan writer, Muhammad
Younis,
Formed an astounding period of darkness for the province. Shooting,
beatings and other acts of provocation were perpetrated against
these people, who had never suffered before without avenging
themselves. “Gunning the Red Shirts” was a popular sport and pastime
of the British forces in the province, observed an American tourist.
At Kohat, in the bitter cold of the winter, our men were beaten up
and later thrown into the icy stream running through the city. It
was the same story at Bannu [where the British made an unsuccessful
blockade to starve the villagers into submission] and Dera Ismail
Khan. The residents of Swabi saw their fields destroyed, their wheat
stocks ruined by oil poured upon them.
But the Pathans, notwithstanding the fact that they had been brought
up in an atmosphere of violence and bloodshed, stood unmoved by such
provocations and died peacefully in large numbers for the attainment
of their goal.
This time, nothing-not even jailing Gandhi-worked for the British.
Leaders came from nowhere, and the movement surged with invisible
momentum. All across the subcontinent, strikes, picketing, meeting
parades, and innumerable acts of open disregard for British rule
continued throughout the fall and winter of 1930. And Indians
remained nonviolent.
At the end of the year Lord Irwin invited Gandhi to Delhi to discuss
a true. It was the first time the British had officially recognized
Gandhi and his movement. They knew they had no choice.
After several days of negotiations Gandhi and Irwin signed an
accord-as equals. Civil disobedience was suspended, and throughout
India all political prisoners were released. On the Frontier, Khan’s
movement finally won long-sought concessions from the government.
Even the unsympathetic conceded that it was “thanks largely to
earlier Congress-Red Shirt pressure” that the Frontier “now became a
full-fledged governor’s province with an appointed indigenous
minister at the head of local government…At long last, the Pathans
had achieved political parity with the rest of British India.”
But the terms of the Gandhi-Irwin truce satisfied no one. For
politicians in London, too many concessions had been granted; for
Indians who had expected freedom, far too few. But two men
understood the watershed that the truce represented: Gandhi, who
knew that India’s freedom had been granted in principle if not in
fact; and Churchill, imperial to the marrow, who seethed over “the
nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this one-time inner Temple
lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the
viceroy’s palace, there to negotiate and to parley on equal terms
with the representative of the King-Emperor.” In conclusive as it
appeared at the movement, the Gandhi-Irwin Pact marked the beginning
of the end of imperialism. Churchill, who knew his history, better
than most, heard the death rattle. |
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