Non-Cooperation and Khilafat, 1920–22

Detail

The idea behind it — Hind Swaraj (1909)

• Gandhi's core claim: British rule in India did not stand on guns alone. It stood on Indian cooperation.
• Indians worked as clerks, police, soldiers, lawyers and teachers for the Raj.
• Indians bought British cloth and voted in British-made councils.

• So if Indians pulled out that help, the rule would fall.

• Gandhi's promise: if non-cooperation was carried out fully, swaraj would come within a year.

• Planned stages (slow, step by step — not all at once): 1. Surrender titles given by the government. 2. Boycott civil services, army, police, courts, legislative councils, schools and foreign goods. 3. If the government answered with repression, move to full civil disobedience (openly breaking laws).

• The idea of satyagraha was that the fight must stay non-violent; the protester's own suffering was the weapon.

The Khilafat bridge — why Hindus and Muslims marched together

• What happened abroad: Turkey (the Ottoman Empire) lost the First World War. The victors began to break it up. The Ottoman Sultan was also the Khalifa — the head of the world Muslim community in religious terms. Indian Muslims feared his position would be destroyed.
• The Khilafat Committee was formed at Bombay in March 1919, led by the brothers Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali.
• Their demands:
• The Khalifa must keep control over the Muslim sacred places.
• The Khalifa must be left with enough land to defend the faith.

• Jazirat-ul-Arab (Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Palestine) must stay under Muslim sovereignty (Muslim rule).

• Gandhi's reading: here was a real chance to bring Hindus and Muslims into one movement. He saw the Khilafat question as a genuine wrong done to Indian Muslims, not a bargaining chip.

• Two Congress meetings decided it:
• Calcutta special session, September 1920 — Gandhi proposed non-cooperation in support of Khilafat and swaraj together; he won the other leaders over. [2]

• Nagpur session, December 1920 — the non-cooperation programme was formally adopted as Congress policy. [2]

• Britannica records the same programme: Indians would give up titles, and boycott government schools, courts, government service, foreign goods and elections, and finally refuse to pay taxes. [2]

• Britannica also notes Gandhi's support for Khilafat helped him revitalise the Congress itself — the two movements ran their non-cooperation programmes side by side. [2][3]

The movement on the ground, from January 1921

In the towns — the middle class starts it

• Students left government schools and colleges; teachers resigned; lawyers gave up their practice.
• Council elections were boycotted across most provinces.
• The one exception was Madras. There the Justice Party, a party of non-Brahmans, contested and entered the council.
• Their logic: council seats were one of the few ways non-Brahmans could get power that Brahmans already held elsewhere.
• So boycott, for them, meant handing power back to the upper castes.

The economic boycott

• Foreign cloth imports fell by about half in 1921–22: from Rs 102 crore down to Rs 57 crore.
• Liquor shops were picketed (people stood outside and stopped buyers going in).
• Foreign cloth was piled up and burnt in public bonfires.
• Merchants and traders refused to trade in or finance foreign goods.

Workers and villagers push further than the leaders wanted

• 1921: 396 strikes involving 6 lakh workers, with 70 lakh workdays lost.
• Andhra hill tribes (the Gudem-Rampa hills) broke the forest laws — they grazed cattle and took wood from reserved forest the state had closed to them.
• Awadh peasants refused to pay taxes and rents to talukdars.
• Kumaun hill people refused begar — refused to carry the loads of touring officials for free.
• The key point for exams: these groups often acted in defiance of the local nationalist leadership. They read "Gandhi's swaraj" in their own way — as an end to rent, to begar, to forest rules — not as the disciplined programme Congress had drawn up.

Why the towns slowed down by 1921–22

• Khadi (hand-spun, hand-woven cloth) was costlier than mill cloth. The poor could not afford to buy it, so the boycott of foreign cloth had a class limit.
• Alternative institutions were slow to appear. If a student left a government school, there was often no national school to join. If a lawyer left the court, there was no substitute court. So many drifted back.

Why Gandhi called it off — Chauri Chaura, February 1922

• Chauri Chaura, a small place in Gorakhpur district, United Provinces, February 1922.
• A procession of peasants, meant to be peaceful, clashed with police.

• The crowd set the police station on fire; policemen inside were killed.

• Gandhi withdrew the movement. His reason: the satyagrahis were not trained in non-violence. A movement that turned violent, he held, was worse than no movement.

• Many leaders — including younger ones — were angry. They felt the movement was at its peak and the retreat threw away the gains.
• But the scale mattered: the Raj had been shaken to its foundations for the first time since 1857.

The Great Trial, March 1922

• Gandhi was arrested in March 1922 and charged with sedition (stirring up hatred against the government).
• The charge was under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, and was based on articles he had written in his weekly journal Young India. [4]
• He was arrested at his ashram at Ahmedabad, and tried at Ahmedabad before Sessions Judge C. N. Broomfield. Tried with him was Shankarlal Banker. [4][5]
• Gandhi appeared without a lawyer, pleaded guilty to every charge, and asked for the highest punishment the law allowed. [4]
• Sentence: six years' imprisonment. Britannica records that he served about two years before being released on medical grounds. [4]
• In sentencing, Justice Broomfield called Gandhi "a great patriot and a leader" — an unusual admission from the bench of the ruling power, and a sign of the moral force the movement carried.

Note: Britannica gives Gandhi's arrest date as 10 March 1922, while the Indian Culture portal records the arrest at the Ahmedabad ashram as 13 March 1922. The NCERT scaffold only says March 1922; keep that in an answer. [2][4]

Prelims Hooks

• Hind Swaraj was written by Gandhi in 1909; it argued British rule survived on Indian cooperation.
• The Khilafat Committee was formed at Bombay in March 1919 by Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali.
• Jazirat-ul-Arab — the demand that Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Palestine stay under Muslim sovereignty.
• Non-cooperation was proposed at the Calcutta special session (September 1920) and adopted at the Nagpur session (December 1920). [2]
• The Justice Party of Madras, a non-Brahman party, did not boycott the council elections.
• Foreign cloth imports fell from Rs 102 crore to Rs 57 crore between 1921 and 1922 — roughly halved.
• 1921 saw 396 strikes with 6 lakh workers taking part.
• Kumaun hill people refused begar (carrying officials' loads without pay); Awadh peasants refused taxes; Andhra hill tribes broke forest laws.
• Chauri Chaura is in Gorakhpur district; the police station was burnt in February 1922.
• Gandhi was tried for sedition under Section 124A IPC for articles in Young India, before Judge C. N. Broomfield at Ahmedabad, and sentenced to six years. [4][5]

Mains Points

• The first truly all-India mass movement. Before 1920 nationalism was largely a matter of petitions by educated townsmen. Non-Cooperation drew in students, lawyers, merchants, mill workers, peasants and hill tribes at the same time. This is why the Raj was said to be shaken as it had not been since 1857.
• One slogan, many meanings. "Swaraj" meant a constitutional goal to Congress leaders, an end to rent and talukdari power in Awadh, an end to begar in Kumaun, and free use of the forest in Andhra. This shows both the strength of Gandhian mobilisation (it could unite very different groups) and its weakness (the centre could not control what it had set in motion).
• Chauri Chaura — the ethics-versus-tactics debate. One view: Gandhi was right, since a violent mass movement would have invited crushing repression and destroyed the Congress's moral claim. The other view: withdrawal at the peak demoralised the ranks, and pushed a younger generation towards revolutionary politics (HSRA) and Swarajist council-entry. Either way, it fixed means over ends as the Congress's operating rule.
• Khilafat and the limits of Hindu-Muslim unity. The alliance was real and was the high point of joint action; but it rested on a pan-Islamic religious issue, not on a shared programme of Indian politics. When Mustafa Kemal abolished the Caliphate in Turkey (1924), the bridge lost its ground, and communal tension returned in the mid-1920s. Useful for any GS-I question on the roots of communal politics.