द इण्डियन स्ट्रगल / भारतीय स्वाधीनता संग्राम (नेताजी सुभाष चन्द्र बोस - ऐतिहासिक विश्लेषण)

54 THE INDIAN STRUGGLE
to the 'Khalifa,' the head of the Islamic Church, the temporal
power which he had enjoyed as Sultan of Turkey before the
Great War. The leadership of this Khilafat movement was
assumed by the Ali brothers, Moulana Mohammed Ali, the
younger but more influential, and Moulana Shaukat Ali, the
elder. Both of them were Oxford graduates. Moulana
Mohammed Ali had been a journalist and Moulana Shaukat
Ali a highly-paid officer in the Excise Department of the
Government of India. During the war both of them had been
interned for carrying on propaganda against the British Gov-
ernment and in favour of the Turks. The agitation following
in the wake of their incarceration had made them prominent
in the public eye and when the Khilafat movement began, it
was natural that they should be invested with the crown of
leadership. Moreover, their dress and mode of life, shaped
according to orthodox Moslem ideas, made a strong appeal
to the Moslem masses and served to make them tremendously
popular.
The Punjab atrocities and their sequel made a rebel of the
once loyal Mr. Gandhi. He who had pleaded for co-operation
at Amritsar in December, 1919, and had succeeded in carrying
the Congress with him, was in 1920 collecting his forces for
leading a revolt against the British Government. Before he
returned to India in 1914, he had tried the method of passive
resistance in South Africa, in his fight for the rights of
Indians against the South African Government and had
found it extremely helpful. In February, 1919, before the
Rowlatt Bills-became law, he had started an agitation on the
same lines, called the 'Satyagraha'¹ movement, against the
Bills—but the agitation had proved to be abortive for the
time being, because of the outbreak of violence. He was,
however, fully prepared to use the same method once again in
¹ 'Satyagraha' means literally 'persistence in truth.' It has been trans-
lated variously as non-co-operation, passive resistance, civil-disobedience,
civil-resistance. The Satyagraha pledge was first taken at a public meeting
in Johannesburg in South Africa, on September 11th, 1906, against the
Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance. According to Mr. Gandhi, Satyagraha
eschews the use of violence in every form and has not the remotest idea
of injuring the opponent. Mr. Gandhi states in his preface to Satyagraha
in South Africa that before 1919 he had occasion to experiment with
Satyagraha five times in India.