From the beginning Khilafat was a self-defeating enterprise. Gandhiji thought that by supporting the Khilafat 'cause' he would be able to garner Muslims into the national mainstream. Unfortunately it allowed fundamentalist Muslim leadership to alienate Muslims and commit atrocities against Hindus which ultimately ended in partition of the nation.
. From that date [August 1] onwards thousands of the forbidden war-knives were secretly made and hidden
away, and on August 20, the rebellion broke out; Khilafat flags were hoisted on police stations and Government offices.
...The misery is beyond description. Girl wives, pretty and sweet, with eyes half blind with weeping, distraught
with terror; women who have seen their husbands hacked to pieces before their eye, in the way "Moplas consider religious",
old women tottering, whose faces become written with anguish and who cry at a gentle touch and a kind look, waking out
of a stupor of misery only to weep, men who have lost all, hopeless, crushed, desperate. ...
I have walked among thousands of them in refugee camps, and sometimes heavy eyes would lift as a cloth was laid gently on
the bare shoulder, and a faint watery smile of surprise would make the face even more piteous than the stupor. Eyes full of
appeal, of agonized despair, of hopeless entreaty of helpless anguish, thousands of them camp after camp.
... Two Pulayas, lowest of the submerged classes were captured with others and were given the choice between Islam and
Death. These, the outcaste of Hinduism, the untouchables, so loved the Hinduism which had been so unkind a step-mother to
them, that they chose to die Hindus rather than to live Muslim. May the God of both, Muslim and Hindus send His messengers
to these heroic souls, and give them rebirth into the Faith for which they died.
A
nd it all started with atrocities against Hindus in what is now the Malabar
district of Kerala on Aug-1,1921.
Dr. Annie Beasant records the following in her report titledMalabar's agony
in New India dated 29 Nov 1921:
Can you conceive of a more ghastly and inhuman crime than the murder of babies and pregnant women? ... A pregnant woman carrying 7 months was cut through the abdomen by a rebel and she was seen lying dead with on the way with the dead child projecting out ... Another baby of six months was snatched away from the breast of the mother and cut into two pieces. ... Are these rebels human beings or monsters?
Maulana Modini called the looting and killing of HIndus 'military necessity' while the high priest of Khilafat movement itself the then Congress High Command applauded Moplas for fighting devotedly for their religious cause in a way 'they consider religious'. This inhuman defending of the barbaric Mopla atrocities prompted Annie Beasent to comment bitterly:
Men who consider it "religious" to murder, rape, loot, to kill women and little children, cutting down whole families, have to be put under restraint in any civilized society.
One of the favourite myths of the pseudo-secularist is that Moplah atrocity was actually a rebellion against land-owners who 'happened to be ' Hindus. As demonstrated by the large number of swords and knives ornamentally decorated in their handles
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A typical Mopla sword-knife used to slaughter Hindus. These weapons were mass produced and distributed just before the massacre show, it was not a peasent uprising but a well-financed and well planned attempt that almost succeded in the elimination of Kaffir Hindus |
show how much money and careful planning had gone into these atrocities against Hindus. Annie Beasant's report also shatters the myth that Moplah massacre in which by all moderate counts more than 5000 Hindus perished and many families dishonored and converted through sword and rapine, was not against just the 'high-caste Hindus' all Hindus -just because they were Hindus , were killed; infants were slaughtered before their mothers because they were born of Hindu parents.
Dr.Ambekar was not a leader who had any love for the so-called high castes. But he correctly
called Mopla events as barbaric. In fact, at that time apart from Dr.Annie Beasent he was the only leader to condemn these barbarisms.
Dr. Ambedkar found that all efforts made to make Islam and Indian nationalism harmonise had failed. He found Islam as 'hostile and alien'
to Indian cultural life.