How Mohandas Gandhi’s Pious Dictatorship Culminated in the Genocide of Hindus in Malabar: The Hidden Details

On 24 December 1921, the pre-independence Indian National Congress met at Ahmedabad for a discussion on the Congress Subjects Committee and passed five or six resolutions. This was truly a watershed moment both in the history of the INC and that of Bharatavarsha. It officially appointed Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi the dictator of the Indian National Congress, and what until that time was occurring in fits and short spurts became a deluge: Gandhi’s cult of Hindu-Muslim unity which always meant the fatal kiss of death for the Hindus. It also heralded Gandhi’s two-decade-long reign of blackmailing and manipulating Congress leaders who were stalwarts in their own right.

Although an ardent admirer of Gandhi, the iconic D.V. Gundappa (or DVG) minced no words in calling out the “Mahatma’s” maha bluffs from time to time. Writing on the Ahmedabad Session, he notes[i] that

The most important part of the central resolution of the Congress is that which appoints Mr. Gandhi dictator.

But first, let’s read the actual text[ii] of the resolution itself.

In view of the impending arrest of a large number of Congress workers, this Congress whilst requiring the ordinary machinery to remain intact and to be utilized in the ordinary manner wherever feasible, hereby appoints until further instructions Mahatma Gandhi as the sole executive authority of the Congress and invests him with the full powers of the All-India Congress Committee including the power to convene a Special Session of the Congress or of the All-India Congress Committee or the Working Committee…

Of course, back then, the wholecountry was more or less engulfed in “Mahatma” Bhakti to notice that this was a tremendous masterstroke of Gandhian manipulation. But it was also a vastly different India. It was an innocent Bharatavarsha of the proverbial Hindu masses who hadn’t yet learnt, painfully learnt, that getting their trust repeatedly broken at the ballot box would become the norm for their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. Naturally, it was assumed that this elevation was due to Gandhi’s innate divinity and saintliness that no one in India possessed and therefore no one within the Congress questioned it. The Holy Ghost’s anointment as Supreme Political Saint was complete.

But why is it a masterstroke?    

The Congress President at the Ahmedabad Session was a nonentity named Hakim Ajmal Khan (I doubt that today’s 80-plus years-old Congress bandicoots would’ve even heard this name) was “unanimously elected” to the post. Because the then President Chittaranjan Das was thrown in jail by the British. The last of Gandhi’s obstacles, the then equivalent of the Old Guard, was out of his way. Here is how the INC website describes Gandhi’s formal appointment as dictator (emphasis added).  

Gandhiji was appointed as the sole executive authority of the Congress and invested with full powers of the AICC. Chairs and benches for delegates were eliminated and Khadi tents made their appearance for first time.

Equally, not everybody were conned by this Gandhian hocus-pocus. DVG continues his observation, noting[iii] that Gandhi’s formal investiture into dictatorship was

…the formal recognition and ratification of a fact that has long been in actual existence…Such a moment is a crisis in the history of that particular democratic body…as well as in the general history of the country. If the dictator…fails, the party will perish and the country’s history will necessarily follow the line chalked out by other forces.

This is clairvoyance that touches the upper reaches of genius. History is witness that Gandhi’s dictatorship culminated in India’s Partition and the industrial-scale bloodbath that accompanied it. Equally, the Congress as a party perished the day Jawaharlal Nehru took over its reins. Its actual extinction is playing out even as I write this. As to DVG’s note about India’s history following the line chalked out by other forces, I humbly submit my piece detailing how the Congress surrendered to breaking India forces years ago.

The Forgotten Critics of Mohandas Gandhi

But it’s quite amazing how in less than a decade after India attained Independence, the criticism against Gandhi levelled by his own contemporaries was near-totally erased from national memory. The most marked instance of this is the demonization and hounding of the legendary historian, Acharya R.C. Majumdar. In its basic nature and tenor, this phenomenon isn’t different from whitewashing the history of the genocide and oppression of Hindus during the medieval Muslim rule. Think about it. For the longest time, even the criticism against Gandhi by Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, one of the most vocal and public critics of Gandhi, was never quoted. The only other name of a famous Gandhi-critic is Sri Aurobindo. Even Annie Beasant, otherwise well-known and respected, had seen through Gandhian guiles and spoke her mind publicly.  

Today, perhaps only a handful of people would’ve heard of names like G.K. Devadhar, K.P. Kesava Menon, Gopala Menon, M.R. Jayakar, and the most trenchant critic of them all, the intrepid and independent-minded, C. Sankaran Nair. He was among the first ones to see through Gandhi and as early as 1922, wrote the stinging volume bearing a no-holds-barred title, Gandhi and Anarchy, a pugnacious monument to the Gandhian hoax. Small wonder that the book quickly went out of circulation after Independence. Four decades before Acharya R.C. Majumdar’s blunt critique of Gandhi’s Ahimsa creed, Sankaran Nair had this[iv] to say:

Mr. Gandhi…belongs to a class of thought which has attracted some of the noblest minds in this world, but in applying his gospel of life to politics, he has shown himself a babe and his interference has been generally mischievous…There is scarcely any item in the Gandhi programme which is not a complete violation of everything preached by the foremost sons of India till 1919.

See how this corresponds so well with my aforementioned note on the Congress Party’s Old Guard in those days?  

But the story dates back a bit before Gandhi’s formal anointment as the pious dictator of the Indian National Congress in the Ahmedabad Session. To his naked and shameless support of the Islamic bigot-brothers, Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali. In favour of retaining the decrepit and fast-dying Khilafat in Turkey, which had no support in the Muslim world in the Arabian Peninsula. In India, this project of Islamic zealotry was given a grand title, “The Khilafat Movement” (sic). Gandhi’s shamelessness was boundless. He claimed that it was “love at first sight” when he met Mohammad Ali. And Gandhi’s unstinted support to it directly culminated in the bloodbath, mass rapes, killing of infants and pregnant women, atrocities, plunder, torture and forced conversions of thousands of Hindus in Malabar.

This ghastly incident continues to be known as The Moplah Rebellion instead of The Moplah Jihad against Kerala Hindus. Going by all recorded evidence—of which there is plenty—it is not inaccurate to characterize Gandhi’s support to the Khilafat as a support to the Ali Brothers’ jihad against Hindus.

“Mr. Gandhi is Worse than an Adulterous and Characterless Mussalman”

Two things ensued as a consequence. Yet another of Gandhi’s grand plans to achieve Hindu-Muslim unity bombed spectacularly. Two, the selfsame bigoted Ali Brothers turned back and spat on Gandhi in this fashion.

In 1924, Mohammad Ali publicly said this[v] in a speech in Aligarh:

However pure Mr. Gandhi’s character may be, he must appear to me, from the point of religion, inferior to any Mussalman even though he be without character.

In 1925, he escalated[vi] it further:

Yes, according to my religion and creed, I do hold an adulterous and a fallen Mussalman to be better than Mr. Gandhi.

Of course, Gandhi would remain undeterred as ever, chasing his indigenous delusion of Hindu-Muslim unity, regularly sacrificing hundreds of Hindu lives and temples, even perversely advising them to gladly embrace and become the proud victims of unceasing Jihad.

Like thousands of such Jihadi incidents against Hindus, the Jihad at Moplah has not only been whitewashed as a “rebellion” but has near-successfully been erased from the historical memory of Hindus. The correct question to ask is this: rebellion against what, who and why? And by whom?

The subsequent parts will examine these questions in detail. But here is a teaser.

“Let me finish with a beautiful story told to me. Two Pulayas, the lowest of the submerged classes, were captured with others, and given the choice between Islam and Death. These, the outcaste of Hinduism, the untouchables, so loved the Hinduism…that they chose to die Hindus rather than to live Muslim.”

That was Annie Beasant writing[vii] in New India after she visited the relief camps set up in the Kozhikode and Palghat regions in the aftermath of the genocidal and barbaric Jihad by Moplahs against the trusting and unprepared Hindus of Malabar.

To be continued  

Notes

[i] “INDIAN REVIEW OF REVIEWS.” D.V. Gundappa, et al.  Dec 1921 – Jan 1922, p.212. Emphasis added.

[ii] Partial text of the Resolution of the 1921 Ahmedabad Congress Session quoted verbatim in Ibid. Emphasis added.

[iii] Ibid. Emphasis added.

[iv] “GANDHI AND ANARCY.” Sir C. Sankaran Nair, Pp 8 – 9. Emphasis added.

[v] “THROUGH INDIAN EYES.” Times of India, 21 March 1924.

[vi] “THROUGH INDIAN EYES.” Times of India, 26 April 1924. Emphasis added.

[vii] “MALABAR’S AGONY.” Annie Beasant. New India, 29 November 1921. Quoted in “GANDHI AND ANARCY.” Sir C. Sankaran Nair, Pp 133 – 4. Emphasis added.