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.