The Congress spelt its stance clear in 1886 that it would cater only to temporal/political interests and not religious ones involving the communities. Based on this resolution, the Congress thwarted attempts by some Hindu leaders who demanded cow-killing be made a penal offence in 1887. Surendranath Banerjee, then a Congress stalwart, said: “Here we stand upon a common platform…Here we have agreed to bury differences. After this assurance, let us hope our Mohammedan friends will no longer hesitate to join their Hindu fellow subjects.”
However, Mahatma Gandhi went for a rupture with the Congress’s profession of secularism when he led the (1919-20) Non-Cooperation Movement. He aligned himself with the Muslim divines on the internationally sensitive issue of Khilafat. Communist leader, Hiren Mukherjee wrote ecstatically: “Never before such a thing happened on the Indian soil. Never before had the country responded so ecstatically to cries of Hindu-Muslim friendship. Never before had a leader emerged of Gandhi’s often eccentric, but uniquely effulgent quality.”
Ambedkar wrote, “In taking up the cause of Khilafat, Mr. Gandhi achieved a double purpose. He carried the Congress Plan of winning over the Muslims to its culmination. Secondly, he made the Congress a power in the country, which it would not have been, if the Muslims had not joined it. For there can be no doubt that this was an act of great daring.”
Yet, the communal distemper, wrapped under the mass movement, resurfaced with a vengeance once the movement fizzled out and the raison d’être of the Khilafat stir petered out. Communal riots with their usual portion of blood and gore kept recurring. The spell perhaps began with what is known as Mappila rebellion in south India when there were butchery, rape and forcible conversion. The gory spree continued with the Congress pleading helplessness to contain it. The Round Table Conference held in 1931 accentuated the inter-communal animosities and these got further solidified in the Communal Award the British conceded in 1937.
Gandhiji was indeed helpless. He is on record saying that he could wield no influence over Muslims except through a Muslim. He was pained having found that the Muslim leaders who had been with him solidly during the Khilafat-Non-Cooperation Movement were no longer with him. “A verbal disapproval by the Mussalmans of the Moplah madness is no test of Muslim friendship. The Mussalmans must naturally feel the shame and humiliation of the Moplah conduct about the forcible conversions and looting, and they must work away so silently and effectively that such things might become impossible even on the part of the most fanatical among them,” Gandhiji said.
According to NC Chaudhuri, the ideological result of the failure of the Khilafat movement was more dangerous than its immediate political implications. “Abolition of the Caliphate by Mustafa Kemal and his total rejection of Pan-Islamism deprived the Muslims of India at one stroke of the strength which they had derived by considering themselves as part of the universal Islamic order. But instead of feeling any kind of resentment against Kemal for that, they re-directed their thinking on their position in India, to which they saw a threat in the nationalist movement. They came more and more strongly to feel that they stood nowhere as Muslims unless they had a territorial base in India. There was a complete turnabout from extra-territoriality to territoriality in their political thinking, and the conception of Pakistan was a natural consequence of that revolution in ideas.”
True, the Muslims of the sub-continent were shocked when they saw the Turks themselves rejected the Caliphate after the victory of Kemal Ataturk, thus ending the pan-Islamic movement. Other Islamic countries like some Arab States and Iran emerged as territorial nations breaking free of the idiom of the non-territorial Islamic world. Shocked by the development, the Muslims of the sub-continent began groping for a land of their own where they could grow according to their culture.