Even as the LDF Government in Kerala is going ahead with its one-year long grandiose ‘mega-centenary celebrations’ of the Mappila Rebellion of August 21, 1921 that saw the biggest ethnic pogrom in Eranadu and Valluvanadu regions (spread across Palakkad, Malappuram and Kozhikode districts) resulting in the massacre of thousands of people, the festivities had been dampened by disclosures made by persons who mattered in modern India.
V P Menon, Secretary of State, who was the Man Friday to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the country’s first home minister and deputy prime minister, in his interview to Harry Hodson (who was the Reforms Commissioner to India till 1941 before Menon stepped into his shoes) had made it clear that the Mappila Rebellion was no way connected to the Khilafat Movement as made out by the Congress leaders of that time.
The recordings of Menon’s interview have been preserved in the archives of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, according to Left historian Narayani Basu who authored The Unsung Architect of Modern India, the biography of Menon. Basu is the great granddaughter of Menon.
“Khilafat leaders… were not non-communal. They were merely making use of Gandhiji for their own purpose,” Basu quotes Menon of telling Hodson who had called on the former in his capacity as editor of The Sunday Times.
Menon hailed from the region which saw the worst communal holocaust during the pogrom and had lost many of his friends and relatives to the knives of religious zealots. “In later years , as the Administrative Reforms Commissioner and Secretary of State, he was privy to the intelligence despatches sent by the British Army to Delhi as well as London,” said Prof P G Haridas, eminent historian of Kerala University.
Prof M G S Narayanan, former chief of Indian Council of Historical Research and who was a native of the region blames the Communists for distorting the Mappila Rebellion and portraying it as a peasant upsurge.
“The Conmunists who were always in the look out for opportunities to foment trouble, took advantage of this Hindu-Muslim divide after independence. Their ideologues like E M S Namboodirippadu characterized the rebellion as a peasant revolt. They rechristened the Mappila Rebellion as Malabar Rebellion and Peasant Rebellion.
These labels are misleading,” wrote Prof Narayanan in his preface to “Gandhi and Anarchy”, authored by Sir C Sankaran Nair, the only Keralite till date to occupy the coveted position of the president of the Indian National Congress.
Sir Nair was highly critical of Mahatma Gandhi’s support to the Khilafat Movement, which the Father of the Nation thought would help him connect with the Muslim community to strengthen India’s freedom movement.
But his dreams were shattered and Gandhiji came down heavily on the leaders of the Rebellion.
“I am aghast at the site of our Muslim brethren massacring their brothers and sisters. The information that all these killings happened as part of their attempts to convert the Hindus into Islam” writes the Mahatma in Young India (22-9-21) of which he was the editor.