Gandhi and the Khilafat Movement: Uniting India Against Colonial Rule

When the First World War ended in 1918, the victorious Allied powers began carving up the defeated Ottoman Empire. For Muslims across India, this was not just a distant geopolitical event. The Ottoman Sultan held the title of Caliph, the spiritual head of the worldwide Muslim community, and his weakening felt like an attack on their faith itself. Out of this anxiety grew the Khilafat Movement, and in a move that surprised many, Mahatma Gandhi threw his full weight behind it. His decision would shape one of the most remarkable experiments in religious unity in the freedom struggle.

Why the Caliphate mattered after the war 🔗

The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. When the Central Powers lost, the empire faced dismemberment. The Sultan in Constantinople was also the Caliph, and to many Muslims he symbolised the unity and leadership of the global Islamic community.

During the war, Indian Muslims had largely stayed loyal to the British, partly because the government assured them that the holy places of Islam and the authority of the Caliph would be protected. Roughly 1.3 million Indians fought in the war, and Muslim soldiers were a significant part of that effort. So when peace negotiations made it clear that the empire would be broken apart, the sense of betrayal was sharp.

The Treaty of Sèvres as the breaking point 🔗

The shock crystallised with the Treaty of Sèvres, signed in August 1920. Its terms were harsh: Ottoman territories such as Thrace, Smyrna, and Anatolia were stripped away and distributed among the Allies, leaving the Caliph largely powerless. The British had not kept their wartime promises, and for Indian Muslims this was experienced as a direct insult to their religion.

To coordinate a response, the Ali brothers, Maulana Mohammad Ali and Maulana Shaukat Ali, helped form the All India Khilafat Committee. Working alongside leaders like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Hasrat Mohani, they organised conferences and rallies. The first Khilafat Conference in Delhi in November 1919 passed resolutions to boycott British goods and to stay away from victory celebrations. The movement now needed a wider strategy and a mass base.

Why Gandhi decided to support the Khilafat cause 🔗

Gandhi saw something in the Khilafat agitation that few others did at the time. He viewed it as a rare opportunity to bring Hindus and Muslims together in a single, sustained political struggle against colonial rule. A grievance that was deeply felt by millions of Muslims could, he believed, become the foundation for a united national movement.

This support did not happen in isolation. The years 1919 and 1920 had already pushed Indian opinion to the edge. The Rowlatt Act of 1919 gave authorities the power to detain people without trial, and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in April 1919, where troops under General Dyer fired on an unarmed crowd, destroyed whatever trust remained in British justice. The Hunter Commission’s failure to hold officials accountable, combined with the disappointment of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, created fertile ground for resistance.

Gandhi joined the Central Khilafat Committee and even became its head, declaring that the Khilafat question mattered more than the constitutional reforms on offer. For many historians, this was effectively Gandhi’s first all-India mass movement.

Linking Khilafat with Non-Cooperation 🔗

Gandhi’s genius lay in fusing two separate grievances into one programme. At a meeting of the Central Khilafat Committee in Allahabad in June 1920, he proposed a staged programme of non-cooperation with the government. The idea was simple but powerful: Indians would withdraw their cooperation from the institutions that propped up British rule.

The Non-Cooperation Movement was formally launched on 1 August 1920. The Congress then approved it at a special session in Calcutta in September 1920, and the decision was endorsed at the Nagpur session in December 1920. The condition was clear. Non-cooperation would continue until the Punjab wrongs (Jallianwala Bagh) and the Khilafat wrongs were corrected and Swaraj, or self-rule, was achieved.

What the movement looked like on the ground 🔗

The programme of non-cooperation gave ordinary people specific actions to take. These included the surrender of government titles and honours, the boycott of government schools, colleges, and law courts, the boycott of legislative councils and elections, and the rejection of foreign goods in favour of swadeshi and khadi.

Alongside this rejection came construction. Nationalist institutions sprang up to replace the boycotted ones. Jamia Millia Islamia, Bihar Vidyapeeth, and Gujarat Vidyapeeth were founded during this period. The charkha, or spinning wheel, became a symbol of self-reliance. Gandhi insisted on this constructive side because he believed real freedom could not come from protest alone but had to be built through alternatives.

The response was extraordinary. For the first time, Hindus and Muslims joined a political struggle together on a mass scale. Peasants, workers, students, women, and traders all entered the national movement, each bringing their own aspirations. Gandhi and the Ali brothers often shared the same platform, a powerful visual symbol of unity.

Hindu support and the criticism Gandhi faced 🔗

Gandhi’s support for a pan-Islamic cause was controversial, and it remains debated today. Some critics argued that backing a religious cause tied to a foreign empire was unwise and even encouraged religious sentiment in politics. Yet the picture was more complex than a simple Hindu-Muslim divide.

The movement actually attracted support from several Hindu nationalists, including Swami Shraddhananda, a prominent Arya Samaj leader. At the same time, figures such as Annie Besant and, later, B.R. Ambedkar expressed serious reservations about linking the national struggle to the Khilafat question. Ambedkar in particular criticised what he saw as Gandhi’s willingness to overlook communal violence for the sake of preserving unity. These debates show that the question of mixing religion with anti-colonial politics was contested from the very start.

How the movement came to an end 🔗

The Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements ran together at high tide through 1921, but the alliance unravelled quickly in 1922. Two events in particular brought it down.

The Chauri Chaura incident 🔗

In February 1922, a confrontation in the town of Chauri Chaura, in the Gorakhpur district of the United Provinces, turned violent. After police fired on a group of Non-Cooperation volunteers, an enraged crowd chased the officers into the police station and set it on fire, killing about 22 policemen.

Gandhi was deeply disturbed. The violence convinced him that the country was not yet ready for disciplined mass civil disobedience, and on 12 February 1922 he announced the immediate suspension of the entire Non-Cooperation Movement. Many Congress leaders, including C.R. Das, Motilal Nehru, and the young Subhas Chandra Bose, were dismayed by a decision that halted a movement at its peak. The abrupt withdrawal also left the Khilafat leaders feeling abandoned, since their cause had been bound up with non-cooperation.

The abolition of the Caliphate 🔗

The second blow came from Turkey itself. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, abolished the Sultanate in 1922 and then abolished the Caliphate entirely in 1924. The very institution the movement had set out to protect no longer existed. With its central goal gone, the Khilafat Movement lost its reason to continue and faded away.

The legacy of a short-lived experiment 🔗

Judged purely by its stated aim, the Khilafat Movement failed. It could not save the Caliphate, and the Hindu-Muslim unity it built proved fragile. In the years after 1922, communal tensions resurfaced, and revivalist movements on both sides deepened divisions.

Yet the movement’s importance does not lie in achieving its immediate goal. It marked the first major instance of mass Hindu-Muslim political cooperation against colonial rule, and it transformed the Congress into a genuinely mass-based organisation with Gandhi as its undisputed leader. It demonstrated the power of organised, non-violent mass mobilisation, a method that would define India’s freedom struggle for the next quarter century.

The episode also revealed Gandhi’s core convictions clearly. His insistence on calling off the movement after Chauri Chaura, even at enormous political cost, showed how seriously he took non-violence. And his willingness to embrace a Muslim cause showed his belief that the freedom struggle could only succeed if it belonged to all Indians, regardless of faith.

What do you think? Was Gandhi right to tie the national movement to a religious cause like the Khilafat in order to build unity, or did it set a precedent that mixed faith and politics in ways that proved hard to undo? And do you think his decision to halt a successful movement over a single violent incident was an act of principle or a strategic mistake?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/event/Treaty-of-Sevres
2. https://www.britannica.com/event/Khilafat-movement
3. https://www.britannica.com/event/Rowlatt-Acts
4. https://chahalacademy.com/khilafat-and-non-cooperation-movement
5. https://vajiramandravi.com/upsc-exam/non-cooperation-movement/
6. https://presidentialsystem.org/2025/10/11/on-gandhi-jayanti-rethinking-the-muslim-appeasement-myth/
7. https://www.britannica.com/event/Chauri-Chaura-incident