Non-Cooperation and Khilafat, 1920-1922

In August 1920, the Congress, under Gandhi's leadership, launched the Non-Cooperation Movement, the first nationwide campaign of mass non-violent resistance. Its programme was to boycott foreign cloth, government schools and colleges, law courts, and legislative councils, and to promote swadeshi goods, national schools, and Hindu-Muslim unity. The movement drew its energy from three grievances: the Rowlatt Act, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and the Khilafat issue, the demand of Indian Muslims that the Ottoman Caliph, regarded as the spiritual head of Sunni Islam, should retain control of holy places after Turkey's defeat in the First World War.

The Khilafat alliance was a remarkable moment of Hindu-Muslim cooperation. Gandhi supported the Khilafat cause, and the Khilafat leaders, the Ali brothers, Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, supported non-cooperation, so that the movement spoke for both communities at once. Students left colleges, lawyers gave up practice, and bonfires of foreign cloth were lit across the country. The visit of the Prince of Wales in 1921 was boycotted, and the movement reached villages and small towns that earlier politics had never touched.

The movement ended suddenly. On 5 February 1922, at Chauri Chaura in Uttar Pradesh, a crowd of protesters clashed with police and set fire to the police station, killing twenty-two policemen. Gandhi, who believed that non-violence was a principle and not merely a tactic, called off the movement, arguing that the country was not ready for mass civil disobedience. Many of his followers were dismayed, and leaders such as Motilal Nehru and Chittaranjan Das formed the Swaraj Party in 1923 to contest elections and obstruct the government from inside the councils.

Non-cooperation failed to win swaraj within a year, as Gandhi had hoped, but it changed Indian politics permanently. It made the Congress a mass organisation, it brought peasants and workers into national politics, and it showed that a campaign could be nationwide without being violent. Its end also revealed a lasting tension in the movement: between Gandhi's insistence on non-violence as a moral absolute and the impatience of those who wanted faster results.