Non-Cooperation Movement

The Non-Cooperation Movement began on August 1, 1920, and was endorsed by Congress at a special session in Calcutta that September. Mohandas Gandhi, who had returned the Kaiser-i-Hind medal he had been awarded for service, urged Indians to give up British titles, boycott the new legislative councils, law courts, government schools and foreign cloth, and take up the spinning wheel and national schools.¹

Anger in 1919 over the Rowlatt Act, which allowed detention without trial, and over the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar had undermined trust in the British. Muslim leaders, notably the brothers Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, were angry at the harsh treatment of the Ottoman sultan, the caliph, after the First World War, and their Khilafat movement joined forces with Gandhi. For the first time Congress became a mass movement, drawing in peasants, students, lawyers, merchants and many women. A fund in memory of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who had died on August 1, 1920, reportedly raised more than a crore of rupees, or ten million, in 1921.¹

Thousands were jailed, and the Prince of Wales's visit in November 1921 met hartals, or strikes. The movement stopped suddenly. On February 4, 1922 a crowd at Chauri Chaura in Uttar Pradesh burned a police station and killed 22 policemen, and Gandhi, committed to non-violence, suspended the campaign on February 12. He was arrested in March and sentenced to six years in prison. The Khilafat cause also faded after Turkey abolished the caliphate in 1924.¹