The Rise of Communal Politics

The reassertion of representative politics after 1923 allowed communal tensions, almost always submerged during the noncooperation years, to come to the surface. Once the centrality of the provincial council and the municipality in local public life were restored, elites in Surat associated themselves increasingly with interest groupings defined by religious affiliation. Competition between rival elites over jobs, municipal funds and projects, and political power—all conducted within the language of constitutionalism and minority rights—seriously intensified during the later 1920s, creating an atmosphere conducive to violent social conflict.

The development of explicitly communal electorates was particularly important in fostering community-based politics. In provincial campaigns, the voting population was divided into non-Muslim constituencies for the city and the district and a Muslim constituency embracing urban Surat and Ahmedabad. Separate electorates tended to ensure that no candidate in general wards would dare dissociate himself from Hindu causes and that Muslim candidates would be committed to the defense of specifically Muslim concerns. Muslim leaders, recognizing they could easily be branded lackeys of the Hindus if they joined the Congress ticket, held aloof from the Swarajya party. Once in the council, elected Muslims tended to align more with government than with nationalists and were able to win power far beyond their numbers. In the Bombay provincial legislature of 1924–26, two of the three ministers chosen by government were Muslims. These two, Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah and Sir Ali Mohammed Khan Dehlavi (brother of the

Nawab of Bela), used their positions repeatedly to frustrate Congress objectives. This in turn led to resentments among Hindu legislators that increasingly assumed a communal tone.

As far as Surat was concerned, the most important policy adopted by the Bombay ministry was its decision to institute separate electorates at the municipal level. Before 1925, provincial government had always guaranteed Muslim representation on the council through the process of nomination, a process that allowed it to continue to select such natural leaders as Sayyid Ali Edrus and the Nawabs of Surat and Bela. The old gentry thus had had little need to reach out to the larger Muslim population of the city; within the council, they pursued a Muslim politics that largely reflected rather limited concerns (two exceptions being the very recent issues of the Muslim graveyards and the Kelapith mosque). Even as the franchise widened in Surat and as the proportion of nominations made by government was reduced, the old notables had not considered advocating separate electorates for Surat, perhaps realizing that such a step would necessitate a transformation in their methods of gaining access to council seats. The decision to create distinct Muslim and non-Muslim constituencies came to Surat largely from outside.

Once this policy was adopted, however, any opposition to it almost inevitably took on a communal character. Immediately after the decision to create separate electorates had been made, Dr. Dixit and Dr. Mehta, two of the city's most prominent noncooperators, sent a letter to the Bombay Chronicle objecting to the measure and to delays in setting up municipal elections. Their letter charged that a "Mahommedan Minister [Hidayatullah], fascinated by that nefarious system of communal representation, which has been condemned by all sides, in his enthusiasm to grant communal representation to the Mahommedan community of Surat, which it believed was not so anxious to get it as the Minister was to give it, is probably responsible for this disastrous delay and its consequential events."^[44] Dixit and Mehta may not have intended any slight to the community as a whole, but the tone of their objections and those of other Congress leaders clearly upset local Muslims, who saw in these complaints attempts to deprive them of their rights. Several weeks after the publication of Dixit's letter, H. N. Jamadar, a former Khilafatist, wrote a passionate response to the Chronicle. "It is painful to see," he argued, referring to the allocation of only eight municipal seats to Muslims, "that even this can not be tolerated by our Hindu neighbors. . .. Let me assure your correspondents that the Mussalmans were always anxious to get it [separate electorates] because of the fact that in the General Constituency they were always at the mercy of their Hindu brothers. I regret to see that your correspon-

dents who are the pillars of the Swarajists in Gujarat should have taken such a hostile attitude toward the Mussalmans." Jamadar argued that swaraj could come only if Hindus showed more tolerance: "I . . . ask your correspondents how they are going to achieve their final object without allowing their co-brothers to enjoy their full communal rights which they are gradually getting through such systems as the communal representations and the like."^[45] Dixit and Mehta apologized for the careless wording of their original letter but continued to insist that separate electorates were anathema to the cause of Hindu-Muslim cooperation.^[46]

Such claims and counterclaims became a regular part of civic politics during the 1920s. With the first municipal campaign under the new election law, the idiom of community concerns assumed new preeminence in the city. On the streets of the city, candidates began to champion the causes of their own communities with increased aggressiveness, knowing that such rhetoric won votes in electorates that coincided with religious groupings. Once in office, Muslim councillors repeatedly appealed to the principle of minority rights, raised fears of discrimination, and evoked the backwardness of their community in calling for greater allocations of political resources and power. Hindu councillors from the Congress party, on the other hand, tended to represent their own opinions as expressing the sentiments of an undifferentiated public or people, but they actually spoke only for Hindus since they were setting themselves against the Muslims' claims to justice. The language of both sides was steeped in the grammar of representative discourse, which allowed for contentions based on both public and communal grounds. As long as the key institutions of the civic polity—the provincial legislature and the municipal council—reinforced religious identification, much local conflict would continue to play itself out in terms of the politics of community. Through this process of defining their interests in terms sanctioned in public culture, one diverse, almost amorphous, group of people—the Hindus—acquired an identity as a majority community that effectively excluded all others from the exercise of power; another almost equally heterogeneous collection of residents—the Muslims—assumed the position of a minority community requiring the protection of government against threats posed by the process of democratization.^[47]

Politicians like Dixit and Jamadar no doubt made unintentional contributions to building a society divided along religious lines despite sincere advocacy of Hindu-Muslim unity. Other figures, however, had little commitment to communal harmony and felt little hesitation about stirring one community's feelings against the other. As politics in the city became increasingly organized around community concerns, and as

communal conflicts grew ugly in other areas of India, raising fears that similar developments might threaten Surat, such persons won more visibility.

Among Muslims, the elite temporarily displaced by Gandhian politics took the lead in defending their community against Hindus. As soon as noncooperation began to wane, members of the gentry began to reassert their claims to Muslim leadership by critiquing the Khilafatists for placing group concerns at risk in the effort to achieve communal harmony and for dissipating funds that had been collected at the height of the movement.^[48] Their effort to resume their leading position in the city often took an anti-Hindu character. During one meeting held in March 1923 under the leadership of Sir Ali Mahommed Khan Dehlavi, Sayyid Ali Edrus, and members of the Nawab of Surat and Nawab of Bela families, a host of resolutions were introduced condemning provocative acts against Muslims in a number of locations around the country and criticizing Arya Samaj efforts to convert Muslims to Hinduism through shuddhi campaigns. Narmawala, the Khilafatist, seeing that the meeting was taking a direction harmful to Hindu-Muslim unity, was able only at the last minute to introduce a resolution expressing pleasure at the settlement of communal disputes in several Indian cities.^[49] But once the cause of the khalifa had crumbled, leaders like Narmawala, Syed Ahmed Edrus, and Fejullahbhai Hamdani really had no powerful Muslim issue with which to mount a counterthrust and became increasingly ineffective figures. The gentry families assumed much of their older preeminence, but their authority was now based less on their loyalty and traditional status—the criteria of natural leadership—than on the assertive advocacy of Muslim interests.

Among Hindus, a similar but more dangerous process began to take shape. Hindu figures who had lost influence during the period of non-cooperation, particularly those drawn from the old Home Rule League, assumed new influence in the city by taking up overtly Hindu causes. Particularly prominent among them were M. M. Rayaji, Karsukhram Vora, and Kanaiyalal Desai, all men with high levels of education who had long been committed to creating a political order based upon the principles of representation and moral and material progress. Within that order, however, such individuals were becoming concerned that minority rights should not be confirmed at the expense of the power and influence of the majority. Vora assumed leadership of the local chapter of the Hindu Mahasabha, a national organization devoted to the pursuit of Hindu interests.^[50] Rayaji, once president of the local Khilafat committee, now became editor of a newspaper called the Hindu, where he called for expanded campaigns to reconvert Muslims to Hinduism,

criticized government for establishing communal electorates and favoring Muslims, lambasted Hindus for weakness in defending themselves against assaults on their dignity and power, and demanded that candidates for municipal election demonstrate what they had done for their community.^[51] The Hindu Mahasabhaites maintained a small but vocal presence in the city, never assuming great political power but placing constant pressure on other politicians to associate with Hindu concerns.

In 1927, the development of this increasingly communal politics in Surat came to a head in the first of a series of bloody Hindu-Muslim riots. The initial catalyst of the violence was the decision by the Mahasabha to organize several ceremonies in celebration of the tercentenary of the seventeenth-century warrior king Shivaji, who had carved out a kingdom in Maharashtra at the expense of Muslim states in North India and the Deccan. The key event in this celebration was to be a procession through the streets of the city held on the day fixed as Shivaji's birthday. The purpose of these observances, according to one sponsor of the festivities held in Bombay, was to commemorate a regional king who symbolized "the common heritage of the Hindus or the Aryan people of Bharat Varsha [i.e., India]"^[52] and thereby inspire pride within the Hindu community. No doubt the event was intended in part as a statement of cultural resistance to continued British rule. But Shivaji was certainly a strange figure to inspire adulation in Surat. He was remembered in local history as a plunderer of the city's merchants, while Muslims saw him as a Hindu who had undermined the stability of Mughal rule. Many deemed the attempt by Vora, Rayaji, and Desai to hold ceremonies in his honor as a deliberate affront to their community.^[53] This the Mahasabhaites denied, arguing there was no anti-Muslim message to the celebrations, only a positive Hindu one. But they made little attempt to adapt their observance to Muslim concerns.

The procession held on the tercentenary morning was not very large, roughly one thousand persons. But it made up for what it lacked in numbers with sheer noise and fanfare. Five different bhajan groups played loud music to accompany the singing of Hindu religious songs by the whole crowd. Hundreds waved pictures of Shivaji and Hindu flags. As the procession approached the market of Burhanpuri Bhagal, Muslims became concerned that the noise would continue unabated in front of two mosques in the neighborhood. A few went up to the Hindu leaders in order to ask them to discontinue the music while passing by the mosques. Dr. Rayaji, intent that his community not show any sign of weakness, refused. At this point, people on the balconies of the two mosques immediately began to shower the procession with brickbats and pieces of metal, while others attacked the crowd directly

with clubs. The police rushed to a confused and already somewhat bloody scene unprepared for action. Without securing a firm promise from Rayaji that the music would cease, they decided to accompany the procession past the mosques. This brought a further hail of stones that injured twenty-two constables and eighteen participants in the celebrations. The police fell back, only to be pursued by a group of infuriated Muslims. In a state of panic, the police opened fire, killing one Muslim and one Hindu and injuring three others. When the district magistrate finally arrived with reinforcements, he found two angry crowds of two thousand people apiece facing each other. Order was restored at the scene, but sporadic violence continued elsewhere in the city for the rest of the day.^[54]

While the riots reflected tensions that had been building in the city for several years, it was their aftermath that really hardened the lines between the two communities. Politicians who had never identified with communal organizations now clearly took sides. "Local Hindus without distinction of caste or creed," led by M. K. Dixit and M. M. Mehta, responded to Dr. Vora's call to honor the dead Hindu youth by participating in a gigantic funeral procession of nearly twenty thousand persons to the cremation grounds.^[55] A similar but smaller procession, attended by all the leading Muslims, was held for the Muslim victim.^[56] Dixit, Vora, Kanaiyalal Desai, and Champklal Ghia all agreed to serve on a committee to establish a memorial fund of 100,000 rupees for the Hindu victim; a similar fund was created among the Muslims under the chairmanship of Sheikh Ali Bakza.^[57] In each case, some of the city's leading advocates of Hindu-Muslim unity had confirmed in this moment of crisis that their primary loyalties lay with their coreligionists.

Many of the elite participants in the processions and in fund-raising efforts may have had no intention of creating further ill will. Indeed Dixit and Bhimbhai Naik (now a member of the legislative assembly) among the Hindus and Sheikh Ali Bakza and Hafizuddin Khan among the Muslims won praise from the district collector for their efforts to restore calm. In their consultations with district officials, however, they acted primarily as negotiators for their respective communities; indeed, they had little choice but to do so if they wished to be consulted since the collector had chosen them precisely because he regarded them as representatives of their groupings.^[58] Only a few of the staunchest Gandhians, most notably Dayalji Desai, adopted a neutral peacekeeping role. But to a great extent, the neutral ground in the formal process of making peace was occupied by the district authorities, while indigenous leaderships found themselves thrust into roles either as Hindu or Muslim leaders. This was certainly one reason why resolving the problem became so difficult.

Among underclasses of the city, the riots had also fostered feelings of mutual distrust and hostility. Muslims were angered that only Muslims were ever brought to trial for the events of the Shivaji tercentenary and that Hindu leaders like Rayaji had gone unpunished for deliberate affronts. Hindus bristled at the fact that unarmed members of their community had been attacked and that the procession had never been allowed to go on to its end. A number of caste panchayats ordered the boycott of the shops and services of Muslims, threatening to fine members up to 11 rupees for each violation. Hindu wedding processions, which had traditionally relied on Muslim bands for their music, now went musicless, often leaving the band members with no means of earning their livelihoods.^[59]

Until September, there was little threat of renewed violence. But supporters of the Hindu Mahasabha then began to plan new celebrations, this time in honor of the elephant-headed deity Ganapati, that would again involve noisy processions with music passing by mosques. The plans again appeared to be deliberately provocative. While Hindu residents revered Ganapati, ceremonies in his honor had generally been small-scale affairs conducted either privately in homes or by small neighborhood groups. Processions to the river to immerse the images of Ganapati had never before assumed a public, city-wide character.^[60] The Mahasabha's leaders, however, now hoped to transform the occasion of the Ganapati observances into a major statement of Hindu pride and defiance (both of local authorities and of the Muslims). Muslims feared the celebrations, because of the possibility that music might again be played in front of the mosques and because of the tradition of anti-Muslim expression associated with the Ganapati celebrations in Maharashtra. Rumors spread that the Mahasabha was planning to import several hundred Maratha toughs into Surat for the festival.^[61]

The district administration, under heavy pressure from Muslims not to allow renewed insults to Islam, responded forcefully to these plans. In late August, several weeks before the Ganapati festival, the police issued orders banning the music of brass bands and drums in processions without special permit, allowing only five cymbals and no other instruments to be played within twenty paces on each side of a mosque, prohibiting playing any music in front of the mosque door, and requiring that processions pass by mosques without stopping. Deeming these orders insults to Hinduism, the Mahasabha called for a general hartal in the city on the day of the observances and resolved not to take the images of Ganapati to the riverside for immersion as long as the restrictions remained. They also organized huge public meetings—one with an estimated twelve thousand participants—to draft petitions of complaint to the district magistrate and to the Bombay government. The

resolution of a meeting of Hindu women, headed by the wives of most of the city's public leaders, argued that "this public meeting of the Hindu ladies of Surat enters their protest against the notification respecting the Ganpati festival . . . in disregard of the long established custom and elementary right of Bhajan Mandalis [religious processions] in Surat to go along public roads with the accompaniment of music and declares that the notification had deeply wounded the religious feelings of Hindu ladies." The women requested the governor of Bombay to "cancel this order and direct the local authorities not to interfere in future with such established customs and established rights of the people."^[62] A petition from another Hindu public meeting suggested that "it seems but reasonable to expect tolerance by one class of citizens for the customs of another class and no Government can tolerate with equilibrium the oppression of the one class at the hands of the other when the former are bonafide exercising their common-law rights enjoyed by them since time immemorial, much less would our benign British Government take any action which would jeopardize such rights."^[63]

Muslims put forward their claims in a similar language, appealing to the sanctity of traditional practice and of community rights, both notions enshrined in colonial discourses about India.^[64] In essence both sides confirmed through their rhetoric and actions that consideration of religious sentiment, now defined largely in oppositional terms, should be the chief criterion of political justice and that the maintenance of communal pride and self-worth should be the central preoccupation of their politics. Less consciously, both sides confirmed that a third party—the "benign British government"—was responsible for settling intercommunity disputes. Thus, as Hindus and Muslims became increasingly hostile to each other, they reinforced the dominance of colonial understandings of India and indeed of colonial power.

District and provincial authorities, recognizing the potential for explosion, refused to relax the restrictions on processions in Surat. For nearly one year, they waited for Hindus and Muslims to arrive at some compromise. Though some Hindus secretly immersed images of Ganapati in their private wells, most kept their images ready for some grander ceremony. Muslims remained vigilant about offenses to their religion, sustaining a steady pressure on the collector not to rescind his orders. In March, the ceremony of Holi went by without any processions. Meanwhile, the Hindu and Muslim press took up the causes of their communities with increasing vehemence and insensitivity. Finally, the next September, the Hindu rank and file took matters in their own hands and took Ganapati processions out in small groups to the river-

side over a period of several days. Violence far worse than that of the previous May erupted, leaving six dead and ninety-three injured.^[65]

With this second round of rioting, the lines were drawn even more sharply than before. Civic leaders like Dixit and Naik, concerned with alienating their Hindu constituencies, drifted closer and closer to the Mahasabha. Muslim politicians correspondingly moved toward the defense of Muslim sentiment. Thus, boundaries that had been drawn during the Khilafat movement were reinforced, hardened, and turned in an antagonistic direction.

The noncooperation movement would not be the last attempt by the Congress to create Hindu-Muslim harmony, but it would be the most successful. When Congress politicians later spoke of representing the people, the public, or the nation, few Muslims considered themselves included because most of those figures had chosen to side with the Hindu community at the critical moment. Necessary to their own survival, most Muslims came to believe, were distinct Muslim organizations and a distinct Muslim political idiom. Even those few who aligned with nationalism in the years before 1947 took great care to maintain a symbolic separateness from their allies.

By 1928 Surti society much more closely approximated colonial renderings of an India torn by irreconcilable religious divisions than ever before. The Gandhian dream of a social order where communities fully respected each other's beliefs now lay in shambles. Moreover, once Hindus and Muslims came to blame each other for their feelings of powerlessness and exclusion, the full dismantling of colonial institutions and values that Gandhi had envisioned in Hind Swaraj became increasingly unlikely. Religious conflict directed attention away from consideration of the sort of polity that Surat should have; it confirmed principles of community rights and interests inherent in the language of civic politics. Once communalism began to intensify in Surat, local politicians tended to focus increasingly on securing the greatest possible material and psychic benefits for their own community within the given civil order rather than on questioning, as Gandhi had proposed, whether that order was legitimate.

The British rulers of Surat did not directly create communalism; the production and reproduction of communal sentiment were largely a product of elite conflicts. But Surti politicians worked within a structure of colonial domination that created great constraints on culture construction, even at moments of resistance. Implicitly recognizing that only certain kinds of rhetoric could influence the process of decision making in a polity based upon representative principle, many elite figures put their claims to justice in religious terms. Gandhi's follow-

ers, too, reinforced the social categories of colonial discourse, even as they attempted to dismantle the myths of British civilization and Indian inferiority.

This is not to say that Hinduism and Islam were as alien to the Surtis as the principles of public and national politics. Indeed, religion had resonances for elites and underclass alike that gave it power never possessed by the language of constitutional justice. But it was by no means inevitable that religion would emerge as the focus of political conflict within the civic arena. It would have been especially hard to predict before the war—let alone before the beginning of British rule—that Muslims in the city, with their own internal diversity, would rally around the cause of a faraway khalifa or that the seventeenth-century raider of Surat, Shivaji, and the elephant-headed figure Ganapati would emerge as the chief symbols of Hindu unity and self-worth in the locality. The Anglo-Indian political order privileged and reinforced rhetorical efforts to develop appeals built around religious solidarity while discouraging attempts to create alternative languages that could challenge the assumptions of colonialism. Local leaderships who pursued their goals within the idiom of communalism often sustained and strengthened their political positions, while those few who fought the general pattern and tried to create some neutral ground became isolated figures without influence. Thus, through everyday political struggles in the institutions of colonial Surat, communally based understandings of the city became received as commonsensical ones, creating the illusion that local society had always been divided sharply along the lines of religion. It was largely as members of communally based collectivities that most Surtis became participants in the public domain.