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146 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
Not so Mr. Gandhi. At the very commencement of his career as a political leader of India when Mr. Gandhi startled the people of India by his promise to win Swaraj within six months, Mr. Gandhi said that he could perform the miracle only if certain conditions were fulfilled. One of these conditions was the achievement of Hindu-Muslim unity. Mr. Gandhi is never tired of saying that there is no Swaraj without HinduMuslim unity. Mr. Gandhi did not merely make this slogan the currency of Indian politics but he has strenuously worked to bring it about. Mr. Gandhi, it may be said, began his carrer as a political leader of India with the manifesto dated 2nd March
1919 declaring his intention to launch Satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act and asking those who desired to join him to sign the Satyagraha pledge. That campaign of Satyagraha was a short-lived campaign and was suspended by Mr. Gandhi on
18th April 1919. As a part of his programme Mr. Gandhi had fixed* the 6th March 1919 to be observed all over India as a day of protest against the Rowlatt Act. Mass meetings were to be held on that day and Mr. Gandhi had prescribed that the masses attending the meetings should take a vow in the following terms :
“With God as witness, we Hindus, and Mahomedans declare that we shall behave towards one another as children of the same parents, that we shall have no differences, that the sorrows of each shall be the sorrows of the other and that each shall help the other in removing them. We shall respect each other’s religion and religious feelings and shall not stand in the way of our respective religious practices. We shall always refrain from violence to each other in the name of religion.”
There was nothing in the campaign of Satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act which could have led to any clash between the Hindus and Muslims. Yet Mr. Gandhi asked his followers to take the vow. This shows how insistent he was from the very beginning upon Hindu-Muslim unity.
The Mahomedans started the Khilafat movement in 1919. The objective of the movement was two-fold ; to preserve the Khilafat and to maintain the integrity of the Turkish Empire. Both these objectives were unsupportable. The Khilafat could not be saved simply because the Turks, in whose interest this agitation was
- See his Manifesto dated 23rd March 1919.