ABSTRACT

Gandhi’s ‘sudden cancellation of the civil disobedience campaign which he was about to launch in February 1922, and the decline of the non-cooperation movement which followed it, had an unexpected fallout: deterioration in Hindu-Muslim relations. Gandhi’s fast had only a momentary effect. But he continued his efforts to educate the people to draw them out of the mental morass into which they had slipped. He devoted a whole issue of his weekly journal, Young India, to the analysis of communal tension and violence. Gandhi believed that there was a desire in both the communities to live in peace, but it was the ‘middle-class men ‘who engineered riots for their own ends, and made badmashes (hooligans) their henchmen. Jinnah did not agree with Gandhi’s approach to the communal problem. He advocated Hindu-Muslim unity and considered it a sine qua non for India’s progress.