Thread by @Hiranyareta

Anti-British jihad always ended as anti-Hindu

1) Syed Ahmad Barelvi, a Chela of Abdul Aziz (Son of Walliullah), started his Jihad against the British for the establishment of Sharia state in India, died at the hands of Sikhs at Balakot.
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https://twitter.com/TIinExile/status/1209055105359572992?s=20

Why at the hands of Sikhs? Because Barelvi’s confidence in a jihad against the British collapsed when he surveyed the extent and the magnitude of British power in India.
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So he did the next best under the circumstances and declared a jihad against the Sikh power in the Punjab, Kashmir and the North-West Frontier.
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The British on their part welcomed this change and permitted Barelvi to travel towards the border of Afghanistan at a leisurely pace, collecting money and manpower along the way.
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It was during this journey that Barelvi stayed with or met several Hindu princes, feigned that his fulminations against the Sikhs were a fake, and that he was going out of India in order to establish a base for fighting against the British.
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It is surmised that some Hindu princes took him at his word, and gave him financial help. To the Muslim princes, however, he told the truth, namely, that he was up against the Sikhs because they “do not allow the call to prayer from mosques and the killing of cows.”
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^^ Source for the abv "Targhîb-al-Jîhãd" translated by W.W. Hunter, p. 140.

The fond belief that the Amir of Afghanistan and the Frontier Tribals could be invited for liberating India from foreign rule, lingered for a long time.
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It was soon forgotten that the belief was entertained or fostered by Muslim ‘revivalists’ in the 18th and the 19th centuries.
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The Indian “revolutionaries” like M.N. Roy, Raja Mahendra Pratap, and Chandrashekhar Azad were latter-day victims of this illusion and tried to help ‘our friends in the North-West’ with munitions and money.
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The illusion suffered a set back only when Pandit Nehru went out to the NWF to fraternize with the ‘brave Pathans’ soon after becoming virtual Prime Minister of India in 1946, and was welcomed with bullets. He never mentioned the ‘brave Pathans’ again.
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Barelvi set up his base in the North-West Frontier near Afghanistan. The active assistance he expected from the Afghan king did not materialise because that country was in a mess at that time.
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But the British connived at the constant flow not only of a sizable manpower but also of a lot of finance. Muslim magnates in India were helping him to the hilt. His basic strategy was to conquer Kashmir before launching his major offensive against the Punjab.
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But he met with very little success in that direction in spite of several attempts. Finally, he met his Waterloo in 1831 when the Sikhs under Kunwar Sher Singh stormed his citadel at Balakot. The great mujãhid fell in the very first battle he ever fought.
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His corpse along with that of his second in command was burnt, and the ashes were scattered in the winds. Muslims hail him as a shahid.
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The scattered remnants of the Wahabis fought a few more skirmishes with the Sikhs. But they also met with no success. Next, they turned their fury against the British when the latter took over from the Sikhs in 1849.
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There was a lot of organizing and shouting of Allah-o-Akbar in the North-West Frontier as well as in several centres inside India such as Patna, Meerut, Bareilly and Hyderabad. But they produced very little fight.
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The British smashed them everywhere and it was all over by 1870. The greatest ‘achievement’ of the Wahabis after four decades of ‘fighting’ was the murder of Justice Norman at Calcutta in 1871, and of Lord Mayo, the Viceroy, at Port Blair in 1872.
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2) One of Barelvi’s distinguished disciples was Mir Nasser Ali of Barasat in Bengal, better known as Titu Mir or Titu Mian. He had met the master in Mecca in 1822, and returned to Calcutta a few years later in order to organize another jihãd against the British.
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He set up his headquarters at Barasat, and declared that India under British rule was a Dãr-ul-harb. But, in due course, his invectives also came to be increasingly directed against the unarmed Hindus in the countryside of Bengal.
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Narahari Kaviraj, a Communist scholar who hails Titu’s rascals as peasant revolutionaries, describes the exploits of his hero in the following words. An early rehearsal of what the Moplahs were to do in Malabar in 1921 during the Khilafat agitation against the British.
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The British government at Calcutta had to take action at last, not because it was bothered about what was happening to the Hindus at the hands of Muslim mujãhids but because the Wahabis of Bengal were becoming a menace to the British system of law and order.
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Titu Mian was killed in the very first encounter with a British battalion in 1839. A number of his followers were hanged or sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.
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3) Another movement on similar lines had flared up simultaneously in the Faridpur district of Bengal. This was the Faraizi Movement launched by Shariatullah who also had spent 20 years in Mecca and Medina.
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He had also declared that India under the British was a Dãr-ul-harb, and that Muslims should not observe Friday prayers and the two Ids till Islamic rule was restored. He also tried to ‘purify’ Islam of ‘un-Islamic accretions’ borrowed from the hated Hindus.
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And he also acquired a large following of fanatic Muslims in order to mount his jihãd against the British. But like his contemporary, Titu Mian, he also ended by spending all his spleen against the Hindus
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Kaviraj writes: “As the followers of Shariatullah increased in numbers, and as they became too bold and overbearing, they carried their incursions against Hindu zamindars and committed acts of cruelty against Hindu families.”
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Shariatullah died in 1837 without achieving anything more spectacular.That was left to his son who had meanwhile returned from Mecca after a stay of several years. Muhammad Mohsin, better known as Dudhu Mian (1819-1860),was a more full-fledged fundamentalist than his father.
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Professor Murray Titus writes that “Among other things, we are told that he insisted upon his disciples eating the common grass-hopper (phaDinga), which they detested, because the locust (tiDDi) was used as food in Arabia.”

Murray Titus, Indian Islam, Oxford, 1930, p. 180
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Dudhu Mian was convinced that Allah had entrusted him with the mission of restoring Islam in India to its pristine purity and bygone glory. That implied a fight against the British.
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But like his father, he also found that the unarmed Hindus in the countryside of Bengal were a far more attractive prey. According to Kaviraj, Dudhu’s followers were well-armed with swords, shields and a variety of other weapons.
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In April 1839, they raided 76 Hindu houses in seven villages. They committed atrocities on innocent Hindus, killed cows and broke the images worshipped by the Brahmins inside their homes.
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Later on, one of their victims was Kalicharan Kanjilal, a gomashta in a British-owned Indigo factory. Kanjilal was given the full treatment prescribed for kafirs in the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet.
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The atrocities heaped on this poor and unoffending Hindu by a Islamic-cum-Communist ‘hero’ are described in detail in contemporary government records.

Finally, the British Indigo planters put pressure on the British government to bring the hoodlum to book.
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“He was charged with plunder in 1838, committed to sessions for murder in 1841, tried for trespass and for unlawful assembly in 1844, and for abduction and plunder in 1846. But it was found impossible to induce witnesses to give evidence, and on each occasion he was acquitted.”

It was only in 1857 that he was put in jail without trial. He died there in 1860.

Source: R.C. Majumdar (ed.), History and Culture of the Indian People, Volume XI, Bombay, 1981, p. 885.
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The last effort made by the mujãhids of all sorts to overthrow the British rule and restore the ‘Muslim empire in India’ was in 1857. They were able to enlist Hindu support on a large scale because of reasons in which we need not go here.
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But this grand jihãd was also defeated, and its leaders had to seek shelter in the Hindu kingdom of Nepal. The last Mughal emperor ended his days of disgrace in far off Rangoon. Ishtiq Husain Qureshi names this period as that of the ‘lowest depths of broken pride’.
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Thus, by about the year 1860, the multifarious mujãhids had emptied themselves of all the heat stored in them by their sojourn in the ‘holy land’ of Hijaz. They could not shake a single brick in the edifice of the British empire.
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It was now the turn of the Muslim magnates, sitting pretty in their palatial mansions, to rescue the mujãhids from the theological knots into which the latter had tied themselves.
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Meanwhile, the British had seen the Muslim potential for mischief against the Hindus who had started taking pride in their history and heritage, and demanding self-rule.
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An invitation was extended to the residues of Islamic imperialism to revise their strategy when W.W. Hunter wrote The Indian Musalmans in 1871. The invitation was readily accepted by the other side.

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Abv was from the book
"Muslim Separatism: Causes and Consequences"
by
Sita Ram Goel