2021 sees the 100th anniversary of the brutal Malabar genocide of Hindus by the Moplah Muslims. The Moplah Massacre was one of the most heinous genocides in history, where Moplah Muslims murdered thousands of Hindus in Malabar, Kerala. What started as Malabar Muslims supporting the Caliphate in Turkey under the Khilafat movement, got widespread support from Congress leader, most prominently, by MK Gandhi. While Gandhi believed that these ‘nationalist Muslims’ were fighting against the British, he conveniently glossed over the fact that the Moplah Muslims were actually fighting to oust the British so they could establish an Islamic rule in its place.

According to British records, over 10,000 Hindus were murdered by radical Moplah Muslims in the massacre that started in 1921. The Communists, however, have whitewashed the genocide of Hindus for decades. Continuing the trend, after BJP/RSS held programs talking about the Malabar genocide, the CPI(M) in Kerala has decided to rub salt on the wounds of Hindus yet again.

Communist party in Kerala is now planning to develop a ‘tourism circuit’ connecting the sites of the Malabar “rebellion” to commemorate the ‘peasant uprising’. State Tourism Minister Muhammed Riyas said in Alappuzha that the tourism department will develop a circuit connecting all important sites related to the rebellion in Malappuram. He said it will attract a lot of tourists and history students. He also said it was wrong to call the Wagon Tragedy a tragedy, since it was a “massacre” carried out by the British deliberately.

Riyas further said that calling it a “tragedy” would mean that it was a disaster, however, it was a deliberate massacre by the British of “hapless people”. He essentially said that we are using the term “tragedy” that the British used, thereby doing wrong by the “hapless victims”. Reiterating that it was a ‘peasant uprising’, Riyas said that the BJP was wrong in calling in a ‘massacre’.

What is the truth of the “Wagon Tragedy” that CPI(M) calls the massacre of ‘hapless Moplah victims’

While the Communists want to call the “Wagon Tragedy” and insist that the British massacred “hapless victims”, the reality is far from it. Communist historians have long alleged that the “Wagon Tragedy” was like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre where the British round-up Sikh Indians and shot them dead. In fact, even MK Gandhi had, in his Calicut speech, compared the British’s treatment of Moplah Muslims to that of Jallianwala Bagh. However, it is important to keep in mind that the Sikhs who were massacred were unarmed victims who were nationalists.

The Moplah Muslims, however, were murderers and rioters who had committed a genocide of Hindus and raped thousands of Hindu women. During the Wagon Tragedy, the British had arrested 70-90 Moplah Muslims who had murdered and raped Hindu women. 56 of the Moplah Muslims suffocated to death after those arrested were rounded up in a freight wagon to be transported to Poddanur Central Prison near Coimbatore from Tirur on 19th November 1921. Six more prisoners died en route to the hospital and eight died in the hospital.

It is rather interesting that while the genocide of over 10,000 Hindus by the radical Moplah Muslims is called merely a ‘peasant revolt’ against the landlords while the death by suffocation of those who committed that genocide is called a ‘massacre’ by the Communists of Kerala. If there ever was evidence that Hindus lives matter paltry little when the aim is to appease the Muslim vote bank, this is it.

Was the Malabar massacre of Hindus by Moplah Muslims a ‘peasant uprising’ against ‘landlords’

Not only have the communists whitewashed the ‘Wagon Tragedy’ to allege that the Moplah Muslims who died were hapless victims, but the entire genocide of Hindus itself has also been whitewashed for decades with the Communists and their sympathetic historians and politicians calling it a “peasant uprising” against landlords of the time. The Marxist historians have for decades claimed that any attempt to talk about the real genesis of the genocide is an attempt by the Sangh to communalist the “rebellion” and that it had no Hindu-Muslim undertones, to begin with.

While they acknowledge, at least sometimes, that Hindus indeed were murdered, they give a “context” to the murderers that betray the essence of what happened in 1921. They claim that the landlords of the time ill-treated the peasants and that the 1921 “rebellion” was one where the peasants decided to extract their pound of flesh and revolt against the tyrannical landlords. To justify the murders of Hindus, they conveniently claim that it is only happenstance that the landlords were overwhelmingly Hindu and the peasants were overwhelmingly Muslims. When they further this narrative, they justify the murder and rape of Hindus, almost making it sound like it was divine retribution and an uprising of the downtrodden and oppressed against the rich, arrogant, exploitative Hindus landlords.

In doing so, they not only whitewash the Jihad that was foisted on the Hindus but also subtly claims that Hindus died because Hindus oppressed Muslims. It is their fault. They only reaped what they sowed.

The truth of the genocide, however, is far from it. The Moplah genocide of Hindus is hardly taught in our history books and the Khilafat movement leading up to it are shamelessly whitewashed. In our history books, we are often told that the Khilafat movement was one where Hindus and Muslims fought together to oust the British. Essentially, the Khilafat movement was launched by Indian Muslims to support the preserve the authority of the Ottoman Sultan as Caliph of Islam following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the war. Indian Muslims were fighting for the Caliph of Islam and also to destabilise the British not for ‘swarajya’ but to replace it with Islamic rule. MK Gandhi, of course, offered his unbridled support to the movement and asked Hindus to die without a fight.

In doing so, Gandhi ended up feeding the hydra of Islamism in India. Gandhi believed that his support for the Khilafat movement would solidify the anti-British sentiment amongst Indian Muslims. It is touted as the first movement that solidified the non-cooperation movement against the British.

The support by MK Gandhi only emboldened the radical Muslims who went on a rampage, killing Hindus, raping Hindu women, beheading children and forcefully converting to Islam hapless Hindus. Those who refused to convert were mercilessly slaughtered. It is said that even pregnant women were not spared, with their blood painting the roads red and their unborn foetuses lying exposed.

The atrocities heaped by the Moplah Muslims and the fact that it was not a peasant rebellion has been meticulously recorded in history, though a large chunk of it was erased by the Communists in Kerala.

While Marxist historians paint the 1921 genocide of Hindus as a one-off rebellion by Muslim peasants against Hindu landlords, several other transgressions had marked the strife between Moplah Muslims and Malabar Hindus. Over 50 such incidents where Moplah Muslims massacred Hindus were recorded in the book The Moplah Rebellion, 1921 written by Diwan Bahadur C. Gopalan, who was the Deputy Collector of Calicut, Malabar. The book is considered one of the most authentic accounts of what transpired in Malabar.

While these historic transgressions by the Moplah Muslims continued, it is pertinent to note that the British appointed a special commissioner as far back as 1852, one Mr TL Strange, to travel to Malabar and find out why the Moplah Muslims were regularly murdered Hindus.

In an 1852 report, Mr Strange summarily debunked the “peasant uprising” theory and wrote: 

“It is apparent that in no insistence can any outbreak or threat of outbreak that has risen be attributed to the oppression of tenants by landlords. A great clamour is now raised on this regard, prominently in the southern taluks visited by me, the Moplah population seeking to throw the blame of these outbreaks upon the landlords by thus charging them with being the cause thereof. I have given the subject every attention and am convinced that though instances may and do arise of individual hardship of the tenant, the general character of the dealing of the Hindu landlords towards their tenantry, whether Moplah or Hindu, is mild, equitable and forbearing. I am further convinced that where stringent measures are taken, the conduct of the tenants is in the vast majority of cases, the cause thereof and that the Moplah tenantry, especially of the Taluks in the South Malabar, where the outbreaks have been so common are very prone to evade their obligations and to resort to false and litigious pleas”.

He further said: 

“A ‘feature that has been manifestly common to the whole of these affairs is that they have been one and all marked by the most decided fanaticism, and this, there can be no doubt, has ‘furnished the true incentive to them. The Hindus in the parts where the outbreaks have been most frequent, stand in such fear of the Moplahs as mostly not to dare to press for their rights against them, and there is many a Moplah tenant who does not pay his rent, and cannot, so imminent are the risks, be evicted”.

There are several other testaments that prove how the Malabar genocide of Hindus was fuelled by Mohammadan fanaticism and not ‘peasant’ discontent.

Dr Ambedkar had said about the Malabar genocide: “The (Khilafat) movement was started by the Mohammedans. It was taken up by Mr Gandhi with tenacity and faith, which might have surprised many Mohammedans themselves. There were many people who doubted the ethical basis of the Khilafat movement and tried to dissuade Mr Gandhi from taking any part in the Movement the ethical basis of which was so questionable.” (Pakistan or Partition of India, pages 146,147).

Dr Ambedkar had further said:

“As a rebellion against the British Government, it was quite understandable. But what baffled most was the treatment accorded by the Moplas to the Hindus of Malabar,” he wrote. The Hindus were visited by a dire fate at the hands of the Moplas. Massacres, forcible conversions, desecration of temples, foul outrages upon women, such as ripping open pregnant women, pillage, arson and destruction— in short, all the accompaniments of brutal and unrestrained barbarism, were perpetrated freely by the Moplas upon the Hindus until such time as troops could be hurried to the task of restoring order through a difficult and extensive tract of the country. This was not a Hindu-Moslem riot. This was just a Bartholomew. The number of Hindus who were killed, wounded or converted, is not known. But the number must have been enormous.” 

Dr M.G.S. Narayanan, former Chairman, ICHR, New Delhi wrote, “Gandhiji was politically innocent at that time to assume in the context of British India that the poor and illiterate Muslim community in India could be drawn into an active political struggle against the British power easily. To please the Muslims, he supported the case of the moribund Khilafat that the British had done away with in Turkey at the close of the First World War. Later Mahatma Gandhi regretted this folly in sponsoring the Khilafat, but it was too late by that time—the damage was done. Instead of coaxing Muslims into social reform and modern education, the Khilafat had legitimised their conservative religious instincts and roused their fears and suspicions about the outside world. It strengthened their communalism, which thrived on hatred against the Hindu Kafirs, lying dormant from the days of Alauddin Khilji and Aurangazeb.” (In his Foreword to the book Gandhi and Anarchy by Chettur Sankaran Nair, page II).

Not just Indian leaders and historians, but Annie Besant, who was a British theosophist, socialist and reformer had written extensively about the Malabar Genocide of Hindus.

She wrote:

Annie Besant, who had presided over the first ‘Reform Conference’ in Malabar in the spring of 1921, also wrote in detail about the event. 

“The fourfold programme was begun formally on August 1, 1920; Swaraj was to be attained in a year, and on August 1, 1921, the first step was taken in the Malabar Rebellion; the Musalmans (Moplas) of that district after three weeks of preparing weapons, rose over a definite area in revolt, believing, as they had been told, that British Rule had ceased, and they were free,” she wrote in The Future of Indian Politics (Theosophical Publishing House,1922, p. 252).  

“They established the Khilafat Raj, crowned a King, murdered and plundered abundantly, and killed or drove away all Hindus who would not apostatise. Somewhere about a lakh people were driven from their homes with nothing but the clothes they had on, stripped of everything,” she added. 

With the extensive record of the massacre unleashed by Moplah Muslims against Hindus in Malabar, it leaves no doubt in one’s mind that it was indeed an element of Jihad that led to the genocide of thousands of Hindus. The genocide was a direct result of Moplah Muslims wanting to destabilise the British to establish Islamic rule and in the process, in true Caliphate style, massacring the Kafirs that stood in their way, mindlessly, mercilessly.

Despite all of this, the Communist government in Kerala today wishes to rub salts on the wounds of Hindus by promoting a ‘tourism circuit’ to prove just how innocent the Moplah Muslims were and how the “nationalists” fought against the British along with their Hindu compatriots and that any transgression that was committed by the Moplahs was actually a result of Hindus being tyrannical. While they have successfully wiped the memory of the Malabar massacre of Hindus by Moplah Muslims from the collective conscience of the nation at large and specifically Hindus, they are now going a step further to discredit the voices that have finally realised that without learning the truth about our past, we are only bound to repeat it.

Toilet cleaners of ISIS today want to whitewash similar Caliphates and their foot-soldiers from 1921

It is imperative to understand the true ramifications of what the Moplah Muslims wanted in Malabar when they tried to establish an Islamic Caliphate, mirroring that of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was based on the fundamentalist tenets of Islam and while Marxist historians have tried to peddle theories of pluralism and brotherhood even under the Caliph of Islam, the truth is far from it. There have been accounts of rampant Jihad against Kafirs in the Ottoman Empire itself – like that of the Christians and Armenians. This is the model that the radical Moplah Muslims wanted to emulate, essentially saying that the Caliph of Islam is the same worldwide, based on their delusions of an Ummah and that they owed their allegiance to the Caliph of Islam (Turkish Ottoman Empire) and not the Indian nation-state that Indian freedom fighters were struggling for.

The Moplahs, therefore, wanted to destabilise the British not because they believed in the sovereignty of India, but because they wanted to establish an Islamic Caliphate in its place. The name that they chose for this crusade was the Khilafat movement, a name that, owing to general ignorance and/or wilful naivety, was open to being misinterpreted by the masses. MK Gandhi and his support for the Khilafat as a movement “against the British” made it almost sound like the meaning of ‘Khilafat’ drew from the word “Khilaf”, or ‘against’, insinuating that the Moplah Muslims were “against” the British. That misinterpretation has been carried on, by stealth, to this date by Marxist historians reiterating over and over again that the Moplah Muslims were fighting against the British.

In reality, the Khilafat movement drew its name for the “Kaliph” since they were fighting to maintain the authority of the Turkish Caliph of Islam. Officially, Khilafat means ‘caliphate’ but also a broader one as ‘succession’ – Specifically Khilafat refers to the leadership of the Islamic community after the death of the Prophet.

In modern times, the perfect example of ‘Khilafat’ can be seen with the establishment of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria). ISIS created a Caliph, a leader of the Islamic community after the death of the Prophet, and “ruled” Iraq and Syria in strict accordance with Islamic tenets and Sharia. While the world whitewashed the horror, in part, by saying that ISIS was only a terror organisation that was “using Islam to commit murder and rape”, the truth is that ISIS followed Islam to the letter – just like Taliban is now following Sharia in Afghanistan.

It would not be far fetched, therefore, to compare the Moplah Muslims of 1921 to the ISIS terrorists who are being hunted down today and the Khilafat they demanded to IS in Syria and Iraq. This is the “nationalist movement” that MK Gandhi supported, emboldening the Moplah Muslim terrorists from that time. It is this terrorist movement by radical Muslims that today, the communists want to whitewash as a peasant uprising or rebellion against the ‘tyrannical Hindu landlords’.

It must not really come as a surprise given that from India, Kerala has the distinct accomplishment of being the foremost recruitment ground for ISIS terrorists. While they whitewash a massacre of Hindus that was committed 100 years ago, radical Muslims from Kerala have proved that they are more than happy to even be toilet cleaners of ISIS if it gives them the satisfaction of working for the establishment of a Caliphate.

Kerala CM himself admitted that till 2019, over 100 Malayalis had joined ISIS. While these Muslims from Kerala have been joining ISIS by the dozens, there have been several reports about how ISIS looks down upon these Indian terrorists and insist that they clean toilets. While these young terrorists go to Iraq and Syria with the dreams of beheading Kafirs, imposing Sharia and establishing a Caliphate, these menial terrorists are made to clean toilets for other ISIS jihadis from other parts of the world. Amazingly, the desperation for a Caliphate is such, that these lowly Jihadis don’t seem to mind even cleaning the toilet of these far more “respectable” Jihadis.

If these modern-day Jihadis don’t mind cleaning the toilets of ISIS Jihadis, one has to assume that whitewashing the crimes of the Moplah Muslims who wanted to establish an ISIS-like Caliphate back in 1921 is something that comes rather naturally to them and those who sympathise with these Islamic foot-soldiers.

From cleaning the toilets of those who want to establish an Islamic Caliphate now to whitewashing the genocide committed by those who wanted to establish an Islamic Caliphate then, Kerala has often been at the forefront of rubbing salt on the Kafir’s wound and looking away when their heads, severed from their bodies, lay littered on their green fields. That the Communist government in power now wants to rewrite history to ensure that blind Hindus don’t mind it when it is repeated, is not surprising. It should serve as a warning to all of us – While Hindu Kafirs would be massacred by the Jihadis, the Communists would be standing with them with a pen to write about how our massacre was our own fault.