Mumbai: A complaint has been filed with the police alleging that the All India Khilafat Committee Trust is spreading fake and misleading information on the history of Mumbai’s first-ever Eid e Milad procession.
The complaint, filed at Byculla police station, also says that the Khilafat Committee was distorting history by calling a religious movement in the pre-independence days a political event by claiming that leaders of the independence movement participated in it. The Khilafat Committee said that the political history of the Khilafat movement is well documented and the allegations are based on ignorance.
Processions that mark Eid e Milad, the birthday of Prophet Muhammad, is one of the features of the celebrations. The festival is on September 16 and processions planned for September 17 have been shifted to September 18 to avoid the Ganesh immersions that day. The Khilafat Committee had taken the lead in announcing that the processions will be shifted to make way for the Ganesh immersions.
On Friday, the Maharashtra government announced that it has moved the Eid e Milad holiday from September 16 to 18. Some shrines, like the Haji Ali and Mahim dargahs have not supported the Khilafat Committee’s announcement.
The Khilafat Committee, which was founded to protest the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate after the defeat of the Ottoman empire in World War I, has always claimed that the first Eid e Milad processions in Mumbai was started by the Ali brothers from Khilafat House, Byculla, in 1919.
There has been a dispute over the dates. Saeed Hameed, a senior Urdu journalist who filed the police complaint, said his research has proved that the claim is false. “As Eid e Milad is a pious and religious occasion for many Muslims, any baseless and fake information circulated in the name of history can hurt the religious feeling of the Muslims and it can cause law and order problems,” Hameed said in his complaint last week.
Hameed has also contested the claim that the first procession was led by Gandhi, saying that the Khilafat Committee does not have documents to prove their claim. He says that he published his research as a book titled ‘The untold history of the Khilafat House’ last year. Hameed says that his research shows that the first ever Eid e Milad procession began in 1930 from Jumma Masjid as a religious procession and culminated at Chhota Sonapur, Grant Road.
Hameed said he has evidence from police and newspaper reports. Gandhi never led any Eid e Milad procession in Mumbai or anywhere. Claims by the Khilafat Committee that other leaders Jawaharlal Nehru, his father Motilal Nehru, Sardar Patel, participated in the rally, are also untrue, according to Hameed.
Sarfaraz Arzu, chairman of the All India Khilafat Committee, said the police complaint is a case of ‘ignorance masquerading as intellect’. “Hundreds or writers have devoted their lives to the study of the Khilafat movement,” said Arzu.
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“We do not even want to respond to these wild allegations. The Khilafat movement turned into an all-India non-cooperation struggle against the colonial government. People who gave up their government jobs were indemnified by the Khilafat Committee for their income loss. We have minute-by-minute proceedings of the meeting and Gandhi’s signature on the papers,” said Arzu who added that papers documenting the organisation’s history have been preserved by the Jamia Milia university in Delhi.
