Update Twenty-Eight (Pt. 2): The Balance of Asia
The Balance of Asia
Chittaranjan Das, Founding Member and Leader of the Swaraj Party
Swaraj Divided
Chittaranjan Das, Founding Member and Leader of the Swaraj Party
Swaraj Divided
The impact of the Chauri Chaura Incident would prove to be of earth-shattering magnitudes to the development of India. Not only did it see the Non-Cooperation Movement, and to a lesser extent the Swaraj movement as a whole, discredited internationally and amongst more moderate Indians. It also saw the most prominent leader of the Indian Independence Movement imprisoned, in the figure of Mohandas Gandhi, and broke apart the already fragile relationship between the All-India Congress Party and the All-India Muslim League. As a result, the mid-1920s were to prove a time of considerable factional strife within the independence movement as divisions over India's path forward erupted into the open, just as the Montagu Declaration's promises were slowly put into practice, further weakening popular support for the independence struggle. Even as Montagu himself was replaced as Secretary of State for India in 1924 by F.E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead, the liberal-conservative policy towards India of slowly establishing limited Indian Home Rule continued, despite Birkenhead's own misgivings on the issue (16).
Greater power was slowly devolved to the Imperial Legislative Council's two houses and legislative efforts soon followed. Business regulation, a particular hobby horse of the recently elected Democratic Party, were amongst the first pieces of legislation to pass, soon followed by agricultural reform and public health guidelines, all topics permitted to be legislated on according to the Diarchy system established in the reforms. This was as opposed to the areas of finance, military and the like which remained at the total discretion of the Indian Secretary of State. It was notable that the legislative agenda of the Democratic Party and its League allies were quite regionally and class focused, with particular effort given to the interests of the Bombay Elite and centred on the interests of north-western India as a whole, while the east was left to languish.
The result was to see a growing divide between eastern and western sections of Northern India, with the Bengal as the primary region of social and political foment against the new status quo. While many Indians felt the gradual improvement of Indian power and authority to govern themselves sufficient, there remained a considerable portion of the population agitating actively for more independence, for a greater say in government and for similar rights as those enjoyed by the White dominions. It was with this impetus behind them that the Congress Party's representatives to the legislative council sought to push for greater autonomy, particularly emphasizing a need to end the Diarchy and to secure greater representation of the interests of the wider Indian population. However, these efforts largely floundered before the Democratic Party-Muslim League alliance, whose complacent position on the issue of Indian independence and self-interested political accomplishments, caused considerable dissatisfaction with the Legislative Council as a whole and would in time result in the slow revival of Swaraj fortunes, if in a changing guise (17).
The imprisonment of Gandhi had given an unprecedented blow to both the All-India Congress Party and the Swaraj movement. The result was the gradual splintering of the independence movement over the disagreements ranging from the role of Gandhi in the movement to the use of violence and the ethnic and religious divides which engulfed the movement. What erupted following the official end of the Non-Cooperation Movement was thus not only a collapse in relations between the Congress and League but a wider-ranging collapse of unity within the independence movement. Between 1922 and 1926 there were several hundred riots, attacks and massacres between Hindus and Muslims as communal violence spiked drastically - more than a hundred riots occurring in the United Provinces alone during this period. Muslim participation in the officially non-denominational Congress Party collapsed completely and would eventually bring to prominence the idea of a Two-State Solution to resolve Hindu-Muslim divisions in segments of the Muslim leadership.
At the same time, several important figures, including both Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru as well as the Bengali Chittaranjan Das, Huseyn Suhrawardy and Subhas Chandra Bose, would leave the Congress Party entirely to form the rival Swaraj Party, dissatisfied with those who had abandoned the Non-Cooperation Movement. Given that this abandonment had been spurred on by Mohandas Gandhi and his more rabid acolytes, it was felt by many that the Congress Party was descending into little better than a platform for Gandhi to dominate the struggle for independence, a role of leadership which he had just proven himself patently unsuited to (18).
Amongst the most impressive accomplishments of this nascent independence party would be its successful quelling of religious violence in the Bengal, where Das, Suhrawardy and Bose all campaigned relentlessly on an explicitly ethnocentric platform of unity between Hindu and Muslim Bengalis. While both the Congress and Swaraj Parties sought wholeheartedly to avoid a schism, as had occurred in 1907, it would prove impossible to reunite the two as the clear weakening of the Congress Party, partly resulting from a lack of clear leadership without Gandhi's guiding hand, the perceived weak will of the party leadership for independence following Chauri Chaura and the disastrous clashes with the Muslim League all combined to hamstring the senior of the two parties.
The rapid growth of the Swaraj Party, especially as anger at the elitist Democratic Party grew, particularly in the Bengal, along the East Coast and in the United Provinces, and memories of the effectiveness of non-cooperation rose to the fore resulted in the gradual diminishment of the Congress to a subordinate position to the Swaraj Party. The 1923 Indian General Election would see Swarajist members elected to a number of councils, most importantly securing a majorities in the Bengal and Madras Presidencies, but would find themselves stymied on a All-India basis by the Congress Party contesting elections even as the Democratic Party worked with the Indian Liberal Party and All-India Muslim League to secure control of the Legislative Council for a second term (19).
These electoral failures, coupled with the suspension of the Bengal and Madras Legislative Councils in 1926 in response to Swaraj Party legislation seeking to undermine the Diarchy, specifically legislation which would ease the difficulty of securing permits for public demonstrations, would lead the Swaraj Party to disdain the British-established and sponsored electoral system as a whole, instead emphasising the development of a parallel system led by Indians for Indians. During this period, the Swaraj Party would find itself divided on how to proceed in their struggle for independence, with shrinking support for a moderate position of working within the British-outlined Diarchy, while support for the development of parallel structures and pushing for full independence either as a Dominion of the British Empire or, amongst the more radical wing of the party, entirely independent of the colonisers gaining significant backing. This would culminate in the final speech of Chittaranjan Das' life at the 4th Swaraj Party Congress in Calcutta on the 3rd of April 1927, where in he committed the Swaraj Party to "Purna Swaraj" - Total Independence from British Rule (20).
While the Congress Party experienced schism and turmoil, Muslim India had largely sought to come to terms with the facts of British rule. The end of the Great War and subsequent rejuvenation of the Ottoman Empire, coupled with the collapse of the Non-Cooperation Movement, would ultimately prove the end for the Khilafat Movement. Following the Chauri Chaura Incident, the Khilafat Movement distanced itself from the Congress Party and would ultimately dissolve in early 1923. However, Muslim India remained divided, just as Hindu India was, by the issue of Home Rule and Independence. The Muslim League's decision to ally with the Democratic Party, which eventually turned into a coalition with the explicitly anti-Independence Indian Liberal Party, would send shockwaves through Muslim India and draw immense criticism from those who remained committed to Independence.
While many of these figures would ordinarily have joined the Congress Party, communal violence and a feeling of betrayal towards both the Congress and Swaraj Parties would ultimately mean that very few outside of the Ethnocentric Bengali Muslims would join either party. Instead, the end of the Khilafat Movement would see the rise of a pro-independence Muslim Party - the All-India Muslim Independence Party, under the leadership of many prominent former members of the Khilafat Movement. Amongst the most significant of these figures the Ali Brothers, Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali - who had led the Khilafat Movement, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Dr. Mukhtar Ansari, but they also included people such as Abul Kalam Azad, Syed Ata Ullah Shah Bukhari, Hakim Ajmal Khan and Chaudhry Afzal Haq (21).
The Muslim Independence Party would prove considerably more populist both in ideology and rhetoric than the more staid, high-class Muslim League on the basis of their origin as a popular protest movement. This grass-roots connection would be closely tended by the Ali brothers, Jinnah and Dr. Ansari, with the result that the party rapidly grew in popularity across much of Northern India. By the time of the 1926 elections, the party was able to find representation in the United Provinces, the Punjab, the North West Frontier, the Bombay Presidency and in the Bengal, although lacking control in any of these provinces. When Chittaranjan Das held his Purna Swaraj Speech, the effects were soon felt in the Muslim Independence Party. Already in agreement on the need to push for greater independence, the two parties now found that they could unite around the ideal presented by Das, a one-time member of the Khilafat Movement himself.
The result was that over the course of 1927 and 1928, the Swaraj Party and Muslim Independence Party began a series of intense negotiations which ultimately led to the declaration of a All-India United Front between the two parties on the 16th of April 1928, a long-hoped for reconciliation between the two major religious denominations which would allow for united action in the name of independence. Four months later, on the 10th of August 1928, a memorandum was published jointly by the two parties - known to posterity as the Nehru-Jinnah Report for its two principal authors. Written in response to Lord Birkenhead's demand for an Indian alternative to British-laid plans for India's future the report outlined a Bill of Rights, the end of the princely states - and a guarantee of uniform autonomy to all provinces, the end of Diarchy - and handover of authority to an Indian-elected federal government which would thereby transform India into a Dominion, the reservation of minority seats in all provinces and the central government, the use of Indian languages as languages of government, the formation of provinces along linguistic lines, full religious and cultural liberty, equal rights between men and women as citizens and more. In effect, the Nehru-Jinnah Report called for the end to British Rule, and for the transformation of India into a co-equal Dominion on par with South Africa, Australia or Canada while promising sweeping social, cultural and political changes to the Indian Sub-Continent (22).
The reign of Amanullah Khan as ruler of Afghanistan was exceedingly uncertain during its first decade. Having come to power following the assassination of his father and his defeat of his uncle, Nasrullah Khan, in a struggle for the throne in 1919, Amanullah was more aware than anyone of his need to secure his position. Having risen to power on a promise of modernisation, secularisation and democratization, Amanullah had secured a strong base of support, but in the process alienated the immensely powerful conservative forces of the country which had lined up behind his uncle. With this in mind, Amanullah began to consider a way in which he might placate the conservatives, for a time considering an invasion of British India as civil unrest in the British colony escalated under the Non-Cooperation Movement. However, he was eventually forced to abandon such hopes, and instead settled on a less risky policy of distancing Afghanistan from the British (23).
Convinced that the British had more critical things to deal with, Amanullah instigated contact with foreign powers, first Bukhara and Khiva but soon extending to most of Europe and the Middle East, in breach of the Treaty of Gandamak which handed Afghan foreign policy to the British and rejected the subsidy presented for that right in August of 1919, a time when British attentions were fully focused on Copenhagen. While waiting with trepidation for the British response, Amanullah ordered preparations made for the passing of a modernist constitution and a variety of other legislative initiatives. As the Congress Year came to an end and the British Empire was stretched from end to end by the hard task of demobilization, it became increasingly clear that Amanullah had calculated correctly. Realizing the opportunity he had been granted, Amanullah ordered his father-in-law, Foreign Minister Mahmud Tarzi, to initiate diplomatic relations with the Turks and Germans while working to create a new cosmopolitan education system for both boys and girls in Afghanistan while preparing to overturn old traditions, such as the strict dress codes for women, and creating a small Air Force in 1921.
In 1923, Amanullah finally succeeded in passing his ambitious new constitution which not only declared Afghanistan a Kingdom and Amanullah himself King, but incorporated equal rights for men and women, a bill of rights, the abolition of slavery and forced labor, the adoption of the solar calendar and the institution of a national registry with identity cards for all citizens. He would follow this with economic reforms including a restructuring, reorganization and rationalization of the entire tax structure, multiple anti-smuggling and anti-corruption campaigns, a livestock census for taxation purposes, the first national budget, a new currency and the implementation of the metric system. He would further order the establishment of a legislative assembly, a court system to enforce new secular penal, civil and commercial codes of law, instituted prohibitions on the payment of blood money and abolished subsidies and privileges for tribal chiefs and the royal family. Most importantly for the course of his reign, Amanullah determined that he would need to continue military spending at its former levels, further boosting military strength through conscription into regiments formed from men of different tribes, for fear of the reactionary opposition despite his initial hopes of using savings from the army to finance his reforms (24).
Amanullah's worries were soon to be proven correct, as rebellions began to erupt. The first region to experience this was the region of Zamindawar in the south where the influential Alizai Tribe rose in protest against Amanullah's reforms on taxation and conscription in June of 1923. The rebellion would last longer than initially expected as the conscripted battalions in the region refused to fight the Alizai, many of the soldiers sharing ties of blood and kinship with them. It would take the arrival of troops from Herat for the rebellion to be crushed, with the leaders executed and the Alizai tribe broken up and deported to Afghan Turkestan.
The next revolt came barely three months later, and would prove a far greater task to resolve. The instigating event would prove to stem from Amanoullah's constitutional abolition of polygamy and child marriages, and came about when a man of the Mangal tribe in the Afghan Southern Province claimed he had been betrothed to a woman from childhood, only to have a rival on love bring the dispute to the governor and the qazi-magistrate, in effect pulling in both secular and religious authorities to determine the matter, while the supposed fiancée rejected the claim of the first man. While the governor ruled in favour of the fiancée, the qazi-magistrate Mullah Abd Allah declared for the man of the Mangal Tribe claiming that the governor's rejection violated Sharia, a complaint which would be ignored and subsequently served as the instigating incident of the rebellion.
In mid-March of 1924 Khost, which had been seeing widespread popular protests since the previous autumn in support of the Alizai rebellion and against the government's reforms, erupted into open rebellion under Mullah Abd Allah. With the new constitution in one hand and the Koran in the other, Abd Allah called on the tribes to choose between God and Man, spreading the revolt like a cancer across south-eastern Afghanistan. Within a month the entire province was in flames and other tribes were rushing to the banners, laying ambushes of government troops and spreading word of the revolt in all directions (25).
Distraught at the situation, Amanullah sought to call a council of tribal and religious leaders to help legitimise his reforms and counter Abd Allah's claims, but was to meet with heartbreak when the resultant Ulama demanded a retraction of the constitution and an end to Amanullah's reforms. While initially considering withdrawing some of his policies to appease his opponents, the arrival of news that some of the tribes at the Ulama had already joined the rebellion and that Abd-al Karim, the son of one of Afghanistan's many ex-kings, had crossed the border and linked up with the rebellion caused Amanullah to change his mind. It was during this period that a young fighter and former goat-herder by the name of Habibullah Kalakani began making waves following a series of successful raids and ambushes of government troops. Finally convinced that there could be no compromise, King Amanullah declared holy war against the rebels in August and ordered Nadir Khan, Minister of War and a descendant of a rival branch of the royal dynasty, to take personal command of the army. The following two months would actually see the intensity of the conflict reduced significantly, with Nadir Khan initiating secret contact with Mullah Abd Allah in hopes of using the movement against Amanullah to rise to power himself, hoping to sideline Abd-al Karim as the claimant of choice for the rebels. However, it was at this point that Nadir Khan was suddenly assassinated by a rebel tribesman during a secret meeting with the Mullah.
The scandal of the Minister of War getting killed while in illicit talks with the rebels served to enflame Amanullah's modernist supporters and provoked a rallying-to-the-flag effect amongst the military, with Ali Ahmad Khan Luynab of the Barakzai tribe bringing in many of his tribesmen to supplement government forces. For his contributions he was given the post of Minister of War with the task of suppressing the Khost Rebellion. The conflict immediately flared up once more, growing in intensity over the winter to the point where hundreds were being killed each week. In late February Ali Ahmad Khan was finally able to trap Abd-al Karim and Mullah Abd Allah in a valley with some 800 rebels and proceeded to trap them there. Bitter fighting followed, as the rebels threw themselves at the government positions in an effort to break out over the course of three days, finally surrendering on the 2nd of March 1925. More than forty rebel leaders, including Abd-al Karim, Habibullah Kalakai and Mullah Adb Allah, were executed soon after - with the last embers of rebellion having been extinguished by summer (26).
Footnotes:
(16) Birkenhead was particularly dour about the feasibility of Hindu-Muslim cooperation IOTL, and much of that has proven true ITTL already. However, the ability of the Democratic Party to cooperate with the League has come as a significant surprise to him and has left him willing to allow the experiment to continue.
(17) In contrast to OTL, the Imperial Legislative Council has a considerably greater degree of legitimacy in Indian eyes. This has its benefits, as people begin to buy in, but at the same time it also has some issues. The fact that the Democratic Party, which rules in coalition with the League, is dominated by the Anglicized-Bombay business elite and western-focused League, where most Muslims in India lived at the time, means that the legislation actually passed by the council is something of a disappointment to many. The Congress Party's representatives do what they can to push for greater autonomy, but can't really accomplish much under the current circumstances.
(18) This is still pretty similar to the developments in the Congress Party IOTL, if with a few major divergences. Most important to note here, is that rather than remain with the Congress Party and Gandhi as he did IOTL, Jawaharlal Nehru joins the Swaraj Party with his father. The Swaraj Party on the whole is also more explicitly opposed to Gandhi, who they view as having abandoned the movement he started.
NOTE: I recently realized that I described the Non-Cooperation Movement as the Swaraj Movement in Update Twenty-One, when India was last covered in the TL, which is something of a misnomer on my part. The Non-Cooperation Movement was the protest movement ignited by Gandhi in the immediate post-war period which came to an end with the Chauri Chaura Incident. There is a separate Swaraj Movement which advocated for Indian Independence (In effect Home Rule) which was heavily involved in the Non-Cooperation Movement - which is where the confusion stemmed on my part. We now have a third Swaraj entity - the Swaraj Party, which is an actual political party. Thus, when I discuss the Non-Cooperation Movement here it is in reference to the protest movement; when I mention the Swaraj Movement it is in reference to the ideological movement which swept the Congress Party and Muslim League and led to their temporary alliance; and finally, when I mention the Swaraj Party it is in reference to the political party which emerged due to the splintering of the Congress Party when Gandhi was imprisoned.
(19) The Congress Party contests the 1923 elections, as contrasted with OTL where they sat them out. This is due to the continued lack of Gandhi's leadership allowing the party to follow pre-existing patterns rather than completely disregard the elections as occurred IOTL. The result is that while the Swaraj Party proves very successful on a provincial level, their candidates end up splitting votes with the Congress at an All-India level, and they are unable to secure victory. This is a divergence from OTL, where the Swaraj Party actually secured a majority of votes, as the Congress had in 1920.
(20) With the Congress Party still crippled without Gandhi to lead it (I know that there were other figures in the party, but if you look at what the party did between 1922 and 1924 when Gandhi was released IOTL, it becomes clear that those who hadn't left for the Swaraj Party were largely extremely close adherents of Gandhi's and as such were unwilling to do anything which would break with his wishes.) the Swaraj has a chance to continue distinguishing itself. ITTL the Swaraj Party has fallen further under Bengali influence than IOTL, with Chittaranjan Das having become the undisputed leader after quelling the Bengal, whereas IOTL it was Motilal Nehru who emerged as the main leader. Finally, where Das' death IOTL weakened the Swaraj Party and paved the path for Motilal to leave, here he becomes the first "martyr" to the cause of Purna Swaraj. In Swaraj Party mythology, the accomplishment of Purna Swaraj comes to be seen as his last wish (Note, Das lives two years longer ITTL and as such is able to remain as a party leader for the 1926 elections). It is worth noting here that the declaration of Purna Swaraj is actually quite unclear, it could mean "total independence" as a Dominion of the British Empire, but it could also mean "total independence" outside the British Empire. This lack of clarity is on purpose, because the Swaraj Party is pretty divided on which they would prefer, at this point Dominion status has the greater level of support, but the alternative has some support. What the Purna Swaraj announcement does do is clarify that the Swaraj Party rejects working within the Diarchy structure.
(21) It is important to note that IOTL the Khilafat leadership splintered following the end of the movement with Bukhari forming the Ahrar Party, the Ali Brothers joining the Muslim League and the rest of those mentioned joining the Congress in support of Gandhi. It is really important here to note that Muhammad Ali Jinnah does not leave India ITTL, nor does he join the Swaraj Party. He is instead a founding member of the Muslim Independence Party. IOTL he flirted with the idea of founding a new party after Chauri Chaura, here that impetus is greater and he therefore remains politically involved in India. The Khilafat Movement itself fell apart over a longer period of time, its final embers dying in 1931, IOTL, here it is less of the movement collapsing, and more a matter of transition from a protest movement to a political party. The All-India Muslim Independence Party is a figment of my imagination, but is meant to represent the fact that with Gandhi imprisoned and Hindu-Muslim relations in tatters, those who sought out the Congress Party would likely be stymied while the Muslim League has lost a good deal of legitimacy and gravitas as a bastion of the independence movement by allying with the Democratic Party. I could have gone with the Ahrar Party, but from reading up on it - it seems like the first thing they did was declare an entire sect of Islam heretical, not exactly a great way of building an All-Muslim alliance.
(22) The two preceding sections really come together here to spell out the direction wished for by the MIP and Swaraj Party, with the formation of an alliance between the two. IMO reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims is critical for there to be any chance of success in any Indian independence movement, and that is something everyone on either side was aware of both ITTL and IOTL (you can see various efforts at improving communal relations between the two denominations during this period). The result is the Nehru-Jinnah Report - an expy of the OTL Nehru Report which mostly remains similar to the OTL report but is merged with Jinnah's Fourteen Points resulting in a few key differences. The most important of these is the inclusion of minority seats, while every point with specific reference to Muslim representation has been changed to minority representation instead and the fraction of representatives omitted. Note, the Nehru mentioned here is Motilal Nehru, not his more famous son, while the Jinnah mentioned is the famous Muhammed Ali Jinnah.
(23) This is where things diverge in Afghanistan as a result of differences in the events of India. By avoiding the Amritsar Massacre, which IOTL was what convinced Amanullah to launch the Third Anglo-Afghan War, India is spared a hard blow but at the same time Afghanistan is forced to find another way of resolving their differences than an external conflict.
(24) I may have things going a bit too much Afghanistan's way, with the Afghans accomplishing most of their goals from the OTL war without having to fight it, but considering how busy Britain was at the time I believe it would be possible. This does delay some things for Amanullah, for example Afghanistan hasn't declared itself independent and Amanullah remains Amir until 1923. Perhaps the most important divergence which comes of avoiding the Third Anglo-Afghan War is that Afghanistan doesn't accept the Durand Line as its border - while not immediately impactful, it could cause issues in the future. Amanullah has to be one of the most ambitious reforming rulers of the age - all of the reforms mentioned here are OTL. I can honestly see why the conservatives screamed bloody murder over Amanullah. Also important to note is that IOTL Amanullah cut military spending which caused him to lose the support of the military - I am assuming that he thought he had solved his issues with the reactionaries and that was why he did so, allowing me to use the lack of a Third Anglo-Afghan War to keep Amanullah from getting lulled into a false sense of security.
(25) This is all mirroring the events of OTL quite closely, with a series of tribal revolts in response to Amanullah's reforms requiring military might to suppress. I have simplified the story of the start of the rebellion a bit, but it is basically exactly the same situation as IOTL. I don't see why it would have changed given TTL's divergences (I could have gone with an equivalent but Alt-TL instigating event, but I think this works better), and it allows the conflict to play out relatively similar to OTL. One thing to note is that the rebellion is spreading a bit quicker than OTL, the potential rebels more primed to go off without the appeasement of the Third Anglo-Afghan War.
(26) There are a lot of things to note here, the first of which is that the Khost Rebellion becomes significantly larger than IOTL. Second, the council Amanullah called IOTL led him to withdraw some of his reforms, ITTL he considers it but the spread of the rebellion and sense of betrayal at the actions of the Ulama cause him to reconsider (yes, it is a bit shoe-boxed, in but I don't think it falls into the realm of implausibility). Habibullah Kalakani who IOTL led the revolt which saw Amanullah deposed in 1929 never enters the Army ITTL because the Anglo-Afghan War is butterflied, as a result he isn't fighting with the government forces at Khost but instead joins the rebels alongside various other tribesmen. Next, Amanullah makes the decision to order Nadir Khan to directly lead the effort against the rebels ITTL, when IOTL Ali Ahmad Khan was given the task.
This decision is made because Ali Ahmad Khan didn't have the chance to make himself noticed in the Anglo-Afghan War (starting to notice a trend here?) and as such Nadir Khan is viewed as the only trustworthy option to command the government forces. Nadir Khan demonstrated IOTL that he was more than willing to abandon Amanullah (ITTL the better relations with the army slow Nadir's departure from his post long enough for him to lead the effort against Khost) and had the ambition to take the throne. While the assassination is a bit deus ex machina, it doesn't seem implausible given the numerous officials and royals who were gunned down in Afghanistan, not least Amanullah's own father in 1919. In contrast to OTL Abd-al Karim also doesn't flee into India but is instead killed alongside Amanullah's various OTL opponents. The end result is that while the Khost Rebellion is significantly worse than IOTL, Amanullah ends up having a clean sweep of all his enemies. He thus goes into the latter half of the 1920s able to continue his reforms uninterrupted, with a loyal Army under Ali Ahmad Khan and his reactionary rivals in shambles.
Sheikh Khaz’al Khan Ibn Haji Jabir Khan of Arabistan
A Fateful Course of Events
Persia under Mohammad Taqi Pessian was a state divided unto itself between two major factions and an insidious, if smaller, third faction. The first of these factions was the one to which Pessian had welded himself at the outset and which he continued to find the greatest degree of support from, the conservatives, dominated by powerful religious leaders and tribal figures. The second were the modernists, those who preached secularism, democratisation and modernisation and looked to Afghanistan and the reformer king Amanullah for inspiration, and were concentrated in the cities of Pessian Persia and amongst the tribes of the north, whose ties to Afghan tribes would prove a crucial tie to the modernising efforts in Afghanistan. The final faction was to be found in the slums of Persia's cities and the cottages of the countryside, amongst the poor and disenfranchised - the Socialists. Closely tied to the Jangal movement of Socialist Persia to the west, the Socialists found themselves part of a hunted underground, clashing constantly with Pessian's secret police forces as they sought to provoke popular agitation and unrest in the Shahdom in a bid to weaken it.
Ministers like Abdolhossein Teymourtash and Ali Akbar Davar spoke out critically against the conservative influence on government and pushed for the implementation of a modern judiciary and educational system, the ending of more archaic traditions and religious customs, and the strengthening of parliament. Shah Pessian would prove highly resistant to such efforts, knowing full well who his most important supporters were. Mohammad Hossein Naini Gharavi and Abu l-Hasan al-Isfahan, the two current Marja of Twelver Shia Islam, were to prove immensely influential in the direction of Pessian's reign serving on his royal council as advisors and at times even directly intervening in policy formulation and implementation. This would be demonstrated most clearly when Naini took personal leadership of the formulation of a modern law code, infusing his personal beliefs and view on Sharia into the code, most significantly ensuring the establishment of a Supervisory Council of "wise men", in effect the Marjas and eight other prominent religious leader, which would hold veto authority over any policy or law set out by the Royal Council. In return, the mosques across Pessian Persia erupted in ecstatic support of Pessian's law enforcement and political reforms which would see the parliament reduced to less than a fig leaf.
Over the course of the half decade between 1927 and 1932, Pessian relation with the British government grew increasingly volatile, as the Macdonald Labour government clashed with the wider colonial establishment in London, resulting in rapid increases and decreases in British aid depending on the course of the internal British struggle. This instability would climax twice, once in 1930 when governmental spending by the Colonial Office spiked to fund the Pessian government, just as tensions were reaching a high point and socialist agitation provoked strikes in Birjand and Ferdows, in a move met with significant hostility by Labour figures. This increase in funding was sufficient to pay off strike leaders as well as provide payroll for secret police informants, with the result that the strikes were brought to a swift end and the ringleaders were captured, interrogated and executed. The second would occur in mid-1931 when Labour appointees swept through the colonial office on a mission aimed at reducing expenditures, triggering a major clash as funding for semi-colonial dependencies like Pessian Persia and Arabistan were slashed. While Pessian and his supporters were able to continue funding most government operations for the remainder of the year, by early 1932 the situation had become increasingly worrisome as payroll for the Khorasan Gendarmerie was delayed for two months and the officer corps saw its pay reduced by a third (27).
While not in as precarious a situation as that present in Pessian Persia, the Socialist Republic of Persia was far from united in ideology, policy or even on fundamental questions such as whether to pursue representative collective leadership in the model of the Muscovites or the more autocratic leadership exemplified by the Yekaterinburg Reds, an issue of considerable debate within Persian circles at the time. Perhaps most significant of these divisions lay in how distant Kuchik Khan, leader of the Jangal Party, was in his ideological beliefs from many of his supporters and allies in government. This was most clearly illustrated in Kuchik Khan's continued clashes with others in his party over the role of religion in Persian society, Kuchik Khan being a man of faith and religious convictions while many in his party aimed for a secular society with some of the more extreme figures in the party even wishing for enforced state atheism.
The result was that even as the Jangali government undertook slow and methodical land reforms, developed local defence force militias in the model of the Russian Black Army and implemented major governmental reforms to increase the government's democratic base, clashes over the Religious Question increasingly began to spill out into the wider public. With the Pessian government's alliance with the Shia Marja weakening trust in the Shia religious institutions in Socialist Persia, this proved to be a lost cause for Kuchik Khan - who saw his support, and that of the Jangal movement as a whole, dwindle over the course of 1929 and 1930.
This culminated in the fracturing of the Jangal Party over the Religious Question in late 1930, with Kuchik Khan's supporters remaining in the party - around 1/3 of the party membership - while the remainder split between a variety of opposition parties, such as the Socialist Party under Sulayman Eskandari, the Revolutionary Republican Party under the young Taqi Arani and Abdossamad Kambakhsh and most importantly the Party of the Masses, the Tudeh Party, under Haydar Khan Amo-oghli and Soleiman Eskandari. It would be the Tudeh Party which emerged as the largest party in parliament following the collapse of the Jangals and a vote of no-confidence on the 3rd of January 1931, which brought Kuchik Khan's government to an end. The next Premier of the Socialist Republic of Persia would be Haydar Khan and the Tudeh Party in coalition with the Revolutionary Republican Party, the latter being a relatively unstructured youth party, its leadership barely older than 30 at the time.
The Tudeh Party was swift to pass legislation establishing a new modernist legal code, prepared during the previous decade by Soleiman Eskandari and his nephew Iraj Eskandari, and an ambitious legislative slate which saw large swathes of the economy nationalised, most prominently all utilities, medical services and resource extraction sectors, declared the enforcement of legal edicts on the basis of Sharia a crime, established the state as a secular actor and enforced freedom of religion. Within the year, the Tudeh Party had reduced the Revolutionary Republican Party to the status of Youth party affiliate of the Tudeh Party and formally merged the two while rapidly escalating the speed at which land reforms were undertaken and re-establishing a professional military, which had been abandoned in favour of militias by the Jangal Party in the post-civil war period, with aid from Ottoman and Russian advisors, with particularly Yekaterinburg providing the largest number of advisors. The Tudeh Party further bolstered popular support by enforcing a change in the naming of their state internationally by abandoning the foreign designation of Persia in favour of the indigenous Iran. As 1932 dawned, the Socialist Republic of Iran found itself increasingly in a position of power in the Middle East (28).
The Khanate of Khiva was probably one of the most peculiar states to emerge from the bloody chaos of the 1920s. A tense mélange of often hostile religious, ethnic and ideological minorities ruled by a clique of Caucasian communists controlling a puppet Khan, it was at constant odds with itself and yet was able to slowly begin to settle onto a course which would allow the state to consolidate itself. Most significant in the leadership of Khiva remained Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who had taken over directing almost every aspect of the Khivan state, from taxation and agriculture to industry and commerce, while Anastas Mikoyan focused his efforts on foreign affairs, strengthening ties to Socialist Persia and the increasingly united Russian Communists while working to normalise relations with the Ottomans, as Kirov took a leading role in the establishment of a Commissariat which ensured that the orders of the central government were followed across the anarchic steppes of Central Asia.
It was from this Khivan Commissariat that a rising star would emerge in the form of Lavrentiy Beria, one man among many who had been forced to flee Ottoman persecutions for the Khivan Khanate. There, he had at first joined the army, quickly rising in rank through his demonstrated intelligence, ruthlessness and willingness to do anything asked of him by his superiors, before being inducted into the Commisariate following the crushing of the Bukharans. In this role, Beria had personally commanded the forces executing the Bukharan leadership, while at the end of the Revolutionary War he was given charge of hunting down the last remaining Bukharan and Basmachi supporters, a task at which he would excel, resulting in the imprisonment, torture and often execution of more than 3,000 individuals by late 1925. At this point Beria was promoted once more and put in charge of organizing a secret police and spy networks in Khiva. This would be followed soon after by an expansion of responsibilities to include espionage in foreign nations, most prominently Pessian Persia, Afghanistan and the Ottoman Empire, but also western China and the Russian states, in response to the Urtatagai Crisis with Afghanistan (29).
The Urtatagai Crisis erupted in late 1925 when a Khivan Commissariat force hunting Basmachis attacked the island of Urtatagai in the Amu Darya River. The status of the island was a matter of some dispute, as the Afghan army had already tried to enforce their claim to the island unsuccessfully in a border clash in 1913 and had later successfully captured the island unopposed in 1920. Since then, the island had been used as a hideout by Bukharan, Basmachi and even White Russian forces, who repeatedly crossed into Khiva to wreck havoc. Therefore, when yet another raid saw Basmachi rebels flee onto the island the local Commissar decided to pursue, clashing and defeating the island's garrison, resulting in 12 killed and 5 Afghans captured, while the 12 Basmachi rebels were summarily executed by the commanding Commissar. Outraged, the Afghans demanded an explanation, reparations as well as a return of the island and prisoners. When the Khivans proved slow to respond, Amanullah Khan called up the Afghan Army under Ali Ahmad Khan to reclaim the island if no response had been given by the new year.
Thus, by the start of 1926 the prospect had suddenly emerged of a new conflict in the heart of Asia, drawing considerable international attention and worry. It would eventually prove to be the intervention of the League of Nations which would resolve the dispute, with diplomats from Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands all arriving to mediate. Over the course of February, March and April the two sides would thus negotiate in an effort to avoid conflict, ultimately resulting in the official handover of Urtatagai into Afghan hands, the payment of a widow's pension to the dead soldiers' families and a return of the captured prisoners in return for an Afghan pledge to help end the raids of the Basmachi movement, the Afghans taking on financial liability to repay damages should such efforts fail. The successful conclusion of negotiations would prove to be one of the League of Nation's early successes and helped significantly improve relations between Khiva and Afghanistan. The miscalculation which led to the crisis, and the lack of understanding of their neighbors it exposed, were what prompted Beria's expansion in authority (30).
The States of Basra and Kuwait were the sole parts of the central Middle East under direct British supervision, and as such were tied even more firmly to the course of events in the British Empire than elsewhere in the region. Perhaps most important about this relationship were the distinctions present in how the two protectorates were governed, as Kuwait fell under the Secretariat for India while Basra was governed directly from London. This distinction was to have an immediate and concerning impact on relations between the two states as Kuwait City had, until the Great War, been the sole naval port outlet for the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. The sudden inclusion of Basra, and its extension into Khuzestan, suddenly created a contending force to this trade route which saw direct sponsorship from London. Thus, while Kuwait remained the main focus of investments early in the Austen Chamberlain government, the strong relationship between the government and Indian Secretariat proving critical in keeping focus aligned. This alignment began to slowly crumble once Sheikh Khaz'al Khan Ibn Haji Jabir Khan and Khuzestan were joined to Basra, not only greatly increasing its oil production capacities, but providing clearer local leadership to the protectorate and a change in name, the protectorate coming to be referred to as the Sheikhdom of Arabistan, in effect an extension of Khaz'al's domains.
The result was that Basra City suddenly began to emerge as a contending port of call to Kuwait City, and rapidly began to overtake the latter. By late 1927 the relationship between the two protectorates had degenerated to near-war, with Sheikh Ahmad Al-Jabar Al-Sabah of Kuwait openly threatening Khaz'al with a drawn blade during an attempted mediation by British interlocutors. This state of affairs would further worsen with the change in government which saw Labour come to power. Much as in Pessian Persia, the incipient Labour government came to clash with the Indian Secretariat over Arabistan and Kuwait, ultimately resulting in London throwing their support behind Khaz'al and Arabistan while the Indian Secretariat continued to back Kuwait. This escalation in tension would result in several armed clashes between the two protectorates, with the British authorities doing little to help resolve the issue, over the course of the years between 1928-30 (31).
That said, even as relations between the British protectorates deteriorated, there were changes occurring further to the north-west along the Tigris and Euphrates. The immense injection of money which came with the claiming of Baku, and subsequent end of Ottoman support to the Pan-Turkish movement, was to have profound effects on Mesopotamia as further oil fields in the region were prospected and work begun on them. These discoveries, and the shift in Ottoman priorities to securing those regions as a result, were to have unexpected consequences as the Ottomans under Kemal Pasha turned towards Germany for aid in the construction of a series of dams and river barrages which would allow for the irrigation of Mesopotamia, turning the desert green once more, as it had been before the depredations of the Mongols. Thus, over the course of the latter half of the 1920s and the early 1930s, the Ottoman Empire would begin work at Mosul, Kut and Dicle on the Tigris and at Keban, Aleppo, Raqqa, Ramadi and Fallujah on the Euphrates, on a series of dams which would fundamentally reshape the geography of the Middle East. The first of these dams, at Kut and Aleppo would finish work in early 1931 (32).
Footnotes:
(27) We are pretty far off the beaten path here as Mohammad Taqi Pessian goes in almost the exact opposite direction of Reza Pahlavi. IOTL the Pahlavi government threw its lot in with the modernists and actively provoked the religious establishment on multiple occasions. In this case Pessian leans on the conservative forces at his back for support, even going so far as to give the religious leaders of the country a veto on legislation. Further, we here see how vital British funding is for Pessian activities and get our first look at the increasingly contentious situation in Britain's colonial, dominion and foreign offices.
(28) The Socialists in Persia show themselves capable of successful elections and see a fragmenting of the once monolithic Jangal movement. I just couldn't work out how Kuchik Khan would be able to hold on to power for much longer given his pro-religious influence stance of OTL given that the Pessian government is trending that way in this period. Ultimately, the Jangal Party ends up on the conservative end of the political spectrum in Persia, the Socialists at centre-right, Tudeh in the Centre, the Revolutionary Republican Party on the centre-right and an amorphous collection of parties on the far-left. I realize going with Tudeh as the ruling party is a bit lazy on my part, but the name would seem to fit the circumstances and I am leaning on some of the same figures who determined the OTL naming at the party's establishment. It is worth noting that Haydar Khan ended up allied with the Jangal Movement throughout the revolutionary struggle and is less tied to the Russian revolutionary scene ITTL, part of why he wasn't gunned down my Jangal supporters as occurred IOTL, and has actually become something of a national hero for his service during the war.
(29) It is important to note that all of the figures mentioned here are from the Caucasus, there are no native Khivans in government outside of the insular and powerless court of the Khan, who enjoys a life of leisure with numerous concubines. I know that some are probably wondering why the Khivans aren't uniting the state with the Russian unification orchestrated by Trotsky and the Muscovites, and the answer to that question is that the Caucasian Clique would rather be big men in a smaller lake than small fish in a massive ocean. The large influx of Georgians and Armenians, as well as the numerous subsequent waves of refugees, have fundamentally reshaped the demographics of the region resulting in Caucasians actually making up a slight plurality of the population, something like 25%, while the Turks make up around 23%, the Russians around 14% and the Assyrians around 8% with the rest made up of various smaller minorities. We also run into Beria for the first time. He has had a somewhat different career to OTL, but still ends up doing what he was good at, intrigue and murder.
(30) The Urtatagai Conflict as it is known IOTL plays out quite similarly to what happened IOTL. Hell, even the results of the negotiations are pretty close to those of OTL and don't really leave anyone feeling put out (except for the salty Basmachis). A notable difference is that the conflict is mediated by the League of Nations ITTL, which brings it significantly more international attention and is another feather in the LoN's cap. I did play around with the idea of the conflict escalating to open war, given that an Afghan-Khivan conflict is much more even than the OTL Soviet-Afghan conflict would have been, but ultimately decided that cooler heads would come out on top. Amanullah wanted to send a message so that he could continue focusing on his reforms, not get entangled in a bloody war just after crushing the Khost rebels. While he is somewhat sympathetic towards the Basmachis, it isn't enough to fight a war for them - and after this crisis they are not even worth what little support they were being given previously.
(31) Sheikh Khaz'al was highly supportive of the British IOTL, and actually played a key role in supporting the foundation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. He was even considered as a candidate to take the Sheikhdom of Kuwait when the then-Sheikh launched an ambush against the Saudis in breach of British interests. Kuwait falling under the Indian Secretariat while London retains control of Basra is basically OTL except that Basra was part of the wider Mandate of Iraq IOTL, whereas here Basra is a smaller state. One thing to note is that the Iraqi Revolt of 1920 does not happen ITTL because of the changes to the post-Great War period in the Treaty of Copenhagen. Basra was already strongly influenced by the British, and rule follows more along the lines of that in Kuwait than the OTL treatment of Mandate Iraq. Note that Arabistan was actually what Khaz'al's domains were called IOTL, I am just extending them to include the Basran Dominion ITTL. The result is that we have two, almost equal sized, Sheikhdoms backed by rival parts of the British establishment competing over much of the same resources (oil and financial aid from Britain) and trade.
(32) This is largely a TTL affair and is a result of the injection of cash that comes with access to the Baku Oil Fields for the Ottomans. The Ottomans under Kemal Pasha have come to the realization that leaving their peripheries to rot can have disastrous consequences and as such are using this opportunity to strengthen their hold on these regions. These dams and irrigation works are combined with a massive Turkicization effort through schooling, changes to official languages and massive migration efforts into Mesopotamia - amongst other efforts - in an effort to turn Mesopotamia into something which can strengthen the Ottoman Empire rather than hinder it. The consequences of such shifts are going to be quite profound as we will come to see.
End Note:
And with that we end the first full update back from hiatus. I really hope that you have enjoyed this look into the developments of South Asia and the Middle East. I have found it quite interesting to play around with the political developments of this period, particularly digging up the Swaraj Party, which I had never heard of before, was quite fascinating. There is a lot of set up in this update and many of the developments which have occurred during these four sections are going to play important roles in the coming updates.
I would like to thank @Sardar for beta-ing the South Asia segment and helping to smooth out a few of the issues that were left in the text, as well as @Ombra for beta-ing everything I have written this time around.
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