Spadecarners

In the ornate mosques of Delhi, Lahore, Peshawar and Hyderabad this month were gathering hundreds of determined young Moslems in brown uniforms, armed with spades. They were Khaksars, "the Humble as the Dust," meeting for "a certain religious observance." But India's Viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow, has had some experience with Khaksar humility and Britain has had plenty with subject peoples who want to make hay while her sun is eclipsed. Last week the Marquess hastily ordered India's provincial Governments to declare the Khaksar movement illegal "wherever necessary."

To some of India's 78,000,000 Mohammedans, suckled on the fighting creed of Islam, the nonviolent and democratic ideals of Mohandas Gandhi and his followers are sissified. It was among these fire-eating, creed-conscious Moslems that the Khaksars got their start in 1930. Officially the spade or belch is carried "to lift the humble dust"--it can also be used for drinking, cooking, sitting, skull-splitting.

Founder and prophet of the Spadecarriers is 60-year-old Inayatullah Khan. A brilliant student at Cambridge, Inayatullah talked Urdu* with an Oxford accent, became known as "the brown sahib (white man)" in India.

Getting religion twelve years ago, Inayatullah went native with a bang. He became Allama Mashriqi, "The Sage of the East," began preaching resistance to the British as a starter. The Spadecarriers now sport a grandiloquent motto: "To establish hegemony over the world, to become rulers once again, and to conquer the universe."

The Sage's followers began drilling with their spades, rioted in good military order, submitted themselves to an iron discipline enforced by whippings. Tolerated at first by the British Raj because they served as a check on the larger and more troublesome nonviolence groups, the Spadecarriers soon achieved the rank of a first-class nuisance themselves. They grew to a membership of between 200,000 and 400,000 (chiefly in the strongly Mohammedan northwest provinces), were strong enough to parade in public, publicly beat up an unfriendly Moslem member of the Sind Provincial Cabinet.

High point of Spadecarrier activity was a demonstration in Lahore last spring against the moderate Moslem League. In a pitched battle between Spadecarriers and police at least 27 were killed.

Unproved are recurrent rumors that connect the Spadecarriers with the Nazis. But certain it is that their tough-guy membership is a fertile field for fifth-column agitation in India, even if they do not set out to conquer the world for Islam.

* Urdu-Hindustani as spoken by the Mohammedans in India.

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