Khilafat movement

Campaign by Indian Muslims after World War I to protect the office of khalifa from abolition by the British, and to protest against partition of Turkey under the Treaty of Sèvres 1920, which was seen as an organized attempt to eliminate all centres of Muslim power. It was the only time that Muslims and Hindus united in active anti-British alliance. The khalifa was the religious and temporal head of the Sunni branch of Islam, and was situated in Constantinople.

The episode was of the noncooperation movement in India during the early 1920s; Gandhi pushed Congress to support the Muslim cause. The movement disappeared when the office was abolished 1924 by the Turkish nationalist Kemal Atatürk, and the campaign ended in failure with bitter Hindu-Muslim recriminations.