How an Indian journalist ended up playing a role in the history of three countries

Catching his audience’s attention must never have been hard for Karim Ghani. He was “a tall, thin, slender man, with unmanageable jet black hair and large dark eyes that stared with a hint of fanaticism at people he spoke to,” writes researcher-journalist Haja Maideen. “He was highly articulate in English, Tamil, Urdu and Arabic and spoke with purpose as if possessed with a sense of mission.”

Ghani’s “knowledge...and his eloquence naturally attracted many people” to him, including some of the most prominent leaders of South and South East Asia in the early 20th century. He was a parliamentary secretary under Ba Maw, the first premier of Burma. He was a minister of state in charge of propaganda in Subhas Chandra Bose’s Azad Hind government. And he advocated for an independent Malayan-Muslim nation based on anti-colonialism and Pan-Islamism.

History sees him as a complex character. It was Ghani who allegedly instigated the violence in 1950 in Singapore after a court ordered that a young girl be removed from her Muslim foster family’s custody and handed to her Catholic biological parents. As many as 18 people died in that violence – what some refer to as the Maria Hertogh riots – and more than 170 were injured.

Ghani insisted that a secular government should never interfere in religious matters. “This Colony regime is going far beyond its limit,” he said. “History will tell how we were humiliated by a Colonial regime… A ‘show of strength’ will demonstrate to the Colonial regime that we can give them a nerve-wrecking time if they interfere in our rights.”

Time in Burma

DM Abdul Karim Ghani was born in Tamil Nadu’s Sivaganga district and moved to Burma (now Myanmar) in his youth. His organisational skills were apparent early on when he was appointed secretary of the Youth League of the Chulia Association. The Chulias are mainly Muslims who once worked in metalcraft. (The word Chulia, says Moshe Yegar in Muslims of Burma, came from Chola, the empire that once dominated the region).

Another obvious talent Ghani had was for languages. As a journalist, he worked for Tamil and Burmese papers and, besides knowing those two languages, had a facility for Arabic, Urdu and later Malay.

In the early 1930s, Ghani was drawn to the message of Ba Maw, a political figure influenced by the Home Rule politics of India. Maw opposed Britain’s plan to politically separate Burma from British India and his Poor Man’s Party joined an alliance that contested the 1932 legislative assembly election on the “anti-separation” platform. Ghani too fought the polls on the same plank and won. However, when the government was formed, Ba Maw aligned with the “pro-separationists”, arguing for freedom to withdraw from the Indian federation.

In 1936, Ghani was elected to the House of Representatives in the bicameral assembly set up under the Government of India Act, that formally separated Burma from India. Ba Maw became Burma’s premier, heading a minority coalition government, and Ghani served as parliamentary secretary from 1937 to 1939. Not long after, Ghani and Ba Maw went their separate ways.

Azad Hind

This was a time of extraordinary political uncertainty and fluidity. Ghani’s life from this moment on was characterised by virulent anti-colonialism. In June 1942, he attended the second conference of the India Independence League, a diasporic body founded by Rash Behari Bose to oppose the British and secure India’s freedom through an armed struggle.

The conference passed a resolution appointing Subhas Chandra Bose, then in Germany, as the leader of the League as well as the Indian National Army, which had been set up by Indian prisoners of war in Japanese-occupied Malaya and Singapore. Ghani was the League’s head in Burma.

The next year, in October, Ghani signed Subhas Chandra Bose’s proclamation establishing a Provisional Government of Free India (Azad Hind) and calling on the Indian National Army to “fight the last fight for India’s liberation”.

The Indian National Army did put up a fight, but as it was marching towards north Burma alongside Japanese forces, the tide of war turned. Under concerted Allied bombardment, the soldiers of the Indian National Army had to make a brutal retreat in the face of illnesses like cholera, malaria and dysentery. Thousands of them surrendered to the British Indian forces.

As the head of the League in Burma, Ghani was detained on Subhas Chandra Bose’s orders, according to a report in the Cairns Post, a Queensland-based newspaper. A trial was conducted and Ghani was exonerated. He was one of the Azad Hind leaders who last saw Subhas Chandra Bose in Bangkok before Bose boarded the fateful flight to Japan on August 18, 1945.

Ghani was arrested once the British forces reoccupied Singapore but was released a year later from hospital in 1946. At the time, he insisted that Subhas Chandra Bose had secreted himself in a hideout and would emerge at an appropriate time. The Cairns Post quoted Ghani recalling Bose’s escape from India in January 1941:

“To a mastermind like that of Bose, such an escape is only child’s play, especially in the present instance when he had the absolute cooperation of the Japanese, themselves past masters in the art of staging make-believe. It will, therefore, be no surprise, if one day, Bose is seen in India, probably marshalling his men for another war – World War III – which he always predicted would decide the final destiny of India’s independence.”

Inciting riots

Over the next five years, Ghani reinvented himself as an ideologue for an independent Malayan-Muslim nation based on anti-colonialism, Pan-Islamism (reaching out to Muslim nations like Pakistan and Indonesia) and socialism.

While managing a press called the Moslem Publishing House in Serangoon, Singapore, he edited the Tamil daily Malayan Nanban, an English weekly called Dawn and its Malay edition Sinaran. He was the president of the Moslem League, a welfare-oriented body, and headed the All-Malaya Moslem Missionary Society while serving in several other organisations. It was from this leadership perch that he drove the violent protests over the custody of a girl, throwing much of South East Asia – Indonesia, the Federation of Malaya and Singapore – into turmoil.

The girl at the centre of the custody row was born Huberdina Maria Hertogh in 1937 in Java. Her father was Dutch and her mother Eurasian. When the Japanese forces occupied the Dutch East Indies, her Catholic parents gave the child to a Muslim Malay family – some say for adoption, others say for protection. The girl was renamed Nadra and brought up in the Islamic faith.

At the age of 13, her biological parents, now in the Netherlands, “found” her and came to reclaim her. The girl’s foster family contested their claim. Matters reached a head when she was married off in August 1950 to a teacher, a 22-year-old named Mansoor Adabi.

Ghani’s editorials in his publications in early September 1950 lashed out at Singapore’s Laycock Bill, which proposed to regulate marriage and raise the marriageable age for girls to 16. To Ghani, as Haja Maideen writes in The Nadra Tragedy (1989), this constituted an affront to the Muslim faith and an interference in matters of Islamic jurisprudence. He assumed the leadership of the Nadra Action Committee barely days before Singapore’s Supreme Court was to rule on the twin issues of the girl’s custody and the legality of her marriage. Very soon, he was the movement’s “moving spirit”.

Ghani was livid when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Maria’s biological parents and annulled her marriage. He wrote increasingly fiery editorials and delivered a vitriolic speech at Singapore’s Sultan Mosque that are believed to have incited crowds to riot and arson. The rioting began on December 11 and by the time it ended 72 hours later, 18 innocent Eurasian officials had died and hundreds of others were injured. Scores of vehicles were torched.

As soon as order was restored, the authorities spirited away Maria by boat to St John’s Island off Singapore and then flew her to Amsterdam. Several “ringleaders” of the riots were arrested, including Ghani, and his publications were shut down.

Ghani did not back down, though. He made it clear he would not accept a court ruling and threatened to push Pakistan and Indonesia into an international protest against what he called a colonial affront to Islamic law. Unnerved by the threat, the colonial authorities hastily cancelled a scheduled stop by Maria’s flight in Karachi and rerouted it to Calcutta.

Ghani was kept in prison for 15 months before being released in April 1952 on “compassionate grounds”. His case, as of others arrested in the matter, never went to trial. Nevertheless, he was branded a “troublemaker” and “advised” to leave Singapore.

An obvious place for Ghani to go to was India, the country of his birth. But India kept placing bureaucratic hurdles in his way, until his long-time associates in Singapore – with mediation from Imanullah Khan, the Pakistan-based secretary of the World Muslim Congress – ensured he found a new home in Karachi.

Ghani made a fresh start in publishing but soon fell into obscurity. He was keen on working on a new transnational Pan-Islamic movement headed by Pakistan that drew in newly decolonised countries in Asia and Africa. But Pakistan had its own crises to deal with, including emerging cracks between its Eastern and Western parts.

Ghani died a figure marginalised and forgotten in a new post-colonial world that would soon see new conflicts driven by Cold War rivalries. As Haja Maideen wrote in the concluding pages of The Nadra Tragedy: “Karim Ghani felt that he was all alone in the wilderness and his cries were not heard by the masses.”