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95 SELFDETER MINATION Though the Germans were willing to fund schemes and initiatives, they lacked a nuanced understanding of the goals of their various benefactees. In an alliance formed of statist thinking, they were in starkest terms the enemies of the enemy. But the partisans of two other major national liberation struggles whom the Germans were supporting, running along timelines roughly parallel to India’s, were genuine friends. The Indians gravitated easily toward alliances with Irish republicans in the United States and Egyptian nationalists in France. What is most striking about these interactions is their strong sense of solidarity by analogy, identifying their brothers in mutiny as ideological kin based on their shared political aspirations and structural positioning vis-à-vis the British Empire. Even while impelled by the immediate goal of their own national liberation, they saw themselves as counterparts to, even implicitly identified with, other national struggles that seemed to resonate in common cause with their own. They were, in a sense, speaking the same dialect of the language of nationalism: aiming for citizenship within a democratic republic, a prerequisite for which was collective political emancipation. Again and again the three groups turned up in the same contexts. Delegates from all three countries were present at the International Congress on Subject Peoples held at the Hague in August 1907, where a proposition was introduced “that claims of subject nations for the management of their own affairs ought to be recognized, and the Indian and Egyptian representatives . . . spoke in support of it.” With the war came German sponsorship; both Irish and Egyptian activists 4 . . . and Friends The Republican Ghadar 96 The Republican Ghadar maintained Independence Committees in Berlin, which were “always friendly with Indian nationalists and eager to join forces.” A DCI report for December 1918 noted that the BIC had sent a telegram to ex-Khedive Abbas Hilmi, “congratulating him on his arrival in Germany and expressing the hope that the victory of the Central Powers would soon liberate the enslaved peoples of Egypt, India and Ireland.” Despite their patrons’ defeat, the anticolonial triple alliance was not abandoned after the armistice was signed. The New York–based Independent Hindustan frequently covered its sister struggles, while an anonymous member of the Indian Committee in Stockholm contributed the India chapter for a Swedish book on “England and her suppressed peoples with special chapters on India, Ireland and Egypt.” Of course, none of the three struggles was internally unified regarding the tactics of resistance, or the institutional form envisioned for an independent nation. Among the varied voices contributing to each national discourse, the question was, then, which of them our particular revolutionists would identify as their counterparts, based on which commonalities. First and foremost, all three shared a dedication to the Mazzinian legacy of liberal constitutionalism, national unification, and republican democracy. In the case of the Egyptians, a further area of similarity with India was the presence of an Islamic cultural identity in the makeup of a composite homeland. Though it was the dominant element in Egypt, in significant distinction from India, both could still be situated in relation to a transnational Pan-Asian or Pan-Islamist bloc. In the Irish case, there was no element of cultural or religious continuity and no prospect of sharing membership in any pan-entity, unless it was the reluctant commonwealth of the British Empire’s subject peoples. And yet that was one of the most solid and enduring partnerships of all, perhaps indicating the triumph of principle over ascribed identity as the root of solidarity. EGYPT FOR THE EGYPTIANS An article in the Ghadar’s first issue (1 November 1913) under the heading “A Storm Is about to Burst in Egypt, Drizzling Has Already Started” suggested that Egypt’s awakening was a good sign for the Indian movement, since the “key of the Suez Canal is in their hands.” The Egyptians might well have thought that India’s awakening was a good sign for themselves, given that the British interest in controlling the region was generally recognized to be motivated by strategic concern over protecting Britain’s precious access to India. As it happens, the first meeting of Indian and Egyptian nationalists came about when F. Hugh O’Donnell, an Irish Home Rule MP and journalist, and early advocate of solidarity among peoples subjected to British rule, introduced the India House habitués to Mustafa Kamil, the founder of the Egyptian nation- [3.141.41.187] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 07:42 GMT...

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