Muhammad Jafar’s autobiography begins with a brief history of his early years: how after losing his father as a child he had lived like a vagabond until he taught himself to read and write, becoming a petition-writer at a magistrate’s court. Then a chance meeting with a Wahhabi preacher changed his life and he came to regard his association with British infidel justice as highly corrupting. Muhammad Jafar glosses over any activity that presents him as anything other than a victim of injustice, but nevertheless implies that when the Sepoy Mutiny broke out in 1857 he headed a group of Wahhabis who went up to Sittana. He was then twenty-one years old. After General Cotton’s break-up of the Hindustani Fanatics in 1858 he returned to Thanesar and resumed his former profession. This was ‘by order of a Certain Person, and for a Hidden Object’. His work as a court petition-writer now became a front, for the ‘Hidden Object’ was jihad against the British Government and the ‘Certain Person’ was the Amir of the Wahhabis in Patna, Ahmadullah, one of the three Wahhabi mullahs detained by Commissioner William Tayler in the summer of 1857. Since the death of his co-detainee from natural causes Ahmadullah had assumed the leadership of the Wahhabi movement, while his younger brother Yahya Ali had become the movement’s senior imam. Unknown to the British, these two brothers were now joint leaders of the Indian Wahhabis in plains India.
But then came the day in December 1863 when a friend with contacts in the judiciary in Thanesar arrived at Muhammad Jafar’s house to warn him that the policeman Daffadar Ghazan Khan had made a ‘false complaint’ against him to the British authorities. Later that same night a party of policemen led by Captain Q. D. Parsons, Superintendent of Police in Amballa, raided his house and immediately found what Muhammad Jafar himself termed a ‘dangerous letter’, written but not yet sent. ‘That letter’, admitted Jafar, ‘was addressed to the head of the Mujaheddin caravan and there was a coded message about the despatch of a few thousand coins.’ The letter and other incriminating papers were seized, but no arrest was made. Next morning Muhammad Jafar gave out that he was going to Amballa, and fled. Captain Parsons, who can perhaps be best described as a rogue policeman with psychopathic tendencies that finally drove him to insanity, was furious. He had all the male members of Muhammad Jafar’s household beaten up until his younger brother revealed that he had taken refuge in Delhi.
It was at this point that Sir Herbert Edwardes, the Commissioner at Amballa, grasped the full import of Muhammad Jafar and his letter. The military expedition against the Hindustani Fanatics was on the point of being launched under Neville Chamberlain’s command, and here was the first hard evidence to show who was orchestrating the fighters in the Fanatic Camp in the mountains – and how. A reward of ten thousand rupees for information leading to Muhammad Jafar’s arrest was authorised, and Delhi now became the scene of a major manhunt led by Captain Parsons. Jafar initially evaded the police net and fled with two companions in a phaeton to Aligarh. But Parsons got to hear of it, telegraphed ahead, and Muhammad Jafar was arrested on his arrival and brought back to Amballa in irons. Over the next few days the Wahhabi petition-writer was repeatedly roughed up by Parsons and his policemen in an effort to get him to reveal the names of ‘the participants and supporters of the Jihad’. He was told that if he agreed to act as an ‘approver’ he would be released and given a high post, but that if he refused he would be hanged.
The use of approvers, miscreants who turned Queen’s evidence against their fellow conspirators or partners in crime in return for a pardon, was a standard weapon in the British judicial armoury. In his autobiography Muhammad Jafar rails against these approvers and their lies, but the details he supplies show that it was the incriminating evidence he himself inadvertently provided, combined with his actions in leading the authorities to other branches of his organisation while on the run, which resulted in the series of arrests that destroyed the Wahhabi leadership in the 1860s and early 1870s.
Muhammad Jafar’s letters led Captain Parsons to Patna and to Elahi Bux, aged head of one of the three Patna families and father of the two most important members of the Wahhabi council, Maulvis Ahmadullah and Yahya Ali. Acting on Parsons’ telegraphed information, the Patna city magistrate arrested the old man in his own house and then released him on a surety of ten thousand rupees. Already forewarned by news of the arrest of Muhammad Jafar and his contacts in Amballa and Delhi, Elahi Bux’s two sons set about burning all the incriminating documents stored in the Sadiqpore chota godown. This process appears to have been still incomplete when on 21 January 1864 Parsons himself arrived in Patna and, with the local magistrate and a large body of police, raided the Wahhabi headquarters. He was too late to catch Maulvi Ahmadullah, who had just left for Calcutta to attend a meeting with the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, but his younger brother Yahya Ali and two other members of the organisation were arrested and more papers seized. By Muhammad Jafar’s account, Patna’s disgraced former commissioner William Tayler was present at these arrests, which must have given him immense satisfaction.
The papers recovered mostly concerned money transactions and were not in themselves sufficient to build a case against anyone in the household at Sadiqpore, but they led the indefatigable superintendent of police to a number of suspects in Bengal. Two of these were persuaded by Parsons – by means unknown but which may be guessed at – to testify that they had stayed in the small godown at Patna while on their way up-country from Bengal to the frontier to wage war against the British. There they had met the imam of the Wahhabis, Yahya Ali, and had heard him preach jihad. When three of those arrested in Amballa after Muhammad Jafar’s flight also turned approver, the cases against him, Yahya Ali, Elahi Bux and eight others were considered complete.
In the opinion of the Deputy-Commissioner of Amballa there was also sufficient evidence to charge Yahya Ali’s elder brother Ahmadullah, but this was disputed by the Government of Bengal. Maulvi Ahmadullah was now held in high esteem by Government, he still had influential friends such as Sir Frederick James Halliday in England and, moreover, he occupied several important public positions in Patna, including that of Deputy Collector of Income Tax, and was a member of the Committee of Public Instruction. After the grave injustice he had suffered at the hands of William Tayler in 1857 it was was unthinkable that he should be arrested a second time except on the strongest evidence. So Ahmadullah was left untouched, no doubt greatly to the disappointment of Tayler, who was following these goings-on with the closest interest from his legal firm’s offices in Patna.
Amid much general excitement and newspaper comment, the trial of eleven Wahhabis on the charge of waging war against the Queen opened at Amballa in April 1864 at the court of the Sessions Judge, Sir Herbert Edwardes, assisted by two Muslim and two Hindu Assessors. Yahya Ali refused to defend himself, so it was arranged by friends that he and his father should be represented by a young European barrister, persuaded to take on the case by a very large fee. Nevertheless, Yahya Ali remained aloof from the proceedings, endlessly reciting verses from the Quran and seemingly resigned to his fate. In his account of the trial Muhammad Jafar makes much of the way many of the several dozen witnesses called ‘would look at us and weep bitterly’ as they gave their evidence. He asserts that all were kept in police custody until the trial was over, and threatened with execution if they failed to testify as they had been coached to do. He cites the example of a boy who worked in his household and who at a preliminary hearing failed to give his evidence convincingly: ‘On the same day he was beaten so brutally at night that he died before he could appear as witness in the sessions court. In order to avoid the embarrassment Mr Parsons announced that the boy had died of an illness.’ The use of approvers’ testimonies was always open to abuse, but it is hard to take Jafar’s complaints of a mistrial too seriously when he himself acknowledges that there was indeed a conspiracy to make war against the Government of India and that he was part of it.