The non-Mussulman Indians supported the claims which the 70 millions of Indian Mussulmans, their fellow-countrymen, considered as a religious obligation. In an address drawn up by the great Hindu leader, the Mahatma Gandhi, and handed on January 19, 1920, by the deputation of the General Congress of India for the Defence of the Caliphate to His Excellency Baron Chelmsford, Viceroy and Governor of India, in order to lay their aims before him, they declared they raised a formal protest lest the Caliphate should be deprived of the privilege of the custody and wardenship of the Holy Places, and lest a non-Muslim control, in any shape or form whatever, should be established over the Island of Arabia, whose boundaries, as defined by Muslim religious authorities, are: the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, the Euphrates, and the Tigris, thus including Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, beside the Peninsula of Arabia. This General Congress of India, according to the manifesto it adopted during its sittings at Bombay on February 15, 16, and 17, 1920, gave to the delegation sent to Europe the following mandate, with respect to the Muslim claims regarding the Caliphate and the “Jazirat-ul-Arab”: “With respect to the Khilafat it is claimed that the Turkish Empire should be left as it was when the war broke out; however, though the alleged maladministration of Turks has not been proved, the non-Turkish nationalities might, if they wished, have within the Ottoman Empire all guarantees of autonomy compatible with the dignity of a sovereign State.” And the manifesto continued thus: “The slightest reduction of the Muslim claims would not only hurt the deepest religions feelings of the Moslems, but would plainly violate the solemn declarations and pledges made or taken by responsible statesmen representing the Allied and Associated Powers at a time when they were most anxious to secure the support of the Moslem peoples and soldiers.” The anti-Turkish agitation which had been let loose at the end of December, 1919, and had reached its climax about March, 1920, had an immediate repercussion not only in India, where the Caliphate Conference, held at Calcutta, decided to begin a strike on March 19 and boycott British goods, if the agitation for the expulsion of the Turks from Constantinople did not come to an end in England.