The Great Partition Page 11

  4

  The Collapse of Trust

  The streets of Calcutta were eerily empty on the morning of 16 August 1946. The Muslim League provincial government had called a public holiday to mark Direct Action day. Three days later at least 4,000 of Calcutta's residents lay dead and over 10,000 were injured. The streets were deserted once again. Now the scene was one of carnage, buildings reduced to rubble, rubbish uncollected from the streets, telephone and power lines severed. Schools, courts, mills and shops stayed closed. A British official groped for an analogy, describing the landscape as a cross between the worst of London air raids and the Great Plague.1 In the intervening days, the worst riots between Hindus and Muslims ever remembered in India broke out. What had once been violent, but almost theatrical, encounters between politicised militias and activists, had burst their limits and had become targeted attacks on innocent civilians, including women, children and the elderly.

  Although there had been riots in Calcutta in the past, the violence of August 1946 was distinctive in its scale and intensity. Vastly different social groups and sections of the city amassed along religious lines. Jinnah's call for a day of direct action on which a complete hartal would be utilised to demonstrate support for Pakistan undoubtedly triggered the violence. Jinnah ratcheted up the oratory, speaking of Congress as a ‘Fascist Grand Council’. The day of direct action was clearly a strategic manoeuvre. Jinnah needed to strengthen his own hand of cards in the unfolding dispute over the membership of the interim government which was taking place in New Delhi, and to show just how ardent the demand for Muslim representation really was. Jinnah called on his followers ‘to conduct themselves peacefully and in a disciplined manner’ although his own usually precise and legalistic prose was vague enough to allow for violent reinterpretation.2

  A few days before Direct Action day, the Calcutta district League set out its own plans; there would be a complete strike of Muslim workers in shops and factories, then numerous processions accompanied by musical bands and drums would converge from all over greater Calcutta – from Howrah, Hooghly, Matiaburz and elsewhere – ending in a mass rally. Leaguers were told to go out to the mosques, where they should tell people about the plans, hand out pamphlets and say special prayers for ‘the freedom of Muslim India, the Islamic world and the peoples of India and the East in general’. Older networks of mullahs, mosques and pirs were put to work, to spread the call for direct action in Bengal.

  On the morning of 16 August League supporters opened their newspapers to find large printed advertisements inside them:

  Today is Direct Action Day

  Today Muslims of India dedicate their lives and all they possess to the cause of freedom

  Today let every Muslim swear in the name of Allah to resist aggression

  Direct action is now their only course

  Because they offered peace but peace was spurned

  They honoured their word but they were betrayed

  They claimed Liberty but were offered Thraldom

  Now Might alone can secure their Right3

  What ‘direct action’ meant, though, was wide open to speculation and distortion. During the build-up, handbills and fly posters using religious language urged Muslims to act and linked the earliest Muslims with the contemporary situation, announcing that, ‘In this holy month of Ramzan, Mecca was conquered from the infidels and in this month again a Jehad for the establishment of Pakistan has been declared.’ 4 This kind of Islamic populism drew on older myths and stories, reworking history and compressing time. The Mayor of Calcutta himself commanded: ‘We Muslims have had the crown and have ruled. Do not lose heart, be ready and take swords. Oh Kafir! Your doom is not far and the greater massacre will come.’5

  On the morning of the 16th, thousands of Muslims, many of them armed with lathis and brickbats, processed to a mammoth meeting at the Ochterlony Monument in Calcutta to hear speeches made by Husseyn Suhrawardy, the Provincial League Chief Minister, who, if he did not explicitly incite violence, certainly gave the crowds the impression that they could act with impunity, that neither the police nor the military would be called out and that the ministry would turn a blind eye to any action that they unleashed in the city. Whether he anticipated the carnage that followed is a different matter, and whether the Calcutta riots were a product of questionable political naïvety or a calculated pogrom is still a moot point.

  Eyewitness accounts of what took place in the aftermath of the dispersal of the mass meeting are chilling. Jugal Chandra Ghosh was running an akhara at the time, a gymnasium which also served to drill squads of young men. He later admitted his own role in organising retaliation on the streets of Calcutta, remembering ‘a place where four trucks were standing, all with dead bodies, at least three feet high; like molasses in sacks, they were stacked on the trucks, and blood and brain was oozing out … the whole sight of it, it had a tremendous effect on me.’6 It was no longer warring political groups who were involved in the battle over India's future. Ordinary people going about their daily business were targeted, from tea-shop owners and rickshaw drivers to stallholders who had been dragged out, beaten and burned or had their property looted. Hindu-owned shops and homes were looted and smashed by those in cahoots with League activists. In Calcutta, people were outraged not just by the events themselves, but also by the way in which political leaders, especially Suhrawardy, failed to deploy the military and police quickly. A definite impression was gaining ground that the state's resources had been exploited by the murderers with the League's blessing; rioters used state-owned trucks and had mysteriously accessed extra petrol coupons.

  ‘People showed signs of being intoxicated, whether with alcohol or with enthusiasm,’ remembered Syed Nazimuddin Hashim, a student at Presidency College at the time, and in this strange, nationalistic euphoria Leaguers went off as if into battle. Huge portraits of Jinnah riding on a white horse and brandishing a scimitar were carried through the city.7 The involvement of politicians granted the violence legitimacy in the eyes of the rioters who believed that they fought for ill-formed and simplistic notions of ‘freedom’ ‘space’ and ‘history’ which hardly tallied with demanding the territorial nation state that came into being.

  There were undoubtedly well-prepared Hindu militias ready for the moment, too. On both sides, the violence was anticipated – at least a week prior to the riot inhabitants of bustees were sharpening daggers and making weapons from railings uprooted from public parks, and political leaders along with local hard men instigated and carried out much of the violence. Members of Hindu militia organisations – ranging from more professionalised volunteer bands such as the Bharat Sevashram Sangha to local football and gymnasium club members – were equally prepared to fight.

  That autumn, Gopal ‘Patha’ Mukherjee – Gopal the goat – was stirred to action. He had acquired his nickname because his family ran a meat shop in Calcutta. Like several of the major gang leaders in Calcutta, he had a background in the wrestling pits and gymnasiums of the city where he had built up a reputation for toughness and daring on the streets. Young men looked up to him and they called him other nicknames too: ‘brave’ and ‘strongarm’. The local police knew who he was, and probably kept a watchful eye on him. Once the riots started, Gopal was more than ready for them. He could summon at least a few hundred men, perhaps more. ‘It was a very critical time for the country,’ Gopal remembered: ‘we thought if the whole area became Pakistan, there would be more torture and repression. So I called all my boys together and said it was time to retaliate.’ He considered it his patriotic duty. ‘Why should we kill an ordinary rickshawwallah or hawker, they were not part of the politics … basically people who attacked us … we fought them and killed them … we prepared some country bombs, we'd also secured some grenades from the army … to camouflage myself … I grew a beard and long hair.’ This was preparation for war in the name of nationalism.

  The links between local strongmen and politicians were blatant and well remembered by
one of the perpetrators. ‘I had a club, an akhara,’ he says. ‘I was a wrestler, and I trained my boys, and they carried out my instructions. There was this Congress Party leader. He took me round Calcutta in his jeep. I saw many dead bodies, Hindu dead bodies. I told him, “Yes, there will be retaliation”.’8 As one student at the time recalled on College Street there were lots of small Muslim booksellers: ‘when we went there … we saw dead bodies piled up on both sides, men, women, children, and all the books on the road, burnt, gutted …’9 Rioters, as always, sought political legitimacy wherever they could find it, imagining blessings from omniscient national leaders and seeking the green light to kill from members of local party hierarchies.

  The political purposes of the riots are not in doubt. The Calcutta killings reinforced, in a graphic way, the idea that Hindus and Muslims were incompatible, and planted this seed in the minds of British and Indian policy-makers. Violence and injustice were not unfamiliar in the largest Indian city where unemployed mill-hands suffered the stagnation of the post-war slump, and squalor and overcrowding badly affected a city still reeling from devastating famine. This level of violence was something entirely new, however, in a metropolis which also had a strong tradition of regional patriotism and coalition governance and where robust trade unions and anti-imperial organisations cut across religious lines.

  Intense feelings had been aroused around the notions of freedom and oppression, independence and tyranny but nobody had come any closer to envisaging the final shape of a settlement, or spelt out emphatically what either swaraj or Pakistan would mean to the Indian people in reality. At the grassroots, then, these ideas of Pakistan and swaraj could both be glossed with a different set of dreams and priorities: euphoria, millenarianism, the idea of a freedom, which would not only deliver a territorial state to govern but also open the door to a new kind of world order. Many terms used by the imperialists and the colonised were lost in translation; British ‘Raj’, used in Indian languages to mean ‘rule’ or ‘kingdom’, was to be replaced, in the rendering of different Congressmen with swaraj (self-rule), Hindu raj (the rule of Hindus), Ram-rajya (the regime of the god Lord Ram), gram raj (village rule) or kisan mazdoor raj (peasant and worker autonomy). The various terms available for ‘state’ in Hindustani at the time – raj, sarkar, hukumat, riyasat, and mulk – carried different connotations to the British reading of the word and similarly clouded the possibilities of what form Independence could take.10 As one member of the public, identifying himself only as ‘V.K.J.’, wrote to a leading newspaper, ‘The thinking public have different visions of future India. The idea of Rama Rajya is one such vision which is sponsored by Mahatma Gandhi. The other day one of your readers proposed Dharma Rajya and I offer another conception of the future state of India … Kalyana Raj … in which the future head of state will be an elected president and not a hereditary king.’11 People inevitably filled in gaps in their understanding with their own experiences of oppression, their own hopes and expectations.

  Pakistan, then, meant myriad things to different people. The call for Pakistan could be equated with all manner of ambiguous hopes and dreams. Conversely, for many of those who supported the Congress, Pakistan was perceived as a total and sweeping threat which risked shattering the whole of Mother India, rather than as a question of territorial self-determination in a specific part of the subcontinent. It was feared that Pakistan, if granted, would mean alien rule, even for those who resided in Hindu ‘majority’ provinces as hard-hitting editorials in Hindi newspapers reflected. In one North Indian Hindi newspaper during the late 1940s ‘Pakistan was understood as an all-encompassing catastrophe about to befall India’ and as a ‘death-wish’.12 Allowing Pakistan to be created was akin to dismantling the promise of a free India altogether, and risked opening the floodgates to further national disintegration and secessionist movements. As a commentary in the paper Vartman put it during the pre-Partition debate, Saumya Gupta notes, ‘Giving in to the Pakistan demand would only lead to endless partitions. We will not be able to sit peacefully. … All minorities would ask for the right to self-determination. How would we then stop them? Even women … would one day demand a separate Jananistan [land for women].’13 By the late 1940s, ‘Partition’ and ‘Pakistan’ had meanings far in excess of paring off two rather small and poorly industrialised corners of the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan had come to signify anti-freedom for many non-Muslims and a utopian future for many Muslims, and political propaganda nourished such ideas.

  The Calcutta killings marked – and continue to mark – a psychic break between many South Asians and the idea of Pakistan. Neutrality or political indifference was fast becoming an unrealistic and untenable option in the face of this activity and the killings hardened the nationalist lines as other, older and overlapping ideas about identity were stripped back to more simplistic badges of allegiance to either the ‘Hindu’ or the ‘Muslim’ cause. Whereas in the previous months these allegiances, when they had existed, had been along party lines they now reworked themselves and became more sinisterly along religious lines.

  Calcutta also marks a watershed. It was followed by the first major series of Partition massacres that spanned the northern flank of the subcontinent and in which, again, both Muslims and Hindus suffered. On 15 October 1946, only weeks after the Calcutta riots, and as the city was still returning to normality, workers in the Bengal Congress Office received a shocking telegram from their colleagues in the East Bengali district of Noakhali nearly 200 miles away:

  HOUSES BURNT ON MASS SCALE HUNDREDS BURNT TO DEATH HUNDREDS KILLED OTHERWISE LARGE NUMBER HINDU GIRLS FORCIBLY MARRIED TO MOSLEMS AND ABDUCTED ALL HINDU TEMPLES AND IMAGES DESECRATED HELPLESS REFUGEES COMING TO TIPPERA DISTRICT GOLAM SARWAR LEADER INCITING MOSLEMS TO EXTERMINATE HINDUS FROM NOAKHALI …14

  The telegram was a call for help and the Congress workers dispatched a delegation to investigate immediately. But by this time it was too late. A programme of well-planned ethnic cleansing had been augmented in Noakhali and its neighbouring district of Tippera and perhaps five thousand people had perished. In addition there had been public conversion ceremonies to Islam where Hindus were forced to consume beef, cows were sacrificed in public spaces, shops were looted, temples and idols desecrated. As the historian Suranjan Das has suggested, ‘The fact that 1800 troops, 600 armed police, 130 unarmed police, and Royal Air Force Planes had to be mobilized indicates the magnitude of the crisis.’15 Much of rural Noakhali, which is in present-day Bangladesh, is a watery area of paddy fields intersected by lakes and canals connected by bamboo bridges. It is a very different place to Calcutta and the way in which violence occurred in this quiet and poor backwater was especially frightening. There were old grievances among poor Muslim peasants against the Hindus who tended to be more prosperous landowners and dominated trade in the region but the main cause of the violence was a systematic and political pogrom organised by one man, Golam Sarwar, an elected politician and his henchmen, some of whom came from outside the region and were former military men or members of the Muslim League National Guard. They primed local Muslims through incendiary speeches and deliberate provocation, telling terrible tales of atrocities in Calcutta and meshing this with a millenarian command that the world was coming to an end and that all non-Muslims should be converted.

  The violence in Noakhali and Tippera was defined by clear strategic organisation (roads in and out of the almost inaccessible region were cordoned off), systematic destruction of Hindu-owned property, temples and homes, and mass killings. This marks the terrible beginnings of an era when women became the repositories of national identities and their bodies were used to demarcate possession of land and space. Religious ‘conversions’ which ranged from perfunctory recitations of the Kalma to fully-fledged conversion processes involving regular prayer, re-education programmes and ritualised beef-eating, were frequently followed up by the rape of women. The bodies of ‘the other’ were to be completely controlled, both figuratively and literally, as in P
unjab the following year, when mass violence against women became commonplace. ‘All our efforts in Noakhali came to naught,’ lamented one peace worker. ‘It broke our hearts. If the land was to be divided, then who belonged to whom and where? Who would listen to our words of unity and peaceful cohabitation?'16

  Gandhi arrived in Noakhali on 6 November and remained in Bengal until March the following year, far detached from the political machinations in Delhi. His train was fitted with a special microphone; pulling up at small stations along the way, he would preach peace to as many people as possible. Gandhi had to practise negotiating the rickety bridges which linked together the district and went walking for long days at a time, sometimes barefoot, with his band of workers, holding prayer meetings in villages, consoling victims, trying to instil the spirit of unity. Just to catch a glimpse of Gandhi was a privilege; children and young men clambered on to the roofs of trains and women lined his route with palms clasped together in respectful greeting. Others looked on silently and inquisitively. ‘In the beginning there was some resistance,’ remembered a journalist and peace worker, Sailen Chatterjee, who accompanied Gandhi during his stay: ‘they were not coming to his prayer meeting, they [Muslims] were not coming to meet him … slowly they began to realise here is a man who is not that type of Hindu or anything, so they began to come …’ Indeed, it was the most taxing and dispiriting mission Gandhi had ever undertaken. His own life was at risk and he had an armed police guard at times, despite his resistance to the idea. His frustration and unhappiness was clear. ‘Oldest friendships have snapped,’ he wrote in one report. ‘Truth and ahimsa by which I swear and which have, to my knowledge, sustained me for sixty years, seem to fail to show the attributes I have ascribed to them.’ A fellow companion, Nirmal Kumar Bose, wrote later of hearing the Mahatma mutter to himself, ‘Main kya karun?’ or ‘What can I do?’17