The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  In Sindh, where the total electorate was less than one million, the League’s 28 seats were equal to those of the Sindh Assembly Coalition Party, comprising 21 Congress lawmakers and 7 dissident Leaguers and Nationalist Muslims, in a chamber of 60, with the remainder being neutral. As “a great sympathizer of Muslims and supporter of the Pakistan cause”—in the words of his secretary, Naseer Ahmad Faruqi9—Governor Sir Francis Mudie invited the League leader Sir Ghulam Hussain Hida­yatullah to form a ministry. Sir Francis would later be appointed governor of West Punjab by Pakistan’s governor-general Jinnah.

  But in Punjab Maulana Azad cobbled together a coalition of the Congress (51 seats), the Akali Party of Sikhs (23 seats), and a much reduced Unionist Party (20 seats) under the leadership of Sir Khizr Hayat Tiwana.10 By depriving the largest group, the League (73 seats), of power, Azad struck a hard blow at Jinnah’s conceit. Punjab was at the core of the Muslim League leader’s demand for Pakistan in the northwestern region. He found the ignominy of defeat by his bête noire hard to stomach.

  The provincial legislatures then elected members to the 300-strong Constituent Assembly in Delhi. The Congress won 150 seats, and the League 79 Muslim places.11 The latest elections underscored the political dominance of the Congress and the League.

  Attlee dispatched a team of three cabinet ministers, led by the seventy-four-year-old Lord Pethick-Lawrence, secretary of state for India, to Delhi on March 22. His colleagues were Sir Stafford Cripps and Albert Victor Alexander. They and Viceroy Archibald Wavell became the quartet charged with finding a formula to transfer Britain’s imperial power to Indian representatives.

  The British Quartet’s Intractable Task

  Of the three wise men from London, only Cripps had a full grasp of the complexities of the Indian political scene.

  The quartet’s talks with Congress and League leaders proved sterile. So on May 16 the cabinet mission, in consultation with Wavell, issued its own Constitutional Award. It rejected Pakistan, as demanded by the League, as well as a smaller version of it. In the League’s blueprint, the two parts of Pakistan lay a thousand miles apart, with its western wing being 37 percent non-Muslim and the eastern 48 percent. That would have left the communal minority problem unresolved. The smaller Pakistan, stated the British cabinet ministers, would involve partitioning Assam, Bengal, and Punjab, a step that, in their opinion, “would be contrary to the wishes of a very large percentage of these provinces.” Bengal and Punjab, they argued, “each had its own language and a long history and tradition.”12

  The Constitutional Award therefore envisaged a united India, including the princely states, with a federal government in charge of defense, foreign affairs, and communications; a federal parliament, which could pass a major law of racial or religious nature only if a majority of Hindu or Muslim members backed it; and provincial governments with wide powers. A constituent assembly, elected by existing provincial legislatures and charged with drafting a constitution resting on these principles, would convene in Delhi briefly and then divide into three sections. Section A would be Hindu majority, and Sections B and C would comprise the Muslim-majority northwestern region and Bengal-Assam respectively. The aim would be to frame a constitution for three subfederations into which federal, independent India was to be divided.13

  In order to satisfy the two contending parties—the Congress and the League—the cabinet mission’s award included two contradictory clauses. Paragraph 15 stated that “provinces should be free to form groups with executives and legislatures.” But Paragraph 19 said that representatives from the groups “shall proceed to settle provincial constitutions” and “shall also decide whether any group constitution shall be set up for those provinces.”14

  On June 6 Jinnah and the League accepted the Constitutional Award, claiming that the founding of Pakistan was “inherent” in the “compulsory grouping,” adding that by implication this document gave a Muslim group “the opportunity and the right of secession.”

  Congress leaders were of two minds. With the Congress presidency passing from Maulana Azad to Jawaharlal Nehru, a Hindu, in early May 1946, Viceroy Wavell saw an opportunity to satisfy Jinnah’s demand that the League should have the monopoly over nominating Muslim representatives to the interim cabinet the viceroy wished to form. On June 16, Wavell announced that he was inviting Jinnah and four of his party colleagues; Nehru and five other Hindu Congress leaders, including one Untouchable; and a Sikh, a Christian, and a Parsi to form the interim government. If the League or the Congress spurned his offer, then he intended to appoint the new cabinet, which, in his view, would be as representative as was possible of those willing to accept the May 16 constitutional statement.

  Thus pressed, on June 25 Congress leaders accepted the Constitutional Award, while stressing that Paragraph 15 gave provinces the option to stay out of either of the “Pakistan” groups. But they turned down Wavell’s invitation to join the proposed interim government. (The unstated reason was that it deprived them of nominating a Muslim Congressman as a cabinet minister.) They calculated that it would be disastrous for Wavell to appoint a cabinet led by Jinnah. They proved right. Wavell withdrew his offer of June 16, thus depriving Jinnah of his lifelong ambition to be the highest representative of united India.

  Jinnah felt cheated. He savaged the viceroy for his betrayal, Pethick-Lawrence and Cripps for their treacherous behavior, and Congress leaders for their dishonesty. What the CWC had done in reality was to win their right to be represented in the viceroy’s proposed provisional cabinet and then turn down the chance to exercise it. They had made a fiendishly clever move that stopped Jinnah in his tracks.

  Flushed by the crushing of Jinnah’s fondest dream and the endorsement of the CWC’s decision by 204 to 51 votes at the AICC session in Bombay on July 7, an overconfident Nehru overplayed his hand at the subsequent press conference. He explained that his party had agreed only to participate in the Constituent Assembly and that once convened, the Assembly would have the power to change the Constitutional Award’s provisions, if it so wished and that the grouping scheme would most likely not materialize at all.

  Nehru’s indiscreet, aggressive statement finally and irrevocably killed the scenario of a united, independent India. It led Jinnah to withdraw the League’s acceptance of the Constitutional Award. This was the last in a series of three landmark events—all of these wrought by the Congress Party—which culminated in the partition of the subcontinent.

  Jinnah on the Offensive

  At Jinnah’s behest the Muslim League Council meeting in Bombay from July 27 to 29 adopted the path of “Direct Action” to achieve Pakistan. “This day we bid goodbye to constitutional methods,” he declared. “[So far] the British and the Congress held a pistol in their hand, the one of authority and arms and the other of mass struggle and noncooperation. Today we have also forged a pistol and we are in a position to use it.”15

  Summarizing his party’s recent history, Jinnah said that for the sake of fair play, the Muslim League had “sacrificed the full sovereign state of Pakistan at the altar of the Congress for securing the independence of the whole of India” but had been repaid with “defiance and contempt.”16 The Council named August 16 as the Direct Action Day for the achievement of Pakistan. Thus a quarter century after lambasting Gandhi for resorting to extraconstitutional methods, the seventy-five-year-old Jinnah emulated his rival, but without the Mahatma’s stress on nonviolence.

  Gandhi was equivocal about the Constitutional Award. “Let us not be cowardly, but approach our task with courage and confidence,” he told the AICC delegates in Bombay. “Never mind the darkness that fills my mind.”17 His mind filled with a deeper shade of darkness as he noted a sharp rise in Hindu-Muslim alienation. He blamed Jinnah for this in his long interview on July 17 with Louis Fischer, the American journalist who went on to publish two glowing biographies of the Mahatma.

  GANDHI: The Muslims are religious fanatics but fanaticism
cannot be answered with fanaticism. . . . Brilliant Muslims in Congress became disgusted. They did not find the brotherhood of man among the Hindus. They say Islam is the brotherhood of man. As a matter of fact, it is the brotherhood of Muslims. . . . [But] Hindu separatism has played a part in creating the rift between Congress and the League. Jinnah is an evil genius. He believes he is a prophet.

  LF: He is a lawyer.

  GANDHI: You do him an injustice. I give you the testimony of my 18 days of talks with him in [September] 1944. He really looks upon himself as the savior of Islam.

  LF: He pleads a case; he does not preach a cause.

  GANDHI: But I don’t consider him a fraud. He has cast a spell over the Muslim who is [a] simple-minded man.

  LF: Sometimes I think the Muslim-Hindu question is the problem of finding a place for the new Muslim middle class in an underdeveloped India. India is even too underdeveloped to offer a place to the poor. Jinnah won over the middle because he helped it to compete with the other entrenched Hindu middle class. Now he is bridging the chasm between the landlord and peasant. He has done it with Pakistan.

  GANDHI: You are right. But Jinnah has not won the peasant. He is trying to win him.

  LF: Jinnah told me in 1942 you did not want independence. . . . He said you want Hindu rule.

  GANDHI: This is absurd. I am a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Jew, a Parsi. . . . He is not speaking the truth. He is speaking like a pettifogging lawyer. . . . Only a maniac resorts to such charges. . . .

  LF: What did you learn from your 18 days with Jinnah?

  MG: I learned that he was a maniac. A maniac leaves his mania and becomes reasonable at times. I have never been too stubborn. . . . I could not make headway with Jinnah because he is a maniac. . . .

  LF: What is the solution?

  GANDHI: Jinnah has twenty-five years more to work. . . . Jinnah is incorruptible and brave. . . . If Jinnah stays out of the Constituent Assembly the British should be firm and let us work this plan alone. The British must not yield to [a] Hitler.18

  With Jinnah pulling out of both plans of the British Raj, Lord Wavell was left with only one Indian partner: Nehru. He approached the Congress president to reconsider his party’s stance on an interim government. Once he got a nod from Nehru, the viceroy announced on August 12 that he was inviting him to form an interim cabinet. At Nehru’s initiative, Jinnah met him on August 15, on the eve of the League’s Direct Action Day. They failed to reach an agreement. Nehru refused to raise his offer of 5 seats out of 14 to the League with Jinnah demanding 7.

  Nationally, the League leaders were feverishly planning street action on August 16, a Friday.

  A Drama on a Dual Stage, Act I

  With Bengal ruled by the Muslim League’s Suhrawardy, who was chief minister, the Direct Action Day had official backing. On that morning in Calcutta—a city of 4.2 million, three-quarters Hindu—the two-year-old Muslim League National Guard (MNG), the League’s militia, forced Hindu shopkeepers to close their stores in the Muslim majority districts of North Calcutta. The angered Hindus responded by blocking the advance of several small League processions after the Friday congregation prayers toward the commons around Ochterloney Monument in the city center. All the same, between 50,000 and 100,000 Muslims gathered to listen to fiery speeches by League leaders, including Suhrawardy, about achieving Pakistan.

  While heading back home after the rally, fired by the political-religious rhetoric of the speakers, some of the Muslims, armed with iron bars and bamboo sticks, attacked Hindus and ransacked their shops. In the main, the anti-Hindu violence was triggered by the MNG, described by Suhrawardy as soldiers of the envisaged Pakistan. Rioting increased as truckloads of Muslims, armed with brickbats and broken bottles, resorted to looting Hindu stores. In retaliation Hindus and Sikhs hit back with a vengeance. They attacked Muslims on streets and shops and even in their homes. With Suhrawardy refraining from pressing the police to quell the rioting, violence spread quickly.

  Murder, arson, rape, and looting ravaged the city. The bloody mayhem continued for three days and included several massacres, followed by two days of occasional skirmishes. Its end came on August 21, only after Governor Sir John Burrow intervened and deployed five battalions of British troops, backed by four battalions of Indian soldiers, with orders to use live ammunition to restore order.

  The estimated death toll varied between five thousand and ten thousand, with fifteen thousand more suffering injuries. Over one hundred thousand people became homeless. These statistics made it the bloodiest communal riot in India’s history. The murdered victims were often mutilated—a pattern that would be repeated on a much larger scale in Punjab a year later. For the first time in communal riots, there were cases of rape, a feature that would become part of such violence later.

  According to most accounts, the majority of the victims belonged to the Muslim community, which was by and large poor. “Thus, the massacre could be described as the combination of one large pogrom against poor Muslims by Hindu toughs [called goondas in Hindi and Bengali], with one smaller pogrom against poor Hindus by Muslim toughs,” concluded Claude Markovits, a researcher of mass violence, in his 2008 study of the dreadful episode.19 The same conclusion was drawn nearer the time. In his letter to Chakravarti Rajagopalachari on August 21, 1946, Patel wrote: “This [the Calcutta killings] will be a good lesson for the League, because I hear that the proportion of Muslims who have suffered death is much larger.”20 With this horrendous bloodletting and arson, Calcutta lived up to the title “City of Dreadful Night,” as it had been named by the British writer Rudyard Kipling.

  On August 22 the governor of Bengal dismissed the Suhrawardy government and imposed direct rule. Many of the Muslims who fled Calcutta returned to their villages in Muslim-majority East Bengal. This ramped up interreligious tensions in rural Bengal.

  In Delhi the viceroy announced on August 24 that the existing members of his Executive Council had resigned and their successors would be installed on September 2. On that day, a cabinet of twelve ministers—including one Congress and two independent Muslims—was sworn in, with Nehru as vice president of the Executive Council in charge of foreign affairs.21 As foreign minister Nehru said, “India will follow an independent policy [and] keep away from the power politics of the groups aligned one against another.”22 Soon after the United States decided to upgrade its diplomatic mission in Delhi to the ambassadorial level, Nehru named his erstwhile cabinet colleague, Asaf Ali, a Congress lawyer-politician, ambassador to Washington, where he would take up his post in February 1947.

  Meanwhile, Jinnah responded to the inauguration of the interim government by calling on his followers to unfurl black flags as a sign of mourning. He slammed the viceroy for including three Muslims in his cabinet, including Asaf Ali, who lacked the confidence of their coreligionists. His statement triggered communal riots in Bombay and Ahmedabad. This led the viceroy to try to get the Congress and the League to cooperate.

  He was helped by Sir Muhammad Hamidullah Khan, the Nawab (aka Nabob) of Bhopal, a friend of Jinnah as well as Gandhi and who was then based at Panchgani, a hill station a hundred miles from Bombay. With Khan’s intercession, the two titans met in early October. They managed to come up with a compromise. Gandhi conceded that only the League had “the unquestionable right to represent the Muslims of India,” and Jinnah said that the Congress could have “such representatives” in a Congress-League coalition as “it thinks proper.”23

  The five names Jinnah gave Lord Wavell on October 13 included Jogindar Nath Mandal, an Untouchable leader from Bengal. This was his way of getting even with the Congress after it insisted on nominating a Muslim Congressman, Asaf Ali, as a minister. Nehru dropped two independent Muslims and Sarat Chandra Bose (an elder brother of Subash Chandra Bose) from the cabinet and added Jinnah’s five nominees, led by his deputy, Liaquat Ali Khan. The reconstituted cabinet took office on October 25. It included Balde
v Singh, a Sikh, as defense minister.

  By coincidence, October 25 was declared Noakhali Day in the Congress-ruled Bihar by Hindu leaders, many of them affiliated with the Congress Party.

  A Drama on a Dual Stage, Act II

  They were reacting to the news of violence against Hindus in the predominantly Muslim districts of Noakhali and Tippera districts in the waterlogged delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers in East Bengal. Four-fifths of the population in the area was Muslim, whereas most of the agricultural land belonged to Hindu landlords. The religious divide was thus reinforced by gross economic inequity. In light of the recent Great Killings in Calcutta, it was payback for the violence perpetrated against Muslims in the metropolis.

  The rioting started on October 10 in Ramganj after a pro-Pakistan rally and spread to ten other settlements. By the time it ended a week later, the number of Hindus killed was likely at least five hundred (official figure) or as many as five thousand—with sixty thousand made homeless. In Tippera district nearly 9,900 Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam, with many of them paraded in the streets wearing caps inscribed with “Pakistan.” A larger number were converted to Islam in the Noakhali district. Abducted Hindu women were married to Muslims.24

  The rumor spread in the adjoining Bihar that fifty thousand Hindus had been slaughtered in the Noakhali-Tippera area. Bihar, a 90 percent Hindu province, was ruled by Chief Minister Krishna Singh, a Hindu Congress leader. Following the declaration of Noakhali Day on October 25, thousands of Hindus, often led by local Congress figures, marched while shouting, “Blood for blood.” Murder, arson, and pillage rocked four districts of Bihar, including Patna, for more than a week. The victims were Muslim.

  By the time the savagery ended, different estimates of fatalities were published. Congress leaders admitted 2,000. The number mentioned in the British parliament was 5,000. The prestigious Calcutta-based Statesman reported 7,500 to 10,000, with the latter statistic accepted by Gandhi. In contrast, Jinnah came up with the figure of 30,000.25