These dark realities with all their implications were not lost on Gandhi. The civil war and consequent partition of British India into the separate states of India and Pakistan was the worst period of Gandhi’s life. He took partition as a verdict of failure: not that nonviolence had failed but that he had fallen short in his practice of it. Yet it was then, when this verdict seemed so clear, that he proceeded to demonstrate for one last time the power of satyagraha and the true meaning of swaraj. This chapter tries to tell that story as it happened during those months in Calcutta because at no other time was nonviolent power more effective in action.
Calcutta, 1946–47: In the Crucible of Communal Conflict
In May 1947, after nine months of unprecedented Hindu-Muslim civil war had ravaged Calcutta, Sir Frederick Burrows, Governor of Bengal, observed that this great city had become a tragic microcosm of the nation: “The problem of communal [religious] strife which is vexing the whole of India can be studied in an intensified and concentrated manner in this focal city.” Then The Statesman, Calcutta’s leading newspaper, commented on Burrows’s remark. In an editorial of despair more than of indignation, it eloquently voiced the city’s agony:
Calcutta, once the most lively if never the most comfortable city of India, is becoming almost unbearable to its inhabitants. Under the blight of communalism, it is from dusk onwards a city of the dead. Even by day, life is at a low ebb…. Shadowed by past calamity, not daring to turn their eyes from the morbid present to a future without hope, [its citizens] drag out meaningless lives, thankful only from day to day that these are still safe from the goonda [thug] and the housebreaker. They ask themselves if such terrible conditions are to be permanent and find no answer. If Calcutta passes two “quiet” days in succession, hope revives to fall again as the third day brings news of fresh outrages.3
In such an atmosphere of unquiet desperation all of Calcutta had acquiesced by mid-1947. Only six months before, The Statesman, long proud of its independent critical stance and crusading spirit, was alive with attacks on the government of Bengal and exhortations to the citizenry. But these had been gradually replaced by the standard front-page entry: “A Government Press Note reports that the number of casualties as a result of yesterday’s communal disturbances in Calcutta were…” “The Terror,” as it was commonly called, lasted more than a year, from August 1946 until September 1947. Two factors determined its character and fostered its growth: religious or “communal” violence and political extremism. Religious conflict, especially between Hindus and Muslims, had long existed in Calcutta as throughout much of India, but now partition was imminent and political extremism gained its head. When these forces coalesced Calcutta’s atmosphere was radically transformed; together they wrought “the transference of this dread social phenomenon [of communal violence] into another dimension.”4
In a thorough analysis of the continuing nature of communal violence in India, Suranjan Das observes: “What, however, most clearly distinguishes the 1946 violence from earlier outbreaks was its highly organized nature and direct links with institutional politics. The leadership for both Hindus and Muslims now came from established political parties: Muslim League for the Muslims and Hindu Mahasabha and sections within the Congress for the Hindus.”5 Hindu political extremism had mixed with religious symbolism in India since the early twentieth century, as noted above in the writings of Aurobindo Ghose. But historical events had now taken a drastically new turn: Britain would soon transfer power not to one but two nations. The plan for Pakistan became at this moment the new factor in the power equation. Hindu-Muslim conflict escalated dramatically as Calcutta plunged into intense party rivalry. As Das observed, both Hindu and Muslim extremists competed in this struggle. The virulent quality of their propaganda is represented in this sample from a Muslim League pamphlet of August 1946:
“The Bombay resolution of the All-India Muslim League has been broadcast. The call to revolt [for the creation of Pakistan] comes to us from the nation of heroes … God has granted to the Muslims in the month of Ramzan what they have been clamoring for. The day for an open fight which is the greatest desire of the Muslim nation has arrived. Come, those who want to rise to heaven. Come those who are simple, wanting in peace of mind and who are in distress. Those who are thieves, goondas, those without the strength of character and those who do not say their prayers—all come. The shining gates of heaven have been opened for you. Let us enter in thousands. Let us all cry out victory to Pakistan, victory to the Muslim nation and victory to the army which has declared a Jehad.
Another leaflet distributed at this time in Calcutta urged the Muslim minority to “Be ready and take your swords…. Your doom is not far and the general massacre will come. We shall show our glory with swords in hands and will have a special victory.”6
“When the Ganges is in flood,” Gandhi remarked in May 1947, “the water is turbid. The dirt comes to the surface.”7 The troubled waters of Calcutta began to swell in November 1945, and nine months later the dirt did indeed come to the surface. The November riots in Calcutta were not communal in nature; rather, they signalled how mob violence had entered political demonstrations, and the subsequent effect that this would have on the city. On Tuesday, November 21, the Indian National Army officers’ trial had been resumed in Delhi. A procession of 500 students demonstrated in Calcutta, responding to an appeal from their political leaders, to observe this as “I.N.A. Day.” The procession entered a prohibited area, clashed with the police, and a student was killed. Suddenly, without warning, the situation was transformed and that Wednesday “mob violence swept the city.” At the same time, another feature of future patterns appeared: a municipal strike “put the city into chaos.” The Statesman described it as “The Paralyzed City”:
Dazed citizens of Calcutta who up to Wednesday morning were going quietly about their business have lately lived through a fantastic nightmare…. They seek to penetrate the cloud of rumor to find out what is happening and why and what prospects there are of an end of this anarchic confusion which has already led to so much tragedy…. Lives have been lost, hatred created, business suspended, movement interfered with and discomfort caused to everybody in circumstances which are still largely obscure.8
The phrases used here are to recur again and again until finally abandoned the following year as cliches: “paralyzed city,” “dazed citizens,” “fantastic nightmare,” “anarchic confusion,” “lives lost,” “hatred created,” “so much tragedy.” Surrounding all this is an air of bewilderment, a search for causes and reasons in the midst of “circumstances which are still obscure.” Sir Francis Tuker later wrote that “There was fear about, and fear in India means trouble.”9 The fear was there in November, and its full meaning became clear in the next year. Indeed, this element of fear, beginning with uneasy anxieties over the destructiveness of anarchy, and growing by the following summer into an endemic wave of terror, characterizes above all else the phenomenon of religious conflict in Calcutta. As we shall see, it was precisely the nature and force of this fear that Gandhi understood, confronted, and overcame.
February 1946 set the pattern of disturbances for the new year. Increased Hindu-Muslim tension had been noted by General Tuker, head of the eastern command. Large-scale rioting, though, was not anticipated. On Monday, February 11, students demonstrated as they had in November, in protest against the Indian National Army trials. This time the protest was significantly different: an ex-Muslim officer of the I.N.A. had been court-martialled, and given seven years imprisonment. The demonstrators were therefore mostly Muslim, protesting against the severity of the punishment; Hindu officers, they added, had recently escaped with much lighter sentences.10 All Muslim shops in Calcutta were closed, and 2,000 Muslims, carrying League flags, demonstrated. Once again, the demonstrations quickly deteriorated into “mob violence,” with more casualties and over a longer period than the November riots.11 “It is an awful warning,” The Statesman lamented, “but to more than established authori
ty.”12
Leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League interpreted this warning in different ways. Congressmen like Maulana Azad, Sarat Chandra Bose, and Surendra Mohan Ghosh vied with one another in issuing blanket condemnations of the riots. For them it showed only that “the goonda and irresponsible elements of this city have gained the upper hand.” H. S. Suhrawardy, however, then a prominent Muslim Leaguer in Bengal and soon to become its chief minister, had taken an active part in the initial demonstrations and enthused over them. Although he criticized the violence, for him the riot “was a warning that, once the Muslim public was aroused, it would need all the forces of Government to restrain it…. The reason for our success is the sincerity of purpose behind all this agitation.”13 Suhrawardy’s reaction forebode ill for the next of Calcutta’s communal riots, when the responsibility was to fall on him, as chief minister, for maintaining law and order.14
For Sir Francis Tuker, the February riots had a special significance: they “set a match to the fuse which detonated the charges with such fearful violence months later not only in Calcutta and Eastern Bengal, but far a field in Bihar and into the United Provinces at Garhmukteswar and finally into the Punjab.”15 With hindsight, it is easy to plot such a chain of events. Even without hindsight, though, the ominous aspects of the riots were clear to perceptive observers like R. G. Casey who noted their significance shortly after the expiration of his term of office as Governor of Bengal in February.16 Casey’s successor, Sir Frederick Burrows, arrived in the wake of the February riots to assume an “onerous appointment,” (in Tuker’s view) “that we would none of us have touched with the proverbial bargepole, and [we] admired the sense of public duty that brought him from gentle England to turbulent Bengal.”17 For a time, it seemed that Burrows had imposed some of this gentleness on the turbulence around him. India, particularly Bombay and Ahmedabad, experienced rioting but Calcutta was relatively calm.
A national political crisis now emerged, though, which was to affect Calcutta directly. At the end of July, the council of the All-India Muslim League met in Bombay and revoked their earlier acceptance of the cabinet mission plan. “The time has now come,” the council resolved, “for the Muslim nation to resort to direct action to achieve Pakistan…. The Council calls upon the Muslim nation to stand to a man behind their sole representative, the All-India Muslim League, and be ready for every sacrifice.”18 Sacrifices were indeed to be made. August 16 was subsequently fixed by the council for the observance of “Direct Action Day” throughout India. Muslims were urged to stage “a hartal on that day, to hold public meetings and other demonstrations.” Another “Day” was thus designated for political demonstrations; but this day India was not soon to forget. It became a defining moment of political extremism.
While the League was making decisions in Bombay that would, in less than three weeks’ time, transform Calcutta, Bengal was preoccupied with quite another matter. On the same day (July 29) that the direct action resolution had been passed, a one-day general strike of transport, industrial, and government employees “completely paralyzed” Calcutta. The general strike coincided with the postal strike of 16,000 employees that had been in progress throughout Bengal since July 21. This was in turn followed by still another strike, of the Imperial Bank employees, which further belabored the city.19 The strike of the previous November had coincided with the riots; now larger strikes preceded far greater rioting. This is not surprising, since the effect of each of these strikes was to quicken the forces of unrest and disorder in the city.
Once the postal strike was resolved, on August 7, Calcutta could turn again to the national scene, which the Congress now dominated. By August 14, Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the Congress party, had accepted the Viceroy’s invitation to form an interim government. Nehru had written to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, head of the Muslim League, asking for his cooperation. The latter replied that “the situation remains as it was and we are where we were.” After meeting with Nehru in Bombay on August 15, Jinnah told the press, “There will be no more meetings between me and Pandit Nehru.”20 The stage was thus set for August 16: Jinnah adamantly pledged to direct action, Nehru engrossed in the formation of his interim government, with Lord Wavell, the Viceroy, hoping in vain for a Congress-League reconciliation. And Gandhi, in Sevagram, was pondering, “I have never had the chance to test my nonviolence in the face of communal riots…the chance will still come to me.”21
Gandhi’s remark might be thought prophetic, and in a general sense it was because no one was more sensitive than he to the troubles ahead. The remark was not a prophecy, though, of what would happen in Calcutta that August. No Indian political leader foresaw that event. Indeed, most of them do not appear to have had the slightest inkling of the scale on which the Calcutta riots would occur. The Indian press was a shade more foresighted. Among the major English-language papers, mild warnings of the consequences of direct action appeared in The Times of India and The Statesman; and The Leader singled out Calcutta, on the day before the tragedy, as the most likely trouble spot, although it hardly foresaw the scale or intensity of the rioting.22 One insight into the peculiar context of the political situation in Calcutta occurred in The Times of India on August 7. After observing that the Congress had tended to dismiss the very real dangers of direct action, the writer wondered whether the Muslim League ministries, in Bengal and Sind, would resign, since the direct action would be aimed at them. If they did not resign, “quite an interesting situation will have been created by Leaguers breaking the law in Sind and Bengal, where the League may be in charge of the maintenance of law.”23 The remark did anticipate the dilemma the Muslim League ministry in Bengal would face.
H. S. Suhrawardy, as chief minister of Bengal, attempted (like the Muslim League minister in Sind) to overcome this dilemma by declaring August 16 a public holiday. This, Suhrawardy declared, would “minimize chances of conflict,” and was preferable to “stopping business by means of stone-throwing, intimidation, and dragging people out of buses and cars and burning the vehicles.”24 The Congress opposition immediately pounced on this remark as a confession of the government’s inability to maintain order, or much worse (from the Congress point of view) the use of government to further narrow party ends. It is likely that the chief minister thought that the government could walk the tightrope by having peaceful demonstrations on behalf of the Muslim League which would not degenerate into uncontrollable rioting. This was a major blunder. What is certain, however, is that neither the government nor the opposition nor the press anticipated the magnitude of the tragedy.
While the Congress did attack Suhrawardy and The Leader reinforced this censure on the day before the riots, both concentrated their criticism on the chief minister’s unwarranted use of government power to achieve party aims. Neither focused its criticism on what was later to form the crux of the indictment, Suhrawardy’s failure to take adequate preventive measures. This was simply because neither the opposition nor the press had guessed what “adequate” might involve. The statement issued by the government of Bengal on the riots, six months after their occurrence, cannot be gainsaid: “What was not foreseen and what took everybody by surprise including the participants was the intensity of the hatred let loose and the savagery with which both sides killed.”25
The chief minister, the governor, and the police should have taken stronger precautions at the beginning and then acted with more dispatch as the disturbances gained ground. Suhrawardy in particular was appallingly negligent, perhaps in the early stage of the killing even deliberately provocative. Yet, it is hardly realistic to place all the blame on the government, or on any single party to the conflict. Seen in this light, two points may initially be made on the killing: first, it was precisely the total unexpectedness of the calamity that produced its aftermath of shock, terror, and vengeance. Second, the search for scapegoats that followed only obfuscated (given the political atmosphere of the time) the real lessons that might have been grasped at once. In this connection, o
ne of the most constructive features of Gandhi’s approach was his insistence that everyone was in some measure responsible for the continuing violence, and therefore every citizen had it in his power to exercise some degree of control over it. Unfortunately, another year would pass before Calcutta came to appreciate this basic truth.
The Great Calcutta Killing (as it came to be called) began on the morning of August 16, 1946 and lasted until August 20. Approximately 4,000 people were killed and 11,000 injured on a scale of urban violence that was wholly unprecedented. One survivor recalled the tragedy twenty years later: “It was a moment of terror that I never imagined could happen here. I saw the city I loved, the neighbors I trusted, desecrate themselves in a terrible fury unknown before in Calcutta. Those few days of bloodshed proved to me that swaraj had to be much more difficult and distant than we thought.”26 Another observer reported that “For four terrible days this massacre and brutality continued unabated. During this time the life of the city was completely paralysed,” including all medical facilities.27
The tragedy of the killing continued after the massacre with India’s response to it, especially among the politicians. Nehru, consumed with the political demands of forming an interim government, was asked by the press (on early reports of the riots) about how Calcutta’s violence would affect his plans. He replied, “Our programme will certainly not be upset because a few persons misbehave in Calcutta.”28 Once the scale of this “misbehavior” struck the Congress, though, no time was lost in placing the responsibility “for all that has happened” on the Muslim League ministry.29
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