by Harper, Tim
Ultimately the Cabinet Mission returned to Britain in disarray and Wavell was left to make the best of a bad job. There was no hope of any end to the bitter ‘communal recriminations’ and it seemed unlikely that he could form any stable coalition government in Delhi.3 He was soon confessing to his diary: ‘For the first time in my life, I am beginning to feel the strain badly – not sleeping properly and letting these wretched people worry me.’4 The question of India’s future constitution was shelved while the results of the spring elections were put into effect. In September an Indian constituent assembly was convened and an interim government was formed. Congress dominated the cabinet; the two Muslim League ministers who participated for the time being did so in an atmosphere of mutual distrust. Congress ministers now took charge of all the major departments of state, including intelligence and police. Effectively, Congress became the government of India for internal purposes and Sardar Patel became its home minister. Significantly, he took over the intelligence department.5
THE KILLING BEGINS
In the meantime, a set of events occurred which made it clear that unless the Hindu–Muslim issue was quickly resolved at the constitutional level, there might be little power left to transfer to Indians, as one senior civil servant later put it. Wavell himself believed that a total breakdown of social order was in sight.6 In August, frustrated by the Cabinet Mission’s failure to reconcile Congress to sharing power with the Muslim League, Muslims in Calcutta staged mass political demonstrations against the British which spun out of control and resulted in one of the worst bouts of communal killings in Indian history. As many as 6,000 people may have been murdered and 12,000 injured in the ‘Great Calcutta killings’ and associated atrocities during August, September and October 1946. And day after day, for the next two years, the tally of murders in the city rose steadily. The destitution caused in Bengal by war, famine and the flight of refugees from Burma provided the dry tinder of despair and hatred. In many respects events in Calcutta were simply a continuation of the Second World War by other means. But politicians lit the conflagration. H. S. Suhrawardy, the Bengal chief minister whose lethargy during the 1943 famine had earned him much criticism, was behind the attempt to assert Muslim political influence in the face of Congress’s refusal to compromise. Jinnah also bore a degree of responsibility for triggering what at times seemed more like a civil war than random riots; he called for the ‘Direct Action Day’ in Calcutta on 16 August that set off the killing. Officially, the purpose of this day of action was to ‘end British slavery’, but also, and more ominously, it was intended to ‘fight the contemplated caste-Hindu domination’.7
Political manipulators from on high found a ready audience among ordinary people stirred to hatred of their neighbours by the corrosive effects of repeated crises and unyielding poverty. Gradually during the spring and summer of 1946, agitations in Calcutta against the British and in favour of the Indian National Army had become flash-points of conflict between local bosses allied with the Congress, the Hindu Mahasabha (the main Hindu activist organization) and the Muslim League. The League blamed the Congress for stirring up trouble because it had done less well than the League in Bengal’s elections. The Congress, for its part, staged numerous strikes and attempted to close down bazaars, including Muslim bazaars. In these straitened times, this was deeply resented by Muslim shopkeepers. As the Cabinet Mission packed up and went home, the Muslim-dominated ministry and its local supporters decided to hold their own shutdown and declared a public holiday in the city to mark Jinnah’s Direct Action Day. This measure, with which the British governor, Sir Frederick Burrows, meekly complied, ensured that large numbers of people would be on the streets and that the issue of closing the bazaars and forcibly preventing people from trading would be particularly fraught. It was already a period of heightened religious sensitivity, for Direct Action Day fell in the middle of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. The city was also going to be full of excitable students preparing for the annual Calcutta University examinations.
There was ample evidence of warlike preparation on both sides. In the weeks before 16 August, young members of Sarat Bose’s section of the Congress were constantly marching and drilling, ostensibly in training as crowd-control volunteers for Indian National Army Day, 18 August, when Congress intended to fête INA officers recently released from jail. Muslim youth groups, such as the Muhammadan Sporting Club, were similarly mobilizing. They, like other Muslim activists, were supposedly using Direct Action Day to make the British government think again about the constitution. But the word put around by the local Muslim League politicians spelled out something different. ‘We are in the midst of the rainy season,’ one handbill declared. ‘But this is a month of real Jehad, of God’s Grace and blessings, of spiritual armament and the moral and physical purge of the nation… It was in Ramzan that the permission of Jehad was granted by Allah.’8 Of course, in Islamic theology, jihad referred to the universal spiritual struggle against evil. Physical warfare against unbelievers was no more than ‘lesser jihad’ and could be resorted to only under special conditions. Yet when circulated among the poor and unlettered a document like this could mean only one thing: ‘prepare for war.’ Similarly sinister calls to the ‘anti-fascist forces’ to mobilize against their enemies were issued in mosques after Friday prayers on 15 August throughout Calcutta and also in Hooghly, just across the river. Some pamphlets did away with all pretence at subtlety: ‘Oh, Kafir [unbeliever], your doom is not far and the general massacre will come!’9 The suspicious and hostile Hindu press predictably denounced the prospective demonstration as ‘pro-Pakistan’ and ‘anti-Hindu’.
On the afternoon of Saturday 16 August some 100,000 Muslims converged on the Ochterlony monument in central Calcutta to hear speeches from members of the League and Bengal government ministers. The monument, which commemorated one of the East India Company’s great Kiplingesque empire-builders of the early nineteenth century, had long been the symbolic heart of British Calcutta. As the crowds flocked to it, however, they passed through predominantly Hindu quarters of the city and several of the great bazaars. When local gang-leaders tried to force traders to close their shops, trouble broke out. The League later insisted that the Muslim processions had been ‘sober and disciplined’, led by college students and ‘Muslim girls in blue uniforms’.10 Be that as it may, the atmosphere rapidly became menacing. One observer was Major Sim of Vickers India Co. who managed a shop in the main thoroughfare, Chowringee. Sim saw something that resembled the march of a conquering army into the city, ‘with green hats and flags and every man with a lathi [heavy bamboo cane] – mostly so similar that they must have been bought especially for the occasion, and in bulk’.11 As he watched things suddenly turned vicious. Many observers ascribed this to Hindu thugs hurling bricks down onto the Muslim marchers from the great houses that dominated the city centre. The missiles were plainly intended to maim or kill; people had apparently been stockpiling the bricks for days as a mundane but effective weapon. Then Sim saw a Muslim smash a picture of the Hindu goddess Kali. ‘The crowd turned into wild beasts and tore up and looted and burned the row of little shops beneath us. We saw five people beaten to death with sticks in fifteen yards of road in the main street of the Empire’s second city.’ The police stood by and did nothing, probably, Sim surmised, because the chief minister, Suhrawardy, had told his subordinates not to intervene. Sim himself had a party political purpose in mind in recording these incidents. The recipient of his letter describing them was a Conservative MP, to whom Sim observed: ‘Our good friends in the Labour government are responsible for quite a few dead Indians.’12
At this point the local political leaders lost control. Over the next three days criminals turned the city into a battlefield. The governor told the viceroy that ‘it was a pogrom between two rival gangs of the Calcutta underworld’,13 with the thugs who had been released at the end of the war taking a prominent part. Bazaar toughs and gang-leaders were soon leading raids and counte
r-raids on Hindu and Muslim quarters, murdering whole neighbourhoods of men, women and children. Swords, iron bars and tins of kerosene were the preferred weapons. Sten guns and bombs made from chemical explosives bought or stolen from soldiers over the previous two years also came into their own. ‘The swollen bodies – of young and old, men and women – were lying in heaps, folded in gunny bags in the middle of roads, on lorries, handcarts or floating in canals.’14 Finally prodded into action, the police – a mere 500 of them, half of whom were unarmed – were hopelessly outnumbered. They drove around in their war-surplus jeeps dispersing the crowds. As soon as they had passed, the gangs emerged from the side streets and resumed the burning and killing.
There was a tinge of class hatred to these events.15 The houses of the great Hindu Marwari merchants in the city centre proved an early target; a leading Muslim merchant was found hanging from a lamp post. But hatred of ‘the enemy’ overwhelmed any economic rationale. Women of both religions were murdered and mutilated. Hindu children were executed near mosques in a macabre mimicking of the slaughter of goats for the goddess Kali. A Muslim cleric, Akbar Ali, was attacked in the fashionable Park Circus area and thrown half dead into a sewer. He was one of the lucky ones; nine days later his battered body was fished alive from the Ballygunge sewerage station, almost a mile away.16 Much of the killing showed the hand of trained fighters. The historian Suranjan Das recounts that INA men who had come to Calcutta to celebrate Indian National Army Day on 18 August were prominent in the attacks,17 even though Sarat Bose’s wing of the Congress and the INA leadership had loudly denounced communal hatred. Bose himself backed the rescue efforts of the Indian National Ambulance Corps, newly named the Azad Hind Ambulance Corps in memory of his brother. Other men of arms also took part. Hindu darwans or doorkeepers from Bihar and the United Provinces who had been taken on as guards for business premises fought pitched battles with Muslim toughs. People said that some officials from Suhrawardy’s private office distributed kerosene and knives for the assailants by lorry; others claimed that local politicians directed the arson and murder by megaphone from the housetops. Yet there is plenty of evidence too of the eager participation of ordinary people – petty shopkeepers and artisans – in the attacks. Even the malnourished inhabitants of Calcutta’s huge slums or bustees found the energy to murder each other. By contrast, not a single European or Eurasian in the city was reported injured over these days.
Early on the morning of Sunday 17 August, after the first day’s horrendous events, the governor exerted his authority over Suhra-wardy’s ministry and ordered in the troops. Soldiers of the Green Howards and Yorkshire and Lancashire regiments patrolled the city. Later a division of Nepalese Gurkhas was drafted in, but only one predominantly Indian unit was used for fear of sparking further conflict. By Monday evening 45,000 troops – four British, one Gurkha and one Indian division – were deployed in and around the city. Tanks patrolled the streets.18 Rescue units of soldiers and civilians were deployed to try to help groups of Hindus or Muslims stranded in areas where the rival community was dominant. Often they arrived to find these people with their throats cut or burned alive in their houses. The military instituted ‘Operation St Bernard’ to escort workers in essential services to and from their jobs, while Government House attempted to co-ordinate the rescue of endangered civilians. Arthur Dash, a senior civil servant and long-time critic of the Bengal government, enlisted as a clerk with the rescue organization. One of his duties was to stop people jumping the queue with information about families and friends who needed to be shepherded out of murderous situations. He remembered sending one distraught man back into the line. When his turn finally came he told Dash that it was too late ‘as all his family had, in the interval, been killed, and his house burnt down’.19 For Dash, it was like the famine all over again. He saw someone being stabbed in the stomach outside the Bengal Club, the same place where he had watched the bodies of the starving fall three years before.
After three days the mass destruction and killing had been suppressed, but already 30,000 people had fled the city, some of them refugees from Burma four years earlier. Nor was there any end in sight to a more insidious, sporadic type of violence. Every day for the next two years, ten, twenty or thirty people would be murdered in the city’s streets, stabbed to death in alleyways, blown to pieces in bomb attacks on shops and residential buildings or strafed in their vehicles with Sten guns. Calcutta showed how easily the fervour of anti-British demonstrations could spill over into fratricidal killings, a phenomenon that would be repeated horribly in the Punjab over the next eighteen months. As the death toll mounted, Burrows remarked sardonically that ‘it was costing more in casualties to hand over Bengal than to conquer it’.20 Fewer than 7,000 people had died at the battle of Plassey in 1757. Perhaps he could have been forgiven for thinking that power had been handed over already. When he was touring affected areas with the local army commander, General Roy Bucher, he saw three people being beaten to death on the Lower Chitpur Road, barely a hundred yards from where he and Bucher stood. The assailants were not inhibited by the presence of these representatives of the supreme authority; only when a police sergeant fired a shot did they flee.21 Afterwards a bewildered Bucher asked Suhrawardy: ‘Why is it that you Hindus and Muslims in Bengal cannot live amicably as the Hindus and Muslims do in the Army?’ Suhrawardy’s reply seemed as much a threat as a warning: ‘General, that Hindu and Muslim amity will not last very much longer – of that I can assure you.’22
As in the ravaged cities of Southeast Asia in 1942, the problems did not cease when the fighting died down. Cholera, ever present in Calcutta, took over from human killers as sanitation collapsed and rubbish built up in the streets. Arthur Dash wrote in his diary that corpses ‘were dotted about even in the streets of the European areas. In Indian areas they were piled up and blocked them.’23 British authorities noted that Indians tended not to remove the bodies even if they lay outside their own houses for fear of pollution.24 This job had to be carried out by the troops. The city was sprayed with DDT, which helped a little, but food supplies broke down and both grain and cloth had to be rationed again. As late as 28 August there were still 307 government and private relief centres feeding 190,000 people cut off in the most seriously affected parts of the city. Worse was the lingering psychological damage. Many people never again trusted their Hindu or Muslim neighbours. It was this that lay at the heart of the massive refugee problems that were to overwhelm India and Pakistan as they attained their freedom. Indirectly, it was to propel the two dominions towards three pointless and destructive wars over the next generation.
Dacca in eastern Bengal was soon to be the capital East Pakistan, but in 1946 the city still had a large Hindu minority and it quickly fell prey to Calcutta’s infectious violence. The trouble was sporadic but vicious. Murderous gangs killed a handful of people every day with weapons of varying sophistication. The district magistrate recorded that: ‘Occasionally acid bombs (acid contained in an electric light bulb) were used, but killing was done by knives and property was attacked with crowbars, or torches made of rags and oil helped by dry wood and straw.’25 In September the frenzy spread to the rural areas of east Bengal, especially to villages where large numbers of Muslim immigrants had moved into India from Arakan during and after the war in Burma. Prime locations were the districts of Noakhali and Tippera in the Chittagong division which had already experienced appalling suffering in 1942. A local political boss and Muslim League member, Ghulam Sarwar, stirred up the trouble by demanding revenge for the thousands of Muslims killed in Calcutta. In this part of the countryside Muslim peasants were beginning to assert themselves, resentful at what they saw as generations of exploitation by Hindu shopkeepers, moneylenders and landlords. Once again, though, it was religious difference and not economic distress that determined the course of the disturbances, which left hundreds dead and 20,000 people homeless. Here, however, the terror hardly deserves categorization as rioting; it took the form of a hi
ghly organized programme of forced conversions of Hindus to Islam. A Muslim gang would come to a Hindu house and give its occupants twenty-four hours to convert to Islam or die. Returning at the appointed time, the gang members would force the ‘converts’ to eat beef, recite the Muslim confession of faith and quit their homes. These were then burnt out because, the Muslims explained, the end of the world was imminent and shelter would be unnecessary in paradise. These events were meticulously organized by local politicians and their supporters; the British district magistrate observed that ‘large stocks of Muslim prayer caps had been made ready for the converts’.26 But there is no question that many ordinary people were living in daily expectation of the apocalypse. This was a common perception up and down the crescent in Burma and Malaya where similar millenarian movements were giving legitimacy to intercommunal clashes and anti-colonial upsurges.