by Nisid Hajari
In the flesh, any similarities disappeared. Nearing seventy, Jinnah was as frail as his rival was vigorous. A lifelong two-pack-a-day cigarette habit left him gasping for breath at times, and more than once he had had to take to his bed for weeks at a stretch on doctor’s orders. He carried only 140 pounds on his 6-foot frame; cheekbones jutted out of his cadaverous face like the edges of a diamond. His hair, which had once been luxuriant enough to evoke comparisons to the actor Sir Gerald du Maurier, had turned bone-white.
Where Nehru could rival Hamlet for indecisiveness, Jinnah was implacably determined. His frigid demeanor was as legendary as Nehru’s charm: “You do need a fur coat now and then!” one of Jinnah’s oldest friends said, jokingly, about spending time with him.19 Above all the Muslim leader was a supreme tactician, not a would-be theoretician like Nehru. A monocle fixed to his eye, Jinnah excelled at the marathon negotiations that Nehru despised—seizing upon every one of his opponent’s vulnerabilities, pocketing concessions, rejecting any chance of compromise until offered more.
As president of the Muslim League, Jinnah now loomed as the most imposing roadblock to Nehru’s political ambitions. For the previous half-dozen years, the Muslim leader had argued that his community—though outnumbered more than three to one by India’s Hindus—represented a “nation” unto themselves rather than a mere minority group. “We are different beings,” he told one British interviewer. “There is nothing in life which links us together. Our names, our clothes, our foods—they are all different; our economic life, our educational ideas, our treatment of women, our attitude to animals. . . . We challenge each other at every point of the compass.”20 Jinnah insisted that the subcontinent’s Muslims be given their own independent homeland, carved out of the northwestern and northeastern corners of India, where they formed a slight majority of the population. Though originally dreamed up by someone else, the name of this nation would forever be associated with Jinnah’s: Pakistan, or in Persian, “land of the pure.”
From the moment the League leader first started to contemplate the possibility of a Muslim state, Nehru had been his most intransigent foe. Over the past decade they had clashed, both on the stump and at the conference table. Nehru did not just resist the argument that Muslims constituted a separate people from Hindus; he scorned the premise of the idea. To him, the fact that Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs and Christians and Parsis and others had mixed together on the subcontinent for centuries was fundamental to India’s identity. This was the country’s genius, like America’s—the ability to absorb and meld different cultures into a coherent whole.
The Congress leader blasted the very idea of basing a modern nation on religion, calling it “medieval.”21 He found it despicably ironic that the men crying loudest for a Muslim state were, for the most part, neither observant Muslims nor oppressed. Most seemed to be whiskey-drinking, wealthy landowners or businessmen. Nehru thought them cynics, looking to exploit the Muslim masses in order to create a land where they could preserve their feudal privileges. They lacked, he believed, even the virtue of conviction.
Although they had known each other for thirty years, the dispute between Nehru and Jinnah had become deeply personal in the past decade. The League leader represented “an obvious example of the utter lack of the civilized mind,” Nehru had written during the war.22 Jinnah reciprocated the sentiment. He considered the younger man’s talk of India’s spiritual unity and brotherhood of communities a load of mumbo-jumbo, and mocked him publicly as a “Peter Pan . . . who never learns or unlearns anything.”23 At best, Nehru was naive, Jinnah thought; more likely, he was prettying up a naked power grab to make it more palatable to his Western admirers.
Wavell did not believe in Jinnah’s Pakistan any more than Nehru did. But neither could the viceroy in good conscience recommend that the British surrender power before Congress and the League had agreed on what would fill the vacuum. He hoped that if the two parties could work together in a coalition government for several months, they might rediscover common ground. Wavell envisioned six Congress nominees in the interim administration that Nehru would lead, five Leaguers, and three members of smaller minority groups.
Wavell suggested that before nominating his cabinet, Nehru should personally invite Jinnah to join the new government. In not so many words, the viceroy was saying that the transition from empire to independence depended on the willingness of Nehru and Jinnah to make up. The fate of 400 million Indians hung on the statesmanship of the two men.
Dutifully, but without any discernible enthusiasm, Nehru wrote to Jinnah offering to meet in Bombay on 15 August 1946.24 Although the viceroy had forewarned him, Jinnah feigned shock at Nehru’s invitation, which was reported by the major national newspapers—all Hindu-owned and pro-Congress—as if it were a demarche from a head of state. “I know nothing as to what has transpired between the Viceroy and you,” Jinnah replied archly. If Nehru was suggesting that he serve in a Congress-dominated government, though, it was obviously “not possible for me to accept such a position.”25
This was classic Jinnah—prideful, biting, uncompromising. The posturing was intended more for his followers than for Nehru; as he often did, Jinnah released copies of his note to the press. The two men exchanged another public set of letters on the morning of the 15th itself. By that point, Nehru had arrived in Bombay. Finally Jinnah wrote resignedly, “As you have given certain explanations, with some of which I must not be taken to agree, and as you desire to meet, I shall be glad to see you today at 6 p.m.”26
A scrum of reporters waited outside the gates of Jinnah’s Bombay mansion as Nehru pulled up that evening, ten minutes early. After he had made a fortune at the bar, Jinnah had built himself a grand, whitewashed home made of marble and fine stone on top of Bombay’s Malabar Hill. Breezes off the Arabian Sea rustled the branches of the huge pipal tree that loomed over the front porch. Since his wife died seventeen years earlier, Jinnah had lived in the echoing manse with only servants and his acid-tongued, spinster sister Fatima for company. He spent most of his time in his first-floor study, which was lined with law books and piled high with papers in neatly arranged stacks. He and Nehru retired there now.
The Congressman later described their eighty-minute conversation as “quite amicable.”27 But he was tired and harried, and, in truth, neither man had any great desire for a rapprochement. Jinnah could not stomach the idea of serving as the younger man’s deputy, nor would he allow Congress to include any Muslims in their own quota of ministers. For his part, Nehru did not want the Leaguers in the government to question his authority or to slow the march to full independence from the British. “The swift limb of Congress should not be shackled,” he declared imperiously.28
Dusk had just settled when the two men emerged and shook hands in the curved gravel drive for the benefit of reporters. A disappointed news bulletin on All-India Radio that evening made clear that the meeting had failed to produce a breakthrough.
The next morning, before he returned to Delhi, Nehru held forth for reporters. He looked exhausted, as though he hadn’t slept. Still, he affected a cheery insouciance. The lack of agreement between Congress and the League did not worry him, he insisted, nor did the possibility that Jinnah’s followers might try to topple any government he led. In that event, Nehru said, two outcomes were possible. On the one hand, if the administration showed weakness, it would quickly collapse. “On the other hand,” he warned, “if the Government was strong, the [League’s] movement would go down.”29 To many ears, it sounded like a challenge.
Nehru’s comments—in his diary entry for 16 August, Wavell called them “as usual . . . stupid”—tossed a match onto dangerously dry kindling.30 Jinnah had called for a series of rallies to be held around the country that very day, to kick off what he termed a campaign of “direct action” to win Pakistan. He did not specify what this campaign would entail: the threat itself seemed to be the point. Under Gandhi’s leadership in the 1920s and 1930s, the Congress had extorted concessions f
rom the British using mass street protests—what Jinnah called their “pistol.” “We have also forged a pistol,” he had told journalists when announcing his plan in late July, “and are in a position to use it.”31
For weeks League hotheads had described the possibility of a Nehru-led government in apocalyptic terms. They had reminded their followers of the recent fate of Jews under Hitler. “The British-Congress Axis is formed and the rape of the Muslim nation is to begin in a more ruthless and criminal manner than Hitler and Mussolini dared in Europe,” warned an editorial in Dawn, the newspaper Jinnah had founded. If Muslims wanted to survive as a community, they had to be prepared to fight. The moment the British handed power to Nehru and a Congress-dominated government, “that will be the signal for the Muslims—to do or die,” the editorial continued.32
Beneath the paper’s hyperbole lay understandable anxieties. Muslims could plainly see that the British—who had long styled themselves the guardians of India’s minorities—were rushing for the exit. Congress might be open to members of all communities, and Nehru himself had never displayed any hint of religious prejudice. But Hindus dominated the party no less than the country itself. If handed the reins of power, they would naturally favor other Hindus for jobs in the government, police, and military; in admissions to universities; in business deals; and in legal matters. They would control a battle-hardened, million-man army. Across India many Muslims were “angry, a little frightened, and belligerent,” recalled American journalist Phillips Talbot, who was then based in Delhi.33
With no specifics to go on—the League’s brain trust would not even meet to discuss the scope of “direct action” until early September, several weeks from now—Jinnah’s lieutenants had been trying to stir up enthusiasm by issuing bloodcurdling threats. One ominously hinted, “Muslims are not believers in ahimsa,” using Gandhi’s term for his most sacred principle, nonviolence. Another declared, “We cannot eliminate any method [from consideration]. Direct Action means action against the law.”34 Anonymous leaflets appeared in several cities, showing a caricature of Jinnah brandishing a sword as he warned unbelievers, “Your doom is not far and the general massacre will come!”35
Tensions ran especially high in Calcutta, the teeming capital of Bengal, which was then ruled by a League government. H. S. Suhrawardy, Bengal’s corpulent and ruthless chief minister, wrote in Calcutta’s Statesman newspaper that “bloodshed and disorder are not necessarily evil in themselves, if resorted to for a noble cause.” Suhrawardy was a Bengali Boss Tweed, filling his coffers as skillfully as any Tammany Hall pol while indulging his tastes for champagne, Polish blondes, and power (not necessarily in that order).36 His moral compass tended to fluctuate in line with his political interests. Not so long ago, he had led joint Hindu-Muslim marches against the British; at one he and his Congress counterpart had gallantly used the same League flag to wipe the teargas from their eyes. Then, in the spring, Suhrawardy and the League had triumphed in provincial elections. Now he vowed that if Nehru took over the central government, his huge province would not send a single rupee in revenue to Delhi.
Suhrawardy declared Jinnah’s Direct Action Day—16 August 1946—an official holiday in Bengal so that Muslims could close up their shops, put down their tools, and take part in the demonstrations.37 He planned to speak at a “monster rally” on the Maidan—the greensward at the heart of Calcutta—that afternoon, and he wanted a big crowd. Of course, Hindus, too, were expected to shutter their businesses as a mark of respect.
On Calcutta’s commercial Harrison Road that morning, Nanda Lal rolled up the metal blinds of his popular snack shop, the East Bengal Cabin, as usual.38 It was monsoon season; as he laid out a tray of milky sweets, the air clung to his skin and sweat-stained kurta like a damp rag. He first noticed something wrong when the cows sleeping in the middle of the road struggled to their feet to avoid an early-morning streetcar: the normally packed tram that clanged past was completely empty. Nobody was heading to work.
Instead, a half-dozen trucks followed, filled with angry bearded men carrying brickbats and bottles. For a moment Nanda Lal watched, frozen in place, as the thugs piled out and ransacked a nearby furniture store owned by a Hindu like himself. They tossed mattresses and chairs into the street and set them on fire. Then a hail of stones came pelting up the road toward him. Lal turned and fled.
Like all of India’s metropolises, Calcutta hosted a large population of goondas, or roughnecks, both Hindu and Muslim. Since the League’s victory in the elections, the Congress opposition had staged a series of strikes and business shutdowns in order to embarrass Suhrawardy’s administration, using Hindu goondas to enforce the closures. Now, the Muslim goondas rampaging through Calcutta’s streets also appeared to be operating under some higher command. Gasoline—which they used to set Hindu shops ablaze—was tightly rationed by the government. Calcutta’s underworld gangs did not typically maintain fleets of trucks for transport.39
Elsewhere in the city, Hindus were on the offensive. Muslim laborers from the great jute mills across the Hooghly River had started flooding into Calcutta proper at dawn. At some bridges Hindus had built makeshift barricades to block them.40 As Muslim marchers filed toward the Maidan, Hindus rained bricks and flowerpots down on them.41
British commanders in Calcutta had fully expected trouble, and they watched the incoming incident reports with concern but not panic.42 In the past year, several anti-British demonstrations—including one led by Suhrawardy himself—had degenerated into riots. Mobs had attacked government buildings and vehicles, assaulted Europeans, and paralyzed the city by blocking off major thoroughfares. By contrast, today’s sectarian street fights seemed scattered and aimless.
By early afternoon, the riots appeared to have died down. Tens of thousands of Muslims congregated on the Maidan to listen to Suhrawardy and other Leaguers rail against Nehru and the Congress. Some in the crowd carried huge banners bearing Jinnah’s portrait; others gripped steel bars and lengths of pipe. Reports of what exactly the Bengali premier said to them are sketchy—the police neglected to send a transcriber to the meeting. Even before Suhrawardy finished speaking, though, the men with weapons had begun to slip away. As he concluded the meeting, Suhrawardy encouraged the rest of the crowd to return home peacefully, saying something to the effect that the police had been instructed not to harass them.43
Hindus later claimed that Suhrawardy’s words were code, letting the crowd know they were free to loot and burn. Several marchers split off as they headed back toward the Hooghly River and joined the goondas ransacking the city’s Hindu bazaars. Muslims would say those demonstrators were merely taking revenge for the abuses they had suffered that morning. Either way, Calcutta’s police—only half of whom were armed—were quickly overwhelmed. By four o’clock, army signalers were flashing the code word RED to indicate that clashes had broken out all over the city.
Even at this point, as an after-action report by the acting army commander Lt.-Gen. Roy Bucher makes clear, nothing indicated that authorities faced anything more than uncoordinated street riots. British and Indian troops were mindful of how they had lost control of the streets in earlier riots. This time, the main roads and critical intersections seemed reassuringly unaffected. Pending a formal request from Bengal’s British governor, Sir Frederick Burrows, Bucher did not order his men out in force.44
Finally, the violence seemed to subside. Shortly after dusk a heavy thundershower cleared the streets. It was the holy month of Ramadan, and many Muslims had gone home to break their fast. Burrows imposed a strict curfew throughout Calcutta. He was confident the police would have the city under control before morning.
After midnight, however, something new spread through the humid, mud-slicked lanes of Calcutta’s endless slums. Gangs of killers materialized in the gloom, wielding machetes and torches, even revolvers and shotguns. With ruthless efficiency they hunted down members of the opposite community. Where a lane of Muslim shanties crossed through a Hindu area, or a few
threadbare hovels inhabited by Hindu families sat amid a sea of Muslim homes, the shrieking mobs woke the inhabitants, slaughtered them, and set their cramped, flimsy huts alight. Armored cars could not pursue the marauders into the warren-like slums, and on foot, small patrols would have been quickly overwhelmed. Police shouldered their batons uneasily and watched as flames licked the night sky.
The scale of the slaughter only became apparent in the daylight. Hundreds of corpses littered the streets on Saturday morning, 17 August, tossed out like refuse overnight. In photographs they look like gruesome mannequins, near-naked and beginning to bloat, their limbs tangled like rope. Vultures and pie-dogs ripped off great ribbons of their flesh. In previous riots, the victims—usually stabbed or beaten to death in hand-to-hand street fights—had typically numbered in the dozens. When he toured the city that morning, Burrows, himself a former Grenadier Guard, murmured that this carnage looked worse to him than the Somme.45
The city’s goondas were exceptionally well-armed, thanks to leftover weapons caches from World War II, and were expert at fomenting chaos. Still, this was something new—a pogrom rather than a riot. Apart from one pitched battle that had broken out between Hindu and Muslim students at Ripon College, the mobs from either side generally avoided one another.46 They weren’t looking to challenge the authorities or to seize and hold territory. They displayed no interest in attacking well-defended government buildings in the heart of the city. They ignored European civilians.
They were hunting for victims. For days the steady drumbeat of threats from the Congress and League leaders had put Hindus and Muslims on jaw-clenching edge. Looking around them now, Calcuttans could see that their choice was to kill or be killed. As the bodies piled up, they only felt more vulnerable, not less.