by Nisid Hajari
This was legalistic quibbling. As Nehru quickly discovered, Jinnah’s reassurances were meaningless. Descending from the Khyber Pass, the bloodstained gate to the subcontinent, Nehru’s convoy passed through a narrow defile. Tribesmen lined the dun-colored hills on either side. One turbaned fighter picked up a heavy stone and hurled it, smashing a car window. Another emulated him, and another. “The breaking of glass seems to send people mad,” NWFP governor Sir Olaf Caroe later wrote to Wavell. Nehru’s Khyber Rifles escort had to open fire to drive off the attackers.5
The next day, Nehru visited the Rifles headquarters at Malakand Fort, high up in the pine-forested Hindu Kush. As his convoy exited the massive gates of the fort, two dented buses suddenly rumbled to life ahead of them and blocked the road. Bearded tribesmen poured out of the vehicles. They quickly surrounded Nehru’s car, shattering its windows with rocks. One of Nehru’s companions grabbed a revolver from a guard and screamed at the mob to back off. Sepoys raced out of the fort to help.6
Nehru suffered only a few bruises and nicks. But the photos of his battered car in Life magazine the following week made clear just how lucky he had been. The mob could easily have lynched him.
Furthermore, he was convinced the tribesmen’s anger had not been spontaneous. “There can be no doubt that all these demonstrations were League-organised,” Caroe later admitted to the viceroy.7 During the weeks of limbo after the Calcutta Killing, young radicals in the League had begun pushing Jinnah to employ rougher tactics in the fight against the Congress. British intelligence reports claimed that in early September, at a secret meeting of party leaders called to discuss the plan for direct action, there had been “loose talk” of buying arms from Muslim princes around the subcontinent. Some League firebrands had even argued for establishing covert terror squads—as Jewish fighters were then doing in Palestine—to carry out bombings and sabotage across the country.8
Even if party leaders stopped short of sanctioning violence, such talk was dangerous. One of the League’s young hotheads—the pir of Manki Sharif, a volatile twenty-three-year-old frontier mullah—had preceded Nehru into the tribal areas. “There are secret attempts to bring you also under Hindu domination,” he had warned the already suspicious Pathans.9 The tribesmen were an excitable and easily roused audience. Nehru had walked into a trap.
Obviously, Nehru archly told Wavell upon his return to Delhi on 22 October, the experience had not “produced any feeling of assurance in me about the future conduct of the Muslim League.”10 A week earlier, just before he left for the tribal areas, Nehru had received sketchy reports from the heavily Muslim eastern reaches of Bengal. Gangs of local Muslims there had allegedly gone on a rampage against the area’s tiny Hindu minority. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of refugees were fleeing the roving mobs. Now, bruised and bandaged after his frontier tour, Nehru had no doubt the Bengal disturbances, too, were being directed by the League.
To his eyes, Jinnah’s party looked to be pursuing a double policy, trying to sabotage the same government they had just joined in Delhi by spreading chaos out in the provinces. His new colleagues in the cabinet were openly boasting about their plans to undermine Nehru. They had only taken up their posts “to get a foothold to fight for our cherished goal of Pakistan,” one of them declared.11 Rather than bringing the two sides together, Wavell’s jury-rigged coalition was only driving them further apart.
The day Nehru flew back to Delhi, Lt.-Gen. Roy Bucher stood on the bow of an ancient paddle steamer as it nosed into the river port of Chandpur in eastern Bengal. Here in the world’s greatest riverine delta, the mighty Ganges and Brahmaputra meet and roll down to the sea together. In the predawn gloom, Bucher noticed something strange: their waters refused to mingle. Off the port side he could see the Brahmaputra running clear. The Ganges flowed to starboard, brown and muddy. It was as if nature herself wished to send an ill omen.
Despite the hour, chaos engulfed the docks. Bucher—the officer who had quelled the Calcutta riots—watched as a raggedly dressed crowd scrabbled for position. By their dress they appeared to be Hindus, mostly men, skinny and sun-dark. They had a hunted look. They struggled over one another to clamber onto the boat as Bucher and his aide-de-camp disembarked.
A harried steamer agent told Bucher that in the last week, more than thirty thousand Hindu refugees had swelled the population of Chandpur, a transshipment point for the rice and jute grown across the Bengal delta.12 Many were trying to flee to the safety of Calcutta. Strangely, the agent added, in recent days, hundreds of other Hindus had arrived from Calcutta. The newcomers were clad in a bizarre collection of uniforms—jungle green, khaki, “even pink,” he said.13 Several were army soldiers on leave. These “aid workers” were headed where Bucher was: further east, to the district of Noakhali.
The tales of slaughter and rape that had reached Nehru in Delhi had emerged from this lush, remote area. Noakhali was hard to reach even in the dry winter months, when farmers worked their tiny plots of land. Now, at the tail end of the monsoon season, a glassy sheet of rainwater submerged the entire delta. Peasants got around by hand-poled skiffs, or by walking along the raised earthen bunds that divided their fields. Logs and rough-cut bamboo poles served as bridges.14
The only thing that traveled freely in this landscape was rumor. The initial “eyewitness” accounts of violence had been hysterical. On 15 October, a local member of the Hindu Mahasabha, the country’s largest sectarian Hindu party, had returned to Calcutta from Noakhali. “Thousands of [Hindu] women have been carried away,” he told reporters. “At least 10,000 have been subjected to forcible conversion, and atrocities of an indescribable nature have been perpetrated on many of them.”15 A day later a telegram from Chandpur warned that a bloodthirsty mob was marching on the town. If air force planes did not arrive urgently to strafe the marauders, the sender warned, Chandpur’s Hindus would be finished.16
Nehru had taken such reports seriously. “The accounts we have received and are receiving from hour to hour are incredible, and yet there can be little doubt that they are largely true,” he wrote to Wavell on 15 October, angrily demanding that the viceroy—who remained constitutionally responsible for law and order in India—take action.17 Back in August, just days after the Calcutta riots had burned themselves out, Bengal’s roguish League premier H. S. Suhrawardy had seemed to threaten exactly this sort of pogrom. Once Muslims decided to avenge their dead, “there [would] not be a single Hindu left alive in eastern Bengal,” he had said ominously.18
Congress leaders, including Nehru, would put nothing past Suhrawardy and his henchmen. The man leading the Noakhali death squads, Ghulam Sarwar, was a local League strongman. His goondas were reportedly forcing Hindus to wear caps emblazoned with pro-Pakistan slogans, to show that they had “converted” to Islam.19 Muslims made up 80 percent of the dirt-poor population in eastern Bengal, and in many cases resented the richer Hindu minority who lived among them. The idea that the majority could be manipulated to rise up against their envied neighbors seemed entirely plausible.
Yet by recklessly fanning outrage over the attacks around the country, Nehru’s Congress colleagues only made matters worse. They inflated scraps of rumor into evidence—widely believed but unfounded—of a rural holocaust. The leader of the Congress chapter in Bengal insisted that at least five thousand defenseless Hindus had been slaughtered in the first six days of unrest.20
J. B. Kripalani, who had replaced Nehru as the Congress Party president, issued even more inflammatory estimates. After flying over Noakhali, he judged the chaos to be worse than the devastating 1943 famine in Bengal, which had claimed an estimated 3 million victims. When asked what proof he had for such comparisons, Kripalani dodged the question, saying that if all the Hindus forcibly converted, and all the women raped had instead been killed, that would have been a “lesser tragedy” than surrendering meekly. In any case, he added dismissively, the government’s much lower casualty figures obviously could not be trusted.21
To
be sure, violence was widespread: Bucher estimated that perhaps two thousand homes and shops had been burned and around two hundred Hindus had been killed across Noakhali and the neighboring district of Tipperah. But by the time he arrived, his troops had largely regained control of the district. Rather than a mass uprising, he found that a few hundred thugs had conducted the bulk of the raids. Their ringleader, Ghulam Sarwar, was arrested that afternoon.
No more than two forced marriages were ever authenticated, although shame probably prevented most rapes from being reported.22 Many of those Hindus who had supposedly been “converted” had simply been forced to repeat the kalma, the Muslim statement of faith. (Others had been made to eat beef or had slabs of the forbidden meat thrown into their homes.) Most quickly went back to worshipping their many-armed gods again.
At this point, the bigger problem seemed to be the flood of Hindu “volunteers” that the steamer agent had reported to Bucher. They were spreading into villages unaffected by the violence, terrifying local Hindus with tales of Muslim killers lurking in the groves of coconut and betel nut trees. Thousands were fleeing unnecessarily, the men often leaving wives and children behind. “Many of the refugees,” Bucher’s aide judged, “appeared much more like well-fed citizens of Calcutta than people who had left everything in order to save their lives.”23
Yet the conviction that a conflagration had engulfed eastern Bengal persisted, and persists to this day in most Indian histories. Where the numbers did not support that picture, Congress leaders like Kripalani resorted to moral arithmetic. One Bengali Congressman cast the battle against the League as a Manichean conflict, not unlike the way twenty-first-century Western leaders would describe the struggle against Islamic jihadism:
Dark forces—reactionary, counter-revolutionary and anti-social in nature—have been systematically organised . . . under the Muslim League Ministry [in Bengal] and these dark forces have now declared a sort of total war on civilised ways of living and all that civilisation connotes. The Congress is the spearhead of civilisation and progress in India and it has no hesitation in taking up this challenge. After all, life is stronger than death and civilisation is mightier than barbarism. Life in Bengal will survive this shock and civilisation will withstand this onslaught.24
In some ways Gandhi contributed more than anyone to this line of argument. The seventy-seven-year-old Mahatma seemed to take the Bengal violence personally. The journalist Phillips Talbot, who met with Gandhi at this time, sensed “a feeling of frustration, if not of failure” in him.25 He had always imagined that in his beloved villages, humble Muslims and Hindus lived and would always live together peacefully, as brothers. Now the very peasants whom he had championed as the “real” India appeared to have turned into brutal murderers. Clearly ahimsa—his creed of nonviolence—had not penetrated more than skin-deep.
For the previous several weeks, the Mahatma had been living in Delhi to help in the coalition talks with the League. While in the capital he preferred to stay in a hut in a sweepers’ colony, home to Hindu Untouchables, the lowest of the low. (Of course, his “hut” had been whitewashed and outfitted with electricity and a phone: “If only that little man knew what it costs us to keep him in poverty,” Sarojini Naidu cackled.)26 At his evening prayer meetings, devotees pressed Gandhi to rush to Bengal to save Noakhali’s Hindus from “genocide.”
The Mahatma implored Hindus not to seek revenge. But he did not challenge the idea that League Muslims had embarked on a full-fledged pogrom in eastern Bengal. Instead, he instructed Bengal’s Hindus to “die fearlessly” at the hands of their neighbors, without fighting back, to shame Muslims by their moral example. (Gandhi had offered the same advice to Jews facing the Nazi sword during World War II.) “There will be no tears but only joy if tomorrow I get the news that all three of you [have been] killed,” he assured a trio of Bengali followers who were headed to the region on a mercy mission.27
Gandhi fixated in particular on the most incendiary allegations coming out of Noakhali—the vastly overhyped stories about rapes and abductions of Hindu women. Although he surrounded himself with female devotees and argued strongly for equality between the sexes, the Mahatma remained a late Victorian in his obsession with feminine virtue. Sex was forbidden in his ashrams, both in South Africa and India; he himself had taken a vow of celibacy at the age of thirty-seven, after fathering four sons, in the belief that “one who conserves his vital fluid acquires unfailing power.”28 To Gandhi, the ideal Indian woman was cast in the mold of Sita, the god Ram’s blameless wife, who first walked on hot coals then meekly went into exile when her chastity had been questioned.
Gandhi urged the Hindu women of Noakhali to remember “the incomparable power of Sita.”29 He wanted them to commit suicide rather than submit to their Muslim ravishers: they should “learn how to die before a hair of their head could be injured.” Perhaps they could “suffocate themselves or . . . bite their tongues to end their lives,” he advised. Told that such methods were impracticable, the Mahatma suggested the next day that they drink poison instead. “His was not an idle idea. He meant all he had said,” reads Gandhi’s own transcript of his comments.30 Such talk kept emotions running high among Hindus.
Jinnah’s comments did equally little to staunch the violence. He did not condemn the bloodshed for a full two weeks after the first raids were reported. When Wavell pressed him to speak out, the Quaid changed the subject to “Gandhi’s ‘continuing outpouring of poison,’” the viceroy recorded.31 When Jinnah finally did issue a statement, he did not admit any League responsibility for the Noakhali attacks. “It takes two to quarrel,” he churlishly reminded the Congress leaders, “and it is up to the leaders of both communities to put an end in the name of humanity to what is happening.”32
Nehru was in no mood for a lecture. He had judiciously remained silent about Noakhali while away touring the frontier. As soon as he returned, though, his frustrations mounted quickly. The addition of the Leaguers virtually paralyzed the government. Nehru’s new Muslim colleagues refused to acknowledge his authority, or to attend the teatime conclaves he had taken to holding in his office, where Congress ministers tried to make policy decisions without the viceroy in the room. Deep within the bureaucracy, bitter sectarian camps had begun to form. “There is clear evidence that many Muslim clerks are ready, and even anxious, to hand over confidential documents to League officials,” the Intelligence Bureau warned.33
Matters came to a head when Wavell suggested shifting the Home portfolio—which controlled the police and intelligence agencies—from the Congress to the League in order to balance out their responsibilities. After the disturbances in the NWFP and Noakhali, the idea of putting Jinnah’s men in charge of internal security seemed like rank hypocrisy to Nehru. The Congress high command plunged into hours of crisis talks, threatening to pull out of the government altogether if Wavell did not back down. (He did.) On 30 October, Nehru took to his bed, stressed and exhausted from the Delhi infighting.
Nehru was certainly not about to let Jinnah off the hook for Noakhali. Even if not every charge could be substantiated, the League seemed to be quite obviously intent on driving a wedge between Hindus and Muslims. “What has happened in other parts of India and more so in Eastern Bengal has been so ghastly that it is even sufficient to wake up the dead,” Nehru told reporters in Calcutta on 2 November. He had flown to the Bengal capital with a joint delegation of League and Congress ministers, ostensibly to show solidarity and call for calm. But he wanted the journalists to know he saw through Jinnah’s game: “I am not dead,” Nehru assured them. “I am very much alive.”34
In the latter half of October, just as the uproar over Noakhali was peaking, police in the United Provinces noted a disturbing trend: the Hindu Mahasabha and other orthodox Hindu parties, which previously “had very little following or political influence,” were coming “out into the open, and . . . rallying Hindus all over the country to fight Islam.”35 Tales of Hindu women being violated by Muslims were a
powerful recruiting tool.
Before the war, far-right Hindus had established a pseudo-militant organization—the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (commonly abbreviated to RSSS at the time)—that took inspiration from Hitler’s Brown Shirts. They had mostly been a sideshow, parading around in khaki shorts and issuing Fascist salutes. During wartime, the British had banned any such “private armies” from wearing uniforms or drilling openly. Those regulations had expired in September 1946. Now, Noakhali propelled thousands of volunteers into the RSSS ranks. In the United Provinces alone, membership in the militia grew to 25,000 by December 1946.36 Instead of hopping around doing mass calisthenics, Hindu cadres began training secretly in the use of swords, rifles, and crude bombs.
The United Provinces police noted one other unsettling trend in their report: a “disturbing departure for the east”—toward Bihar and Bengal—“of batches of volunteers belonging to the various communal organizations.” If the spread of such militias was not halted, the report warned, “communal anarchy” threatened.37
Nehru’s Congress could technically disclaim any responsibility for these Hindu vigilante groups. The party’s own “volunteers” really were unarmed: they were used mostly for relief work and keeping order at political meetings. But after Noakhali, the line dividing the nationalists from the Hindu supremacists grew fuzzier, especially among the lower ranks of both organizations. In the autumn of 1946, “Congress party opinion began to express itself in anti-Moslem (rather than anti-League) terms,” New York Times reporter George Jones recalled in a memoir, “partly, no doubt, because a number of militant Hindus found it politically expedient to . . . join the Congress party bandwagon.” In their foaming outrage over the Noakhali attacks, Jones continued, “it became rather difficult to differentiate between the frankly communal response” of Congress and the Mahasabha.38