7500 CIVILIANS DIED APPROXIMATELY 15000 WOUNDED MOHAMED ALI JINNAH SPEECH -DIRECT ACTION DAY 16 AUGUST 1946
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| GEORGE VI AGREED TO TRANSFER OF POWER TO INDIA |
1946 Cabinet Mission Plan
Direct Action Day towers over the psyche of Bengal. It came at the end of a long and tortured series of legal negotiations over the Cabinet Mission Plan, a constitutional scheme to transfer British power to a united if federated India. Initially, both the Muslim League and the Congress accepted the plan,
transfer British power to a united if federated India
The rider was meant to strengthen the Centre – the Congress was concerned at how little power Delhi had under the Cabinet Mission Plan. (Much later, in December 1946, the British Government would strike down the Congress’ rider as incorrect, but by then it would be too late: the Calcutta Killings, followed by riots in East Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh had already occurred.)
On July 10, 1946, in his first press conference as the new Congress President, Jawaharlal Nehru scrapped even this conditional acceptance of the plan. Nehru held that the Congress regarded itself “free to change or modify the Cabinet Mission Plan” and it considered itself “completely unfettered by agreement and free to meet all situations as they arose”.
Abul Kalam Azad, the only major Congress leader to oppose Partition right till the very end, called this rejection of the plan “one of those unfortunate events which changed the course of history”.
JINNAH CALLED FOR UNIVERSAL MUSLIM HARTAL
This brought to an end any efforts over finding a constitutional settlement with respect to a united India. In response to Nehru’s press conference, Jinnah called a meeting of the Muslim League Working Committee on July 29, 1946, and got the party to pass two resolutions.
Direct action announced
This was a completely unexpected move. The League had never gone in for direct action (that is, civil disobedience) and its weak organisation was thought to not be up to it. Nehru himself said so, when he wrote to British politican Sir Stafford Cripps as late as January 27, 1946:
“The Muslim League leadership is far too reactionary (they are mostly landlords) and opposed to any social change to dare to indulge in any form of direct action. They are incapable of it, having spent their lives in soft jobs.”
TRAGEDY IN CALCUTTA
While Jinnah proved Nehru wrong (without knowing it), he had taken a massive risk, knowing well that there was a high chance of matters going out of hand, spiralling into a communal conflagration. Trouble was, in fact, expected in the Punjab, which had a long history of communal conflict. Instead, it erupted in Bengal.
Historian Patrick French writes:
“Sitting in his ivory tower dressed in his London suit, he had not realised how the criminal underworld of Calcutta might behave. The Muslim League was too ramshackle an organisation to have any genuine control over its supporters. HS Suhrawardy ran the Bengal League and his organisation had entrusted direct action to Calcutta’s pirs and mullahs, who were told to mobilise the Muslim community at Friday prayers.”
In Bengal, with hopes for a constitutional agreement over united India gone, and some form of partition looking likely, Direct Action Day took the form of a war over who would control Calcutta. While it was the capital of a Muslim-majority province, the city itself was dominated by Hindus, both in terms of population and wealth.
Calcutta Killings
On August 16, to mark Direct Action Day, Bengal Premier Suhrwardy called for a bandh and addressed a massive rally at the Brigade Parade Grounds in Calcutta. Violence began after that, in all probability started by Muslim League volunteers returning from the rally.
It is here that history breaks down. So sharp is the divide now that “Hindu” and “Muslim” history rarely sees common ground. Historian Claude Markovits writes:
“In the period between August 1946 and August 1947, if you were a Hindu, you believed in one narrative that blamed Suhrawardy and the Muslim League entirely, and saw the violent acts by Hindu crowds as simply a matter of self-defense, and you could quote plenty of “witnesses” to support your claim. If you were a Muslim, you tended to adopt a discourse of victimisation and to point to the fact that most of the victims were Muslims, hinting at a dark Hindu plot to wipe out Muslims in Calcutta.”
Total breakdown
In this breakdown, no quarter was given. The violence was horrific and total. Suranjan Das, historian and current Vice Chancellor of Jadavpur University, says that while the “earlier riots in Bengal had a class character, this was a totally different kind of violence”.
Das writes:
“The other distinguishing feature of the 1946 riot is its organised nature. The Muslim League mobilised its frontal organisations to make the Direct Action Day a success and once the riot started it used the government machinery to help its supporters.
Amongst Hindus, the Marwari merchants had purchased as ‘a precautionary measure’ arms and ammunition from American soldiers, which were later used during the riot. Acid bombs were manufactured and stored in Hindu-owned factories before the outbreak. Interestingly, Muslim and Hindu rioting crowds adopted similar strategies in perpetrating violence.
The looted booty was carried to waiting lorries for transportation to a central place; shops were carefully marked with signs so that the crowd left untouched the establishments of their coreligionists; both League and Hindu activists used Red Cross badges to evade police detection.”
The complete nature of the riot meant there was almost no common ground, even for secularists. The fact that 75% of the victims were Muslim, was used by a Muslim League legislator, Gholam Sarwar, to attack Hindus totally unconnected to Kolkata, far out in rural Noakhali. Hindu versions, in turn, justified the Calcutta Killings as self-defence and saw, in the Hindu retaliation, a weakening of the Muslim position.
On August 21, Vallabhbhai Patel would write to C Rajagoplacharai: “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.”
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