"My People, Uprooted: A Saga of the Hindus of Eastern Bengal" by Tathagata Roy

2008-05-08T16:32:00.000-07:00

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1 - Background : Pre-Partition Bengali Society

Chapter 2 - The Countdown : Politics of Bengal between two partitions, 1905-1947

Chapter 3 - The Three Horrors of the Forties

Chapter 4 - Partition, at last

Chapter 5 - The Push Begins, gently : 1947-1950

Chapter 6 - Push comes to Shove : The killings of 1950 and the Nehru-Liaquat Pact

Chapter 7 - The Steady, Ungentle Squeeze, 1950-71

Chapter 8 - The Gory Climax : The Holocaust of 1971

Chapter 9 - Blowing Hot and Cold : Hindus in the Bangladesh Era

Chapter 10 - The Eerie Silence : The Meaning of the Word 'Secular'

Chapter 11 - Now What?

Illustrations

Appendix 1 - Jogendra Nath Mandal's Resignation Letter to Liaquat Ali Khan

Acknowledgements

Appendix 2 - List of Persons Interviewed

Addendum

2008-05-08T16:22:00.000-07:00

FOREWORD

This book is a forceful exposure of atrocious human rights violations in the erstwhile East Bengal, later known as East Pakistan after the partition of India in 1947 and till later as Bangladesh since its independence in 1971. The author, Tathagata Roy, an engineer by profession with a legal background, thoroughly researched books and written documents supplemented by oral history based on interviews of witnesses. Though based in India he has family roots in East Bengal. However, he has tried to get over the personal factor and present an objective outlook.

Hindu-Muslim relationship in India has always been a controversial topic. Anyone speaking on behalf of a particular community is likely to be doubled as communal. Yet, truth demands outspokenness. Knowledge advances on controversies. Anyone who does not like the author’s point of view must come forward with contradiction based on contrary evidence so that truth may ultimately come out in the open. Secularism does not call for the suppression of truth, however unpalatable that may be.

With such an attitude of mind one should go through this book. It may be said that the book presents only one side of the picture. But nothing prevents one from presenting the other side.

This book gives us the details of Hindu-Muslim relations in East Bengal during the British Rule, followed by the Pakistani Government and finally the Independent Bangladesh. The Hindus being a minority there were always at the receiving end. The nadir was reached during the Noakhali carnage which prompted Mahatma Gandhi to lead a peace mission there. Sir Stafford Cripps had to concede about Gandhiji, “Almost alone he quelled the disturbances in Bengal which but for the force of his character and teaching would undoubtedly have led to disasters as serious as those in Punjab.” (quoted in Dr. Rafiq Zakaria’s Gandhi and the Break-up of India, pp. 26 1-262). Gandhiji’s Noakhali Diary gives us many pathetic details. Gaitdhiji was specially moved by the atrocities committed on women in Noakhali. The present book supplements the existing information with graphic details. Yet Gandhiji’s peace mission did not totally succeed, for there was an exodus of millions of Hindus from that part upon and after partition of India. This book establishes that the process has not yet stopped. In spite of changes in the Governments the gruesome tale still continues. Now fundamentalist forces muffle the saner elements of that country. New exodus of Hindus follows. Strangely enough, there has been a large scale infiltration of Muslims from Bangladesh in adjoining States in India largely on economic compulsions creating imbalance in India.

The author strongly argues that silence in this behalf is not golden. Secularism, he contends, does not demand suppression of facts.

In my view, the author’s marshalling of facts is stimulating and persuasive, Whether one agrees with him or not, one will be impressed by the author’s approach towards truth of this painful situation with penetrating zeal. The book may be controversial but cannot be called communal,

This book is a truthful record of the continued human rights violation in our neighbouring country. Without meaning any disrespect the author presses for the remedy of an unbearable situation. This book is recommended for all discerning readers for careful critical study.

Pratap Chandra Chunder
Formerly Union Minister of Education,
Social Welfare and Culture

2008-05-08T16:09:00.000-07:00

PREFACE

As prefaces go, this is rather a long one, but there are reasons for it. I strongly suggest that the prospective reader go through it carefully. It is important for appreciation of certain aspects of the book.

The topic is already very nearly forgotten. It would be completely so in another twenty years when the people, who saw it all happen, die away. I did not see it happen, but at some stage of my life formed an abiding interest in my roots, and therefore in the subject. The subject is the persecution, partly state-sponsored, qualifying as human rights violation, and the resultant exodus of Hindus from what was once known as Eastern Bengal. This ‘Eastern Bengal’ later came to be known as East Pakistan, and is now known as Bangladesh. This exodus began with the independence and the partition of India and that of the province of Bengal, became a flood during the East Pakistan days and continues, though to a lesser extent, to this day.

The stated purpose of this book is to put on record this major case of human rights violation ; and also to trigger further research on the subject ; and further to point out the extent to which it has been concealed. To restate the same on a different plane, the purpose is to tell the post-1960 generation of Bangladeshi Muslims on the one hand and of Indian Bengali Hindus with East Bengali roots on the other, what their ancestors did, the former to the latter, and how the latter swallowed and concealed it.

The purpose of the book is not, repeat not, to create disaffection between Hindu and Muslim or between India and Bangladesh. It is my firm belief that telling the truth does not create disaffection, but concealing it may do so, at least in the long run. However, if such disaffection does result then it is again my belief that the same should be taken care of by means other than suppressing the truth. Preferably by facing it, and also facing the fact that the post-independence generation in either country and either religion have not been told the truth, from mala fide motives.

Very strangely, in these times when world opinion quickly crystallises to condemn any human rights violation, this is one of the very few cases that has all but escaped the attention of the world, even of most of India. Even people who are vaguely aware of the human rights violations in East Bengal suffer from very basic and serious misconceptions about certain aspects of the matter. This is mainly in relation to the aftermath of the exodus and a comparison of refugees from the two erstwhile wings of Pakistan – in other words a comparison between Punjabi and Bengali refugees. The fundamental difference between the two migrations was that the first was a violent, one-time, but two-way affair while the latter was – and is – a continuing one-way traffic, the result of periodic gentle, and not-so-gentle, squeezes. This difference is not only not appreciated by most people ; it is not even known to them.

But, precisely because of this ignorance, the question might be asked, why am I talking about the movement of Hindus alone? What about the reciprocal movement of Muslims from West to East Bengal? The simple reason why I am not talking about any such thing is that there was no such thing, no such reciprocal movement. Muslims have not left West Bengal in any number worth mentioning. This fundamental difference between the human migration in Bengal and that in Punjab simply cannot be overstated. In Punjab, after January 1948, no Muslim was left on the Indian side, and no Hindu or Sikh on the Pakistani side – literally. On the other hand, religious violence in the wake of partition in Bengal, unlike in Punjab, has been strictly a one-way affair. In Punjab there was a Patiala massacre (of Muslims) to match a Sheikhupura (of Sikhs and Hindus), but there is no parallel of the Meghna Bridge or Jagannath Hall massacres in West Bengal.

In fact there has been quite the opposite. The Radcliffe award gave Muslim-majority Murshidabad district to India, and in return Hindu-majority Khulna district went to Pakistan. Today the proportion of Muslims in Murshidabad is much more than what it was at the time of partition, while the Hindu population of Khulna has decimated. There is no Jhulan-jatra any more in Dacca, but Idd and Muhurrum are celebrated with all pomp and glory in Calcutta. Infiltration of Bangladeshi Muslims into the border districts of West Bengal and Bihar goes on unabated, and that into Assam has reduced – not stopped – only after a bloody revolt.

Strangely, volumes have been written and spoken in India (mostly in Bangla), and rivulets of tears have been shed about the manner in which the Bengali refugees have suffered in India (which was quite horrible), but practically nothing about what made them refugees or what they suffered in East Bengal that drove them to take refuge in India. The reasons of not so writing are quite interesting and intriguing. This book, therefore, addresses itself, to these two aspects : namely, what happened to the Hindus in erstwhile East Pakistan, and why whatever happened has been so carefully kept under wraps – not just by the tormentors (which is understandable) but also by the victims, as also the media, political parties, intellectuals, and the like, barring a few feeble exceptions. Published material on these aspects is therefore scarce, and whatever little exists on either side of the border is almost entirely in the Bangla.

It is these sources in Bangla that have largely formed the foundations of my research on the subject. The sources of information in printed form have all been referenced in endnotes. Very little of the contents of this book are based on personal experience. I was born in 1945, and the problem had mostly (though not completely) solved itself – as all human problems do, given time – by the time I was mature enough to attempt any serious observation. A substantial part is based on interviews of persons who have seen it all happen with their own eyes, as also others, in India and Bangladesh, and a few in the United States. The interviews were all conducted during the writing of this book, between 1999 and 2001. Quite a few of the interviewees were in their sixties and seventies, some in their eighties, and the events they were trying to describe had taken place some fifty years ago ; it is therefore possible that some inaccuracies had crept in. There is some hearsay also, kept down to the barest minimum. Wherever possible their names and relevant particulars of the persons interviewed have been given. Some of them have wished anonymity, and such wish has been respected. A complete bibliography, list of interviewees and a set of acknowledgements appears at the end of the book.

The questions may well be asked : who is this author, is he qualified to write something like this? And what is the point of writing it anyway, instead of letting bygones be bygones? The last contention is patently puerile – if accepted it would do away with all unpleasant chapters of human history. And it is my duty to answer the rest of the questions too. Also, in the final analysis, for a person like me who does not habitually write books, the provocation to write a book like this must come from something that is intensely personal. It is also my duty to explain this angle.

I am, of all things, a Civil Engineer by training, with also a degree in Law, teaching and working professionally in the interface area of the two disciplines. I am also into active politics, in the Bharatiya Janata Party to be specific, where I head the West Bengal state unit. I have had no formal training in historical, political or sociological research. My interest in the subject primarily stems from the fact that I find the contemporary history and politics of Bengal a fascinating subject, and also that I am Hindu, and my parents came from East Bengal, though I have lived most of my life in Kolkata or Calcutta. My grandfather on my father’s side was a Naib, a sort of Zamindar’s manager (the term is explained in the text) in Satgaon, a tiny village near Brahmanbaria, a subdivisional (now a district of Bangladesh) town in the erstwhile district of Tipperah in East Bengal. My father, a physicist by training, and then a foreman in Survey of India’s Mathematical Instruments Office, had been living in Calcutta for many years when I was born, and my immediate family did not suffer in any significant way as a result of the partition of Bengal and the resultant exodus.

My only claim to any kind of skill in this subject is that certain aspects of the exodus have been troubling me since my childhood, and I have tried to read up all I could on the subject. As I have said earlier, there is precious little, and quite a bit of it in Bangla, which being my mother tongue I had no difficulty with.

As I am not trained or equipped to write History I shall not claim that this book constitutes History. It could perhaps qualify as a political essay. I can however, justifiably contend that it contains an organised presentation of a large number of hitherto unpublished facts, and some published only in Bangla. It also contains inferences from facts, mostly my own, but also of others from published works, interspersed with the facts. And finally, it contains a full chapter on the hiding of history, and why and how this was done.

Now, what happened to trigger my interest in the subject was that when I was a child of eight or so, I had an occasion to pass through the Sealdah railway station of Calcutta sometime in 1952 or 1953. The Sealdah railway terminus was the hub of the railway network that then connected Calcutta to East Bengal, and the foyer and the forecourt of station in those days was something that would put even the present-day squalor of my home town to shame. I saw, with those eyes that only a child has, an emaciated family of some six or seven huddled in a space of about forty square feet in which the mother was trying to nurse a howling baby (the udder must have been dry for several days, I realised much later) while at the same time trying to cook some gruel from vegetable peelings on a fuel of semi-combustible garbage and pieces of rubber tyres. The rest of the family (a middle-aged man, a few naked boys and girls) lounged about listlessly, all within the said forty square feet, within a short distance of where they (and others) had relieved themselves. To this day I hold in my olfactory memory the putrid smells of the smoke from the cooking of the rotting vegetable, the stale urine, the smouldering garbage, the pungent burning-rubber smoke, the all-pervasive decay.

I was with my father, so I asked him who these people were. He said they were ‘refugees’, and upon some more insistent questioning from a precocious kid, let it be known, in steps and with some irritation (he was what is known in India as a ‘secular’ person) that they had been driven out of East Bengal because they were Hindus in a land of Muslims and had nowhere to go and were therefore here at the station.

I then asked him a question that totally discomfited him in a way I found rather strange, and he told me very brusquely to shut up. I was taken aback, for he was normally a very gentle person, and certainly not inclined to speak to his eight-year-old son that way. I did promptly shut up, but the question refused to go away. Now today, well into my fifties, I realise that whatever might have been the answer to the question, one can neither turn the clock back nor try to do what should have been done fifty years ago. On the other hand, it is totally dishonest, stupid, and even downright dangerous, to pretend that such things never happened. And yet that is what the country, including the East Bengali Hindus themselves, have been doing, for the sake of something that passes in India by the names of ‘communal harmony’ and ‘secularism’.

I realise that assailing this holy ghost of ‘communal harmony’ and 'secularism' may result immediately in my being dubbed ‘communal’ or ‘anti-Muslim’. Being called ‘communal’ by those who subscribe to the Left-Nehruvian concept of 'secularism' is something that I am prepared to live with, because I do not subscribe to that concept. However, in reply to the second possible charge I have searched my heart and have come up with the answer that I am not anti-Muslim. On the other hand I am decidedly anti-anti-Hindu. If that term did not exist before then I claim full credit for coining it.

To these champions of communal harmony I have quite a few questions to put:

Can ‘communal harmony’ justify denying mass-scale state-sponsored persecution, ethnic cleansing, arson, rape, murder and mayhem and the pauperisation of some eight million people – in fact denying history?

Should communal harmony encourage collective forgetfulness of a sordid chapter in the life of a people?

Would anyone, in the name of promoting German-Israeli or Jewish-Gentile goodwill, seriously consider denying that the holocaust took place? Or, in the interest of good relations between Blacks and Whites, hide the stories of slavery and the unimaginable human rights violations against Blacks that took place in the U. S. South in the years of racial segregation and in South Africa during the apartheid era?

Is it not infinitely more preferable in such cases to come out with what happened, analyse the reasons (including the reasons for denial, if any), and then say, in the manner of the wall at the former concentration camp at Dachau : “Plus Jamais, Nie Wieder, Nikogda Bolshiy, Never Again”?

Is it not one of the purposes of writing History to learn lessons for the future?

And is it not possible, if such lessons are not learnt, that History might truly repeat itself, and some future generation of Hindus of West Bengal at some date in the future might find themselves in the same plight, with nowhere further west to go?

I think it is quite possible. Some signs are already visible. Hence this book.

T. R.

“Khoma jetha kheen durbolota
He rudro, nishthur jeno hote pari totha
Tomar adeshey. Jeno roshonay momo
Shottobakko jholi uthe khorokhorgoshomo
Tomar ingitey. Jeno raakhi tobo maan
Tomar bicharashoney loye nij sthan
Onnay je kore ar onnay je shohe
Tobo ghrina tare jeno trinoshomo dohe”

TRANSLATION
(Where forgiveness is but weakness, O Lord,
May I have the strength, by your command, to be merciless
May the truth flash from my mouth, like a cutlass, at your bidding.
May I do you honour by doing justice, as you would have done.
Let your divine ire burn those that do wrong
and also those that suffer wrongs in silence)

- "Nyaydondo : Noibedyo" : Rabindra Nath Tagore

Klaivyam masmagamah Partha na etat tvayee upapadyate
Kshudram hridayadaurvalyam tyakta uttishthata parantapa

(O Partha (Arjuna)! This frailty does not become you! Get rid of your petty weaknesses and stand up to fight)

- Lord Krishna, Bhagavad Gita, II.3

There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one's native land
- Euripedes, 431 B.C

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Chapter 1

THE BACKGROUND : PRE-PARTITION BENGALI SOCIETY

This is a strange story of persecution, ethnic cleansing based on religion, related politics and en masse delusion, partly self-induced. As stories of persecutions in recent times go, the story is quite horrible, though by no means unparalleled. The Jews had been subject to much worse persecution in Europe through the ages, which reached its climax in Hitler’s Germany ; so had the Blacks in the segregation-era U. S. South and in apartheid-era South Africa, the Armenians in Turkey, Native Americans in the United States, Aborigenes in Australia. What Pol Pot, the Maoist dictator, did to his fellow Cambodians was many times more horrendous. The phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ was coined during the expulsion of Bosnian or Albanian Muslims from the Serb-dominated areas of Bosnia or Kosovo, in the Nineteen-nineties. That ethnic cleansing was also quite horrible. Politics, mainly of self-aggrandizement of a few petty (and petty-minded) leaders at the cost of a hapless multitude is at the root of all these, and is an unfortunate, though essential, element. Also, not at all unusual.

It is in the delusional element that this story takes the cake. Certainly very few times in human history, probably never, have a group of people been subjected to mass destruction, eviction, arson, pillage, murder, bestiality, mayhem and massacre, and especially rape and brutalisation of their womenfolk, and thereafter have been told, partly by some of their own compatriots and leaders but also by others, that all this never happened. That in the interest of something very laudable called ‘communal harmony’, this is best forgotten, the faster the better, so that once the generation that went through it dies away, there would remain no records and no memory, neither smriti nor shruti. Then there is self-created or self-magnified guilt. If it happened at all, it was the victims’ own fault, because the victims (when they were not victims) didn’t talk nicely to the poor rapists and murderers (when they were not rapists and murderers), made them stand outside the house while they talked to them (Musolmandere amra daoay uthte dei nai, niche dara karaiya katha kaitam) ; aren’t rape and murder just punishment for such behaviour? Finally there is transfer of guilt. If there was anyone to blame for this it was not the people who took part in the mayhem and rape, but the people who gave refuge to the victims, because the refuge they gave was not good enough. That the villains were only apparently so, and the victims were damned anyway. That the real blame belonged not to the perpetrators, but to those who had led them astray (namely the British), and taught them to hate people who did not profess the same religion. That copious tears ought to be shed for the people after they were dispossessed and beaten, but looking at who had beaten and dispossessed them, and how, was verboten. All in the name of communal harmony, of course.

In short this is a story of standing logic and common sense on its head ; and of hiding the truth, passing off half-truths as the truth, adding a lot of garbage to the truth. The result of all this is that the exodus of Hindus from East Bengal does not figure in the list of great refugee movements of the world, although some eight million moved out – more than the present population of Switzerland. Even an approximate figure is not officially available. On the other hand, much smaller refugee movements such as those of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda and Timor have found a place in the annals of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Yes, there was one phase of movement which has found a place in the records. It is the exodus of Bengali Hindus and Muslims from erstwhile East Pakistan to India (mainly West Bengal) in the wake of Pakistani crackdown during the Bangladesh Liberation War. But not the exodus of the Hindus over the preceding twenty-three years.

But let us put first things first and take a look at the protagonists.

Bengalis are a people who speak the language Bengali, or Bangla, and had been living in Bengal, a province of the erstwhile British India. Calcutta was the capital of Bengal, and the city also used to double as the capital of British India till 1911 when it lost that honour to New Delhi. They still live there, that is to say in the land mass which once formed Bengal, with some serious redistribution of population with which this book is vitally concerned. The only difference is that there is no longer any place called Bengal. What was once Bengal is now divided principally into two parts, the Indian state of West Bengal and the Sovereign Republic of Bangladesh.

It cannot be said that the Bengalis as a people, are not worthy of note. It has been said that they are possessed of considerable intellectual prowess, alertness and openness of mind. It has also been said that they are irritable, indolent, argumentative, and tend to defy authority without any reason at all. Going by quite objective standards however, quite a few Bengalis have made their prominent marks in this world. Of the five ethnic Indians who have so far been awarded the Nobel Prize, namely Rabindra Nath Tagore[1], C.V.Raman[2], Hargobind Khorana[3], S. Chandrasekhar[4] and Amartya Sen[5], (not counting Mother Teresa[6]) two are Bengalis – Bengali Hindus actually, the first and the last. The third and the fourth are full-blooded Indians as well as Indian-born, though they later became U.S. citizens. Apart from these Nobel Laureates, Bengal can boast of such intellectual giants in different walks of life as the monk Swami Vivekananda[7], the novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee[8], the philosopher and mystic Sri Aurobindo[9], the scientists Jagadis Chandra Bose[10] and Satyendra Nath Bose[11], the archaeologist Rakhaldas Banerjee[12], the jurist Radha Binode Pal[13], to name but very few.

One feature that distinguishes Bengalis is that they are unusually proud of, and exhibit an extraordinary attachment to their language, Bangla. The Bangla language is one of the several North Indian tongues descended from Prakrit and Sanskrit, and is written in a script that is very close to Devnagri, the script in which Hindi is written. The script is shared by the Assamese and Manipuri languages also. The language had absorbed a large number of Arabic and Persian words along the way, but retains its essential Sanskrit base. The language is a soft and mellifluous one, and its vowels are pronounced through rounded lips.

The Bengalis of the province of Bengal were however, not a monolithic lot, but were vertically divided by religion. According to the 1941 census 53.4 per cent of the Bengalis were Muslims and the rest Hindus, with a minuscule proportion of Buddhists and Christians thrown in. The province was divided into five administrative divisions, which were further subdivided into districts, as follows : Presidency division, consisting of the districts of 24-Parganas, Nadia, Murshidabad, Jessore and Khulna and the Presidency town of Calcutta ; Burdwan division, with the districts of Howrah, Hooghly, Midnapore, Bankura, Burdwan and Birbhum ; Rajshahi division, with the districts of Rajshahi, Pabna, Malda, Dinajpur, Bogra, Rangpur, Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling ; Dacca division, with the districts of Dacca, Faridpur, Barisal and Mymensingh (the largest district in British India) ; and Chittagong division with the districts of Chittagong, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Noakhali and Tipperah. Apart from these districts of Bengal, the people of Sylhet district of Assam, adjoining the Tipperah and Mymensingh districts of Bengal, those of the princely state of Cooch Behar adjoining Jalpaiguri and Rangpur, and a large number among the people of the princely state of Tripura, and among those of the districts of Manbhum and Singhbhum in Bihar also largely spoke Bangla, and therefore were Bengalis. A map of the erstwhile province of Bengal, as it existed till the midnight of 14th August 1947 is at Fig. 1. The Bangla-speaking areas outside Bengal are also shown in the same map.

M A P - F I G.1

There was a vague and unofficial division of the province into three parts : East, West and North. West included the Presidency and Burdwan divisions ; North, the Rajshahi division ; and East, the Dacca and Chittagong divisions. There were substantial differences in the geography and the culture of the three parts. The West, particularly Burdwan division, had no navigable rivers, and some parts of the division were semi-arid ; however, the division had very large reserves of coal in its Ranigunge coalfields which had sired a large number of heavy industries in the region, including an integrated steel plant at Burnpur. The North was bounded by two great rivers, Padma and Jamuna (different from the Jumna or Yamuna which flows by Delhi and Agra ; this Jamuna is the Bengali incarnation of the mighty Brahmaputra of Assam). The region was criss-crossed by a number of swift-flowing tributaries of the two rivers. The East, as opposed to the two, was a low-lying flood plain, being a delta created by three huge rivers : Ganga, a snow-fed river, rechristened after entering Bengal as Padma; Brahmaputra, ditto, Jamuna ; and Meghna, a short but wide river fed only by rain, but from some of the rainiest places in the world, including Cherrapunjee. Certainly the major rivers, and practically all their tributaries and distributaries were navigable right through the year. In fact the usual means of locomotion in British East Bengal used to be the country boat, the nouka.

By some quirk of demography, West Bengal was Hindu-majority while East and North Bengal were Muslim-majority. This is quite paradoxical, if one considers the balance between the two religions in the South Asian subcontinent. If one travelled from West to East along the vast land mass known as Indo-Gangetic plain (Aryavarta) in those pre-partition days, when there were some Hindus and some Muslims in every part of the plain, one would have observed that the proportion of Muslims in the population would go on reducing as one went east. Thus, the North-West Frontier Province, Baluchistan and Sind were overwhelmingly Muslim ; Punjab was balanced, with a Muslim majority tapering off as one went from Attock to Ambala, west to east within the province ; and the United Provinces and Bihar were overwhelmingly Hindu. Then how is it that suddenly the pattern reversed itself in East and North Bengal, and then again fell into place in the easternmost province of British India, namely Assam? This question had perplexed Syed Mujtabaa Ali[14] who had come to the conclusion that this was due to the arrival of Arab traders in the coastal towns of East Bengal, in the Chittagong-Barisal stretch who had settled down and brought and spread their faith in much the same way as they did in the Malabar region of present-day Kerala, or in Malaysia or Indonesia. Annada Sankar Ray[15] writes in his Jukto Bonger Sriti (Memoirs of United Bengal)[16] that a tradition existed in Chittagong of writing Bangla in Arabic script. He attributes it to maritime trade relations between Chittagong and Arabia from the pre-Islamic period.

The theory of Islam being spread by this trade-and-contact route, rather than by the conquest-and-conversion route, is plausible, and also attractive, but is probably not correct. Plausible, because a similar phenomenon was noticed in the case of a number of Portuguese who had settled down in those parts, and had created Roman Catholic pockets. Buddhadeb Bose[17] writes in the first part of his autobiography Amar Chhelebela (Bengali) that he had seen a person of almost pure Portuguese blood in the coastal town of Noakhali in the 1920s who spoke the usual Noakhali dialect. Gopal Haldar, in his reminiscences[18] of pre-partition Noakhali mentions two villages adjoining Noakhali town called Shahebghata (literally, wharf of the Europeans) and Ezbelia (Isabella?), inhabited by ordinary-looking folk but of the Catholic faith, and with names like Gonsalves and Fernandes. This theory, on the other hand, is probably not correct, because firstly, it cannot explain how faraway places in North Bengal, such as Rangpur and Dinajpur became Muslim-majority, while places more accessible on the riverine route, such as Lower Assam, did not ; also why the Portuguese, who were no less proselytizers than the Arabs, could not spread their faith. Finally, the theory is probably not correct because there is a better explanation.

That explanation is that this region, along with large parts of the rest of India and places as far west and north as modern-day Afghanistan and Xinjiang, had become entirely Buddhist, and by the sixth century or so this Buddhism had also become adulterated with diverse forms of animism, occult practices, promiscuity, and the like, something in the nature of what is known in Hinduism as vamachara, and had degenerated into a loose faith. The great Acharya Sankara set out on foot from faraway Kerala to set right this state of affairs and in a life of only 32 years got the country firmly back to the Hindu fold. It is possible that the Acharya could not reach the eastern parts of Bengal because of the relative inaccessibility of the delta. In fact the delta of Eastern Bengal was known in legend as Pandavavarjita Desha -- the land that even the Pandavas avoided[19]. The population therefore remained Buddhist-Animist, and easily converted to Islam when the marauders from the west came to Bengal. Extensive ruins of Buddhist monasteries are found at Paharpur and Mahasthangarh in the northern parts of present-day Bangladesh. The Buddhist priest Dipankar Srigyan had set out from a village called Bajrajogini near Dacca to convert the whole of Tibet to Buddhism. Till today Hindu Bengalis, when they choose to be abusive, refer to Muslims by the term Neray (a diminutive of Naraa, meaning shaven-headed). And a lot of Bengali Muslims do tonsure their heads, which is believed to be a custom inherited by them from the Buddhist viharas (monasteries) which their ancestors atttended. All these bear eloquent testimony to the hold of Buddhism in East Bengal.

Assam, on the other hand, remained Hindu and did not convert to Islam because of the preachings of the great Vaishnavite guru Shankara Deva (not the same as the sage of the same name from Kerala) who gave a firm faith within the Hindu fold to the Assamese. In fact the Ahoms, who came from Thailand to settle in and rule Upper Assam, embraced Hinduism and remained Hindu.

The Muslims of East Bengal are therefore, in all probability, converts mostly from Buddhism-Animism and not from Hinduism. This view is also held by the eminent historian Vincent Smith[20], among others. The argument finds great support from the fact that Buddhism has yielded elsewhere, as it did in East Bengal, much more easily to Islam than Sanatan (Orthodox) Hinduism. Thus once-Buddhist Afghanistan and Xinjiang eventually became totally Muslim, while Hindu India did not. Similarly, Buddhist East Bengal became Muslim-majority, while lands to the west, which had become Hindu under the influence of Sankara remained Hindu.

Ashok Mitra[21] of the Indian Civil Service[22] has advanced a very different theory[23] which he attributes to his Gurus in Anthropology and Demography, respectively Jatindra Mohan Datta and Sailendra Nath Sengupta[24]. According to him these two gentlemen worked out the total number of Muslims and Christians that had come to India from outside upto the 17th century. They then extrapolated this figure to 1951 using the prevailing rate of increase in population. Deducting the result from the total number of Muslims in India and Pakistan they came to the conclusion, among others, that ninety-five percent of the Bengali Muslims had been Hindus in the last, that is the nineteenth century. This is very interesting, but leads to a number of total absurdities. First, it is inconceivable that the number of Hindus converting to Islam would be more in the British age than in the Moghul or Nawabi age. There were several incentives to convert during those earlier ages, while there were only disincentives during the British times, at least upto the beginning of this century. Secondly any estimate of the total number of Muslims who entered India might be made, if at all, with some difficulty, but to estimate how many of them entered Bengal seems impossible. How they surmounted this obstacle is not mentioned in Ashok Mitra’s book. Thirdly, this theory does not explain the anomaly of sudden increase in Muslim population in East Bengal as one goes from West to East.. Lastly, it presupposes that the rate of growth of population is the same among Hindus and Muslims whereas in fact it is not so ; the latter was always more than the former. Ashok Mitra does not endorse the conclusions of his Gurus, but cites them without comment. Neither Syed Mujtabaa Ali nor Annada Sankar Ray are confident that their views are correct or even supported by a substantial historical school.

M.R.Akhtar Mukul, a prominent present-day Bangladeshi intellectual, has tried an explanation in his book 'Purbapurusher Sandhane' (in Bangla, meaning 'In Search of Our Ancestors') [25]. In this book also he has supported the contention that the Muslims of East and North Bengal are mostly converts from Buddhists. He has commented upon the absence of recorded history of Bengalis in the period between the decline of Buddhism in India and the coming of Sufi[26] saints to Bengal. Finally he has also concluded that the simple appeal of the Sufis, who preached a form of Islam in which Allah, the Muslim God, was looked upon as an object of love rather than fear, proved to be irresistible to the massses of Eastern Bengal. These masses, according to him, were at the lower end of the caste spectrum under the Brahminical hierarchy, and were an oppressed lot. They eagerly embraced the egalitarianism of Islam, and that is how Eastern Bengal became Muslim majority.

While the theory is basically in tune with the likely theory postulated earlier, Mukul has not been explicit as to whether the masses first converted from Buddhism to Hinduism, and then to Islam or directly from Buddhism to Islam. His emphasis on the presumed Brahminical oppression suggests the first, while in all probability the second is what had actually happened. In his analysis as well as the interview that this author had with him (see Chapter 10) Mukul had also betrayed a strong dislike for Hinduism, or what he calls the 'Brahminical religion'. From the the annihilation of Buddhism in the plains of India (which has been referred to earlier in connection with the travels of Acharya Sankara) he has conjectured that Buddhists were also annihilated all over India, without revealing any basis for such a presumption, and without taking any account of the fact that ruins of Buddhist shrines, like Mahasthangarh in North Bengal or Nalanda in Bihar, had existed through the Hindu period, to this day without being vandalised. And last of all, his theory does not explain why what happened in Eastern Bengal did not happen in western part of Bengal, Magadh or Mithila regions (now parts of the Indian state of Bihar) or Avadh, Tirhut, or Rohilkhand (now parts of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh) - after all the Sufis could not have reached Eastern Bengal without passing through these regions, and there is no reason why the Sufis would not have tried their proselytisation in these parts. What, then, is the reason why the people responded to the Sufis in Eastern Bengal while they did not do so in such large numbers in Western Bengal, Magadh, Mithila, Avadh or Rohilkhand? The only plausible reason appears to be the extremely tenacious hold of Sanatan Dharma, as opposed to the looseness of the Buddhist-animist faith.

It appears that the subject has not been adequately researched. It is doubtless a very interesting topic of demographic research but the results, whatever they may be, may cause trouble, which may explain the reluctance to research.

The pattern of population in pre-1947 Bengal was roughly as follows : the province had one huge city and its industrial-commercial hub, its capital Calcutta. The rest of the province was known as moffussil, a region generally looked down upon by the inhabitants of the big city. In this region there were a few minor towns, such as Dacca, Chittagong and Darjeeling, but the rest was predominantly rural. As already said, the western part of the province, including Calcutta, was Hindu-majority while the north and the east were predominantly Muslim. Even here there was an interesting pattern. The towns of even the east and the north, such as Dacca, Mymensingh, Chittagong, and Rajshahi, were all Hindu-dominated. Meghnad Saha[27] in a speech before the Indian Parliament had said “ . . . the city of Dacca, the biggest city in Eastern Pakistan, it had a population of 200,000 before partition. 70 per cent of it were Hindus --- 140,000. They owned 80 percent of the houses there. . . . . I know it because I come from Dacca”. The same position is stated by Annada Sankar Ray. The countryside on the other hand, was overwhelmingly Muslim.

Bhabatosh Dutt[28] writes of the vibrant life the Hindus had in the pre-partition East Bengal towns. “In Daulatpur (a small town in Khulna district where he spent a part of his boyhood) a great attraction for us boys was the ‘Boikali’ or ‘Thakurer Shital’, sweets and coconut milk distributed at the temple of Dadhivamana every evening during the month of Baisakh (mid-April to mid-May) . . . . College students used to celebrate Saraswati Puja with great pomp and pageantry, and used to decorate the temple with branches of trees and flowers”. About Dacca, where he used to live in the suburb of Wari, he writes “Durga Puja was not celebrated in Dacca in public pandals as it is now done in Calcutta. We used to go to Moishundi, Sutrapur and the Ramakrishna Mission beyond Tikatuli to see Durga Puja. But the main puja in Vaishnavite Dacca was not Durga Puja but the famed Jhulan and Janmashtami processions taken out from Nawabpur and Islampur. The most memorable part of these two processions were the shong (clowns) that used to be at their heads and used to abuse each other”. When he moved to Burdwan in West Bengal to teach at the Raj College in 1933 he found it a great comedown from the rich and vibrant cultural life of the towns of East Bengal.

The Hindus of East Bengal were great promoters of education. Every major town in East Bengal could boast of a school or a college founded by private charity of Hindus. After partition the names of these institutions were not changed, but simply abbreviated, with the result that the names of their founders were virtually lost. Thus, Brajamohan College of Barisal, Anandamohan College of Mymensingh and Murarichand College of Sylhet respectively became faceless, meaningless, B.M. College, A.M. College and M.C. College.

The land tenancy system in British Bengal was the familiar Zamindari system established by the ‘Permanent Settlement’ of Lord Cornwallis, whereby land revenue was to be collected from cultivators or ryots by Zamindars or Landlords, and deposited with the district collector by sunset on a particular day, failing which the right to the Zamindari would lapse, and the entire fief of the Zamindar would be put to auction. Later the system was further formalised by enactment of the Bengal Tenancy Act. Most, though by no means all, of the Zamindars even in the east and the north were Hindus, and the major Zamindars, whether Hindu or Muslim, were among the most respected members of their respective communities. Some of these Zamindars, such as those of Dacca or Burdwan, were big enough to be called Nawab or Maharajah, depending on whether they were Muslim or Hindu respectively.

In terms of occupation and distribution of wealth there was great imbalance. While there were a substantial number of Muslim Zamindars, the professions and the lower echelons of the civil services were overwhelmingly Hindu (the higher echelons were largely British) and that too confined to three higher castes of Brahmin, Kayastha, and Baidya. The Probashi magazine in the 1930s, a respected Bengali monthly of those days, published a survey which showed that it was in only two occupations out of some twenty-odd that Muslim outnumbered Hindus : the common cultivator and the beggar. Thus there was a distinct middle class among the Hindus, but only the rich and the poor among the Muslims.

Now who was responsible for the majority community, namely the Muslims, being so far backward compared to the Hindus? Certainly not the Hindus, although that is an impression cleverly sought to be created by a section of post-partition Hindus as a part of the delusional exercise. The fact of the matter was (here we are talking about the all-India position) that the Muslims, upon being overthrown by the British from the power that they had enjoyed during the last seven hundred years or so, chose to withdraw into a collective cocoon, and doggedly refused to accept western thoughts. The Hindus, on the other hand, with their tradition of plurality of culture, eagerly embraced what was given to them by way of western culture by the British – both the good and the bad. As a result, when the British wanted to recruit Indians to man the lower ranks of the burgeoning bureaucracy, for which a rudimentary knowledge of the English language was essential, only Hindus were available. There were some exceptions to this rule, such as Sir Syed Ahmed’s establishing of the Aligarh Muslim University, but by and large Muslim leaders advocated a retrogressive path and encouraged all believers to shun western thoughts.

Was the position in Bengal any different than this all-India picture? It appears that it was, in some respects at least. It appears that the Bengali Muslim was slightly ashamed to be Bengali. The Bengali Muslim spoke Muslim Bangla, which differed slightly (in those days) from standard Bangla in the large number of Arabic and Persian words thrown in. This is not to say that standard Bangla did not have Arabic and Persian words. It had many, but Muslim Bangla had quite a few more, particularly in regard to salutations and familial relationships, and in fields that had anything to do with religion. One tell-tale word is the word for water, which to all Bengali Hindus is Jol, and to all Bengali Muslims is Pani. Both variants of the language was replete with Arabic and Persian words such as Ain-Kanoon (Law), Purdah (Curtain), Munshi (Clerk). A Hindu meeting another would greet him by saying Namoshkar, and would address a younger person in a letter as Kalyanieshu, while a Muslim would say Salaam Alaiqum and Doabareshu under similar situations. To a Hindu one’s mother’s sister would be called Mashi, father’s sister Pishi, and elder sister’s husband Jamaibabu, while to a Muslim they would respectively be called Khala, Fufa and Dulhabhai. However the schism between the two variants of the language was not such that one community could not understand the other.

The Bengali Muslim in those days was embarrassed of the fact that he spoke Bangla, and not Urdu which was the written language of all Muslims of the Aryavarta, the entire stretch of North India from Bihar to the Northwest frontier, and the written and spoken language of the Muslims of the United Provinces. Part of the reason for the embarrassment was the fact that Bangla, even the Muslim variant, has its foundations solidly in the Indian classical language Sanskrit, and is written in a typical North Indian script closely related to Devnagri (in which Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi and Nepali are written), and is therefore essentially Hindu. Urdu, on the other hand, is actually Persian words put in Hindi grammar (quite like Yiddish, which is Hebrew words into German grammar, and Afrikaans, Bantu words into Dutch grammar) and written in the Qoranic or Arabic script, and is, therefore, considered essentially Muslim. In his inimitable work of humour in Bangla Birinchi Baba, Rajshekhar Bose[29] writes of a humble Muslim coachman Bachhiraddi, who hailed from Faridpur (a small town in East Bengal in the district of the same name). Bachhiraddi claimed that his real name was “Mredam Khan” (an imposing but improbable name), and he was not really from Faridpur but from “Arabia (also known as Turkh), where everyone wore Lungis[30] and spoke Urdu” (an absurd statement). In this ridiculous, confused and pathetic statement of an illiterate coachman lay the shame of being a Bengali Muslim of those days. This shame was further accentuated by the horizontal division of Bengali Muslim society into Ashraf and Atrap, which has been described later in this chapter.

Rafiuddin Ahmed, a Bengali Muslim himself, is even more forthright. In his short but important work ‘The Bengal Muslims 1871-1906 : A Quest for Identity’ he writes “A dominant feature of the nineteenth-century Islamisation was the attempted rejection of virtually all that was Bengali in the life of a Muslim as being incompatible with the ideas and principles of Islam. The preachers’ conception of Islamic polity was based on a vague notion of Middle Eastern values, and it was their dream so to transform the lives of the ordinary Muslims that they conformed exclusively to this trans-Indian pattern”[31]. This is actually in keeping with the conflicts that Islam has engendered among the converted peoples, something observed with astounding clarity by the famous author Sir Vidia S. Naipaul (see Chapter 11 for a complete quotation).

The language problem of the Bengali Muslims sometimes gave rise to strange results. Annada Sankar Ray writes of the electoral contest between the patrician Urdu-speaking Khwaja Nazimuddin[32] and the plebian Bangla dialect-speaking Fazlul Haq[33]. Khwaja Nazimuddin, according to Annada Sankar, spoke atrocious Bangla, and just for that reason lost to Fazlul Haq despite having the backing of the powerful governor of Bengal, Sir John Anderson.

The two communities stood strictly parallel and separate like the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. There was very limited interaction between the two at the social level . There were said to be some exceptions, notably in Sylhet, probably as a result of higher literacy there among Muslims. This author had heard from her mother that when her family were the tenants of a Muslim houseowner in Sylhet town, one of the wives of the houseowner was a regular visitor to their house. Nirad C. Chaudhuri[34] observed in his ‘Autobiography of an Unknown Indian’ that in his childhood he found Hindu society to be indifferent to Muslims, but as early as in 1907 hostilities developed, and there was talk of attacks by Muslims upon Hindus at Kishorganj and Kalikachchha[35]. Among the economically stronger and the culturally more thriving Hindus, even touching a Muslim was considered sinful, to be washed away with cowdung and holy water from the River Ganga (following the exodus of Hindus from East Bengal, the apologists for the Muslims have tried to explain that mass rape, murder and mayhem was just punishment for such behaviour). To a Muslim a Hindu was an infidel, a non-believer who indulged in the hateful practice of idolatry, and also economically an exploiter and oppressor. Beef, which the Muslims ate with gusto, was the embodiment of everything sinful to the Hindus, because it involved killing of the cow which the Hindus considered to be their mother. Both communities ate goat meat, but the Hindu had to have the goat slaughtered by severing the head from the body in one chop, while the Muslim had to have it Halal, a process in which the throat of the goat is slit and it is left to die bleeding. To the Hindu the Muslim was mlechchha or Jobon (Yavan), Neray, to the Muslim the Hindu was kafer, na-pak, malaun (all derogatory terms, like Nigger, Kike, or Polack in the United States, used to denote Americans of African, Jewish or Polish ancestry)[36].

Chaudhuri further describes[37] his own revelations later in life, when he was surprised to find that he himself, in spite of having come from deep inside Muslim-majority East Bengal, had only limited knowledge of their society. He recalls an encounter with rural Muslim clerics, whom he calls ‘the very set of men who were the most active promoters of Muslim group-consciousness’. This was when he was the secretary to Sarat Chandra Bose[38], elder brother of Subhas Chandra Bose[39], and the president of the Congress in Bengal in the late thirties, and the Congress was trying to carry out a ‘Mass Contact Movement’ in order to endear itself to the Muslim masses of Bengal. He describes the encounter thus : “One day I saw a procession of Muslim divines trooping into Sarat babu’s[40] house. I was quite familiar with the modern Muslim dress, but had no idea that these learned Muslims wore different clothes. They did, for they had green gowns on and big turbans on their heads. . . . . . even at Kishorganj in my young days I had never seen such figures. Their faces were grave, even stern. One face struck me very forcibly. It was pinched and peevish, but of an incredible ferocity. The eyes were large, black and burning, and in that emaciated face they looked even blacker and larger. His parrot-green gown, too was more resplendent than the others, but being of very cheap satin looked garish. He looked like an ill-dressed Robespierre, the sea-green Incorruptible. . . .”

It almost appeared that whenever the two communities showed any signs of coming closer, somebody or other rose to prise them apart. Titu Meer, a Muslim chieftain who won some fame in the 1830s trying to resist British troops from a fortress built of bamboos, went around teaching Muslims to have Arabic names, grow four-finger-long beards, and wear lungis instead of dhotis so that they would stand apart from the Hindus. Apparently not all Muslims listened to him then – Annada Sankar Ray mentions that as late as in 1937 he had found Muslim gentlemen wearing dhotis in Kushtia, a town in present-day Bangladesh. This is unheard of today in Bangladesh and extremely rare in West Bengal. Moulana Akram Khan, a converted Hindu Brahmin, editor of a Bangla magazine called Mohammadi, tried to doctor standard Bangla spelling so as to give it a Muslim flavour.

This is not to say that there was none who tried to bring the two communities together, only that they were too feeble, too few and too far between. It must be said that because of the basic plurality of the Hindu religion such persons were more numerous among the Hindus, although there were quite a few Muslims too. One such person was the poet Rabindranath Tagore who was also a medium-sized Zamindar. Almost all the cultivators in his Zamindaries of Patisar and Shahzadpur were Muslim. It was he who, upon his taking over as Zamindar, abolished segregation in the seating arrangements at official functions. He had said, in his inaugural address to his tenantry, that the Sheikhs (meaning Muslims, which was synonymous in the context with the poor cultivators) have to be saved from the clutches of the Sahas (meaning the Hindu moneylending class). On the political front the Congress party, and Fazlul Haq’s Krishak Proja Party, though generally identified with Hindus and Muslims respectively, tried to preach amity, however half-heartedly or ineffectively, between the communities, while the Muslim League was unabashedly anti-Hindu. The Hindu Mahasabha[41], led by Syama Prasad Mookerjee was a pro-Hindu party, but did not preach anti-Muslimism in any way (following independence it had been an irresistible temptation for the Nehruvian-secularist and negationist writers to equate Hindu Mahasabha with the Muslim League – more on this subject later).

There were a handful of Muslims in the field of literature and education who tried their best in this respect. Syed Mujtabaa Ali has already been mentioned. The poet Kazi Nazrul Islam,[42] the Hindusthani classical music maestro Alauddin Khan, the educationists Kazi Abdul Wadud and Rezaul Karim, the publisher Abdul Aziz Al-Aman and many others – all of them tried to preach brotherhood and amity in their own way. One notable figure in this regard was S.Wajed Ali[43]. One of his very poignant stories describes his wonderment when, after returning to a neighbourhood he had lived in many years ago, he heard a grocer reading the Ramayana to his son exactly the same way (he described it as a Snake-charmer's voice) he heard it many years ago. His comment was "The same tradition carries on, unbroken". In his Collection of Essays one finds a rare clarity of vision, an unusual catholicity of outlook. He does not mince words in attacking the religious bigots known as 'Kathmollahs', the purdah system, the vitriolic attack by the fundamentalists upon the Hindus, even the belief that to attain salvation there is no other way but to embrace Islam[44].

Although the fields of education, art and culture was dominated by the Hindus, and the backwardness of the Muslims was manifest, yet when a rare Muslim attained prominence in these fields the Hindus did not grudge them appreciation. Abul Mansur Ahmad, a prominent politician of the pre-independence and East Pakistan era and later a Cabinet Minister in Pakistan's Central Government led by H.S.Suhrawardy, (more on this gentleman in Chapter 3 onwards) recalled the period of his teaching at National School at Mymensingh in the 1920s. During this period he used to sport a beard, and wear a Lungi and a cap, and yet his high caste Hindu students would touch his feet when they met him on the streets - such was his popularity as a teacher. Abul Mansur Ahmad was also full of praise for a number of Hindu gentlemen in high stations for their catholicity of outlook. He mentions a tour by Jatindra Narayan Acharya Chaudhuri, Zamindar of Muktagachha (a very important Zamindari) to his village when he was only a boy. News of Abul Mansur's precocity (he had spoken insolently to the Zamindar's manager, because that manager had spoken similarly to Mansur's father and uncle) had reached the Zamindar's ears, and the Zamindar sent for him. Abul however refused to go - an unimaginable offence in those days, and remarked that the Zamindar could come to him if he wished to. The Zamindar was however vastly amused at this, and compared Mansur to the Hindu God Krishna, who as a boy had slain his uncle, the tyrant king Kangsa of Mathura. Abul Mansur Ahmad mentions a number of similar instances in which his daring but rightful stand was vindicated by his Hindu superiors through their sense of justice and fair play[45].

The sad part of the story is that people like Syed Mujtabaa Ali, Kazi Nazrul Islam Alauddin Khan, Kazi Abdul Wadud, Rezaul Karim, Abdul Aziz Al-Aman, S.Wajed Ali and Abul Mansur Ahmad were not the rule but the exception. A hundred of these well-meaning Muslim intellectuals were not equal to one fire-breathing Moulvi who could inflame passions among the faithful and against the infidels.

The mistrust that existed between the communities was bad enough, but it was fanned to the maximum extent possible by the British in pursuance of their ‘divide and rule’ policy. The activities of people like Sir Bamfylde Fuller, sometime governor of the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, have been described in the next chapter which will give some idea of the misdeeds of the British in this field. However the picture that historians in the post-independence Nehruvian-secularist and negationist era mentioned above have tried to draw – that the two communities were living in perfect friendship and harmony till the big bad wolf, namely the British, landed among them, is just a lot of wishful thinking, and probably worse. Equally unrealistic is their overemphasis on the existence of certain deities (such as Bonbibi of the Sundarbans, Satyapir, etc.) worshipped by both communities, and of certain minuscule in-between communities, such as Baul, Kortabhoja, Sahebdhoni and others.

A caveat must be entered at this stage. Because the two communities in Bengal grew and functioned separately or did not trust each other does not necessarily mean that the relation between the two were always hostile. In fact for most of the time it was neither friendly nor hostile – which is normal among men who mind their own businesses. However, and this is a very important however, it was possible to inflame communal passions among Muslims in the name of their religion very easily, and this was done very frequently. This was anything but easy among Hindus. The reason for this difference is twofold. Firstly, because of traditions and the no-alternative nature of Islam – Islam was spread by conquest, whereas Hinduism was spread by assimilation ; and also if one were a Muslim one believed in the teachings of the religion all the way – unlike in Hinduism, there are no grey areas. And secondly worship for Muslims being a community affair, and a religious compulsion five times every day at the local mosque, it was easy to address a large number, especially on Fridays, without making any special arrangements. It was this logistical advantage and this forum that were unabashedly made use of by the Hindu-baiting politicians, which ultimately resulted in the Hindus having to leave East Bengal.

As if this vertical division was not bad enough, both societies were further stratified horizontally, and that too in not one but two ways, that is socially and economically. The bane of Hindu society, caste distinctions, were the basis of the social division in that society. At the very top were the three upper castes, Brahmin, Kayastha and Baidya, followed by the intermediate castes such as Baishya Saha, Mahishya, Aguri etc., and finally at the bottom the lower castes such as Kaibarta, Napit, Dhopa, Bagdi, Hari, Dom etc.. An impression has gained ground that Bengali Muslims are a completely homogeneous lot but that is very far from the truth. Although practically all Hanafi Sunnis, the entire Muslim society was horizontally divided (and probably still is, if the writer Syed Mustafa Siraz[46] is to be believed) between Ashraf (people who claim, rightly or wrongly, Afghan, Turkish, Persian or at least Northwest Indian ancestry) and Atrap (Muslims who are unadulterated Bengalis)[47]. Upper-caste converted Hindus also tried, and often succeeded in getting themselves classified as Ashraf. The names used for the corresponding groups in Northern India are, respectively, Sharif and Ajlaf or Arzal. There were, and still are, other vague and regional caste distinctions among the Bengali Muslims, such as Gerosti, Badia, Jola (Julaha), Sheikh, Syed, Moghul, Pathan, Khondokar, Nikiri, etc. There are separate mosques for the different groups in many villages, and marriage across some of the caste barriers are very rare. Needless to say, the Ashraf are the upper caste. Some of them look down upon the Atrap to such an extent as to use for them the extremely derogatory term, Pati Neray – in fact an Ashraf Muslim minister of post-partition West Bengal used to use it for an Atrap colleague. This was the reason for Rajshekhar Bose’s poor Atrap Bachhiraddi’s claim that he was not a Bengali from Faridpur, but from Arabia (and therefore Ashraf), where everyone spoke Urdu!

As for the economic division, Hindu society had three tiers : Borolok (literally ‘big’ or rich men), Moddhobitto Bhodrolok (literally ‘middle class gentlemen’), and Chhotolok or Baaje Lok (literally small, or insignificant men). Zamindars have already been described. They formed bulk of the rich or Borolok class. Apart from the Zamindars there was also a small, but very powerful group of big businessmen and industrialists ( such as Sir R. N. Mookerjee[48] of Martin Burn fame, the Ship Chandlers and Stevedores of Calcutta Port, etc.), Barristers[49], and ICS men among the rich Hindu Bengalis. Although the term ‘Bhodrolok’ included the rich, it was especially reserved for the substantial middle class of Hindu Bengalis, the source of its literature, art, science and culture. These Bhodrolok were largely a salaried class doing clerical work at different tiers with the Government and the British ‘Merchant Offices’, but there was a fair number of professionals, mostly teachers, doctors and lawyers, among them. This salaried-professional bias was so strong in this community that small businessmen were actually looked down upon, and considered not quite Bhodrolok. The nouveau riche among them had a special name, Naboshakh. The rest, encompassing artisans, cultivators, blue-collar workers and the lot were lumped into the chhotolok or baaje lok category.

The Bhodrolok class was a fairly talented lot, and the Bengali intellectual giants born in the nineteenth century practically all came from this class, though there were quite a few from the Borolok class also. Raja Rammohun Roy, the social reformer who abolished sutee or widow-burning and established the Brahmo Samaj (a monotheistic faith in a formless God within the Hindu fold, founded on the Upanishads), and the great Nobel Laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore were both from the Borolok class. The rest – the social reformer and educationist Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the freedom fighters Surendra Nath Banerjee, C. R. Das, J. M. Sengupta, the seer Ramakrishna Paramahansa, the religious reformer Swami Vivekananda, the novelist and composer of the Vande Mataram Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the educationist Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, the scientists Sir J.C. Bose Sir P.C. Ray and S. N. Bose – to name only a few, were all born to this class. All these gentlemen were fairly evenly divided between East and West Bengal. There were quite a few ladies too, such a the poets Aru and Taru Dutt, Kamini Roy, prosewriters Sukhalata Rao, Seeta Devi, Shanta Devi, Maitreyee Devi, the doctor Kadambini Ganguly, and others. The ‘Nightingale of India’, Sarojini Naidu (nee Chattopadhyay), distinguished poetess and politician, was also a full-blooded Bengali, though she was educated in Urdu at Hyderabad, and wrote in English.

As opposed to this picture of Hindu society, there was no middle class worth the name among the Muslims. There were the Zamindars like the Nawabs of Dacca or Comilla, rolling in wealth and luxury ; and there was the ryot or chashi, the common cultivator, living from hand to mouth. There were relatively few barristers, advocates or doctors, and practically no major entrepreneurs among Bengali Muslims. Even among non-Bengali Muslims operating in Bengal the only significant name was Ispahani[50]. The number of white collar Muslims working for the government, though not totally insignificant, was much smaller than that of Hindus, primarily because of lack of English education. As for private service, except for enterprises owned by their co-religionists such as Ispahani, their number was very small.

Similarly, the number of leading intellectuals among the Bengali Muslims was very much smaller than that among the Hindu Bhadralok. The novelist Meer Mosharruff Hossain, the educationist Haji Mohammed Mohsin, the essayist Kazi Abdul Wadud, poets Kazi Nazrul Islam, Bande Ali Mian, Ghulam Mustafa, Jasimuddin, S.Wajed Ali and, of course, Syed Mujtabaa Ali mentioned earlier, are worthy of special note. Unlike among the Hindu intellectuals mentioned, there was not a single religious reformer among the Bengali Muslims. Likewise, there were very few intellectuals among their women. Jahanara Chaudhuri and Sakhawat Begum may be mentioned as exceptions.

This was the general picture. For most of the time peace prevailed among the two communities but sometimes the peace got a little uneasy. Occasional hostilities were reported, generally beginning with some insignificant event, such as catcalling or beating of drums within the hearing of a mosque or the teasing of some young girl of the other community. Each one of these quickly escalated into a communal riot which was promptly taken advantage of by the lumpen until put down by the police. Dacca town had become notorious for almost annual riots, probably because the two communities were more or less evenly balanced. They often used to take place in the wake of the once-famous Janmashtami processions of Dacca, when the drum-beating by the Hindus supposedly disturbed the Muslims at their prayers in their mosques. The victims of the riots were invariably innocent people who had happened to be in the wrong locality at the wrong moment. The usual crimes committed in the course of these riots were torching and other destruction of property, stabbing, a few murders ; and of course, almost invariably, rape and brutalisation of Hindu women.

Still, nobody thought of leaving home or migrating. The landscape of East Bengal, with its incredibly green paddy and jute fields and its wide, wide rivers, beels and haors (depressions in which huge water bodies were created by the monsoon rains) stretching away to the horizon, the beat of the Dhak at Durga Puja time, the lilting tunes of Bhaoaiya and Jaari Gaan (folk music), had been indelibly etched into the hearts of the East Bengal Hindu. This was his Desh, his Baari, his very own native land. Except for the few directly affected by them, the riots were considered mere irritants by the vast multitude of Hindus in East Bengal. They merely served to heighten the mistrust between the two communities. Nobody, almost without exception, among the twelve-million-strong Hindu community of East Bengal realised what sort of a powder keg they were sitting upon. Until 1946 and the Noakhali carnage.

CHAPTER 1
[1] Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) Poet of extraordinary profundity, founder of Visva-Bharati University, first Indian Nobel Laureate (Literature, 1913) for his English translation of his own Gitanjali (Song Offerings) in Bangla, one of the best-known Indians the world over.

[2] Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888-1970) Second Indian Nobel Laureate (Physics, 1930) for discovery of Raman Effect in the molecular scattering of light.

[3] Hargobind Khorana (b.1922) Indian-born U.S. geneticist. Nobel Laureate (Medicine/Physiology, 1968)

[4] Subramanyam Chandrasekhar (1910-1995) Indian-born U.S. astrophysicist. Nobel Laureate (Physics, 1983)

[5] Amartya Sen (b. 1933) last Indian Nobel Laureate (Economics, 1998) famous for his Welfare Economics and his study of famines

[6] Mother Teresa ((nee Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu) (1910-1997), Albanian-born Indian Catholic nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity at Calcutta. Nobel Laureate (Peace, 1979).

[7] Swami Vivekananda (nee Narendra Nath Datta)(1863-1902) Hindu sanyasin or monk, disciple of Shri Ramakrishna Paramahansa, founder of the Ramakrishna Math (monastery) and Mission and the Ramakrishna order of monks, who won world acclaim from his address at the Chicago Parliament of Religions, 1893 and practically singlehandedly introduced the profundity of Hinduism to the western world. He restored the self-confidence of the Hindus in the face of European political dominance

[8] Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (or Chattopadhyaya) (1838-1894) also called Rishi Bankim, one of the greatest prosewriters in Bangla, author of such classics as Kapalkundala, Ananadamath, Debi Chaudhurani, and many more, and of course of the immortal Vande Mataram, which in Sanskrit means ‘Hail Mother(land)’. The song is partly in Sanskrit and partly Bangla. The song had provided inspiration not only to the freedom fighters of Bengal who had chosen the path of violence, but also to the mainstream freedom movement in India under the aegis of the Congress. The song had been given the status of an associate National Anthem in India after independence, but only the Sanskrit part, because it was considered that the Bangla part refers to idol worship and might offend the Muslims. Subsequently Indian secularists have gone one step ahead and started decrying the whole song on the supposed ground that it is anti-minority. However the whole song still continues to inspire patriotism in a multitude of Indians, including minorities.

[9] Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghose) (1872-1950), Revolutionary-turned-mystic and philosopher, considered a saint by many. Suspected of responsibility for terrorist acts in Bengal, he was arrested (1908) and prosecuted by the British but later acquitted. While in prison, he underwent a spiritual experience. When released, he abandoned politics, renounced violence, and retired (1910) to the French possession of Pondicherry in southern India, where he studied Yoga, attracted a devoted group of disciples, and formed an ashram, or religious community, to further spiritual growth.
[10] Jagadis Chandra Bose (1858-1937) Physicist, famed for his work on the measurement of very minute responses from plants to external stimuli which was developed upon later by Bio-Physicists, and on the quasi-optical properties of very short radio waves which made significant contributions to solid state physics.

[11] Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974) Mathematician and Theoretical Physicist, known for his contributions to Statistical Mechanics in collaboration with Albert Einstein, known as Bose-Einstein Statistics. Postulated the existence of elementary particles called Bosons.

[12] Rakhaldas Banerjee (1885-1930) Archaeologist extraordinary, associated with the discovery of the ruins of Moenjodaro (now in Sind, Pakistan), the cradle of the Indus Valley Civilisation.

[13] Radha Binode Pal, Jurist of international acclaim, Member, Tokyo Tribunal for the trial of Japanese war criminals after World War II.

[14]Syed Mujtabaa Ali (1904-1974) Eminent Bengali litterateur, scholar, linguist, alumnus of Santiniketan, disciple of Rabindranath Tagore. Ali, although an East Bengali Muslim, chose to live alone and die in India, while his family stayed on the other side of the border. Ali had spent considerable lengths of time in Germany (mainly doing research at Bonn and Heidelberg) in the days of the Weimar republic, and in Afghanistan during King Amanullah’s modernisation drive and the subsequent fundamentalist revolt. His works (in Bangla) contain substantial chronicles of the periods. With proficiency in no less than eight languages (Bangla, English, German, French, Urdu, Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit) and a smattering of quite a few more, widely travelled, and with his formidable erudition, Ali was one of the nearest things Bengal has had to a world citizen.

[15] Annada Sankar Ray (b. 1909) A writer of distinction in Bangla, with contributions also to Oriya, is an ex-member of the Indian Civil Service. His observation here, as also elsewhere in this book, is from his Jukto Bonger Sriti (Memories of United Bengal), a small but important book published in 1989 containing autobiographical sketches of his stay at various places in East Bengal while serving in the ICS. While possessed of considerable literary skill and power of observation, Ray, unfortunately suffers from total lack of objectivity and tends to lapse into a state full of sentimental wishful thinking whenever he gets down to analyse the subject of Hindu-Muslim relations. Not unpredictably, he has been lapped up by the Indian ‘Secularists’.

[16] Jukto Bonger Sriti (Memories of United Bengal) (Bangla), Mitra & Ghosh, Calcutta, 2nd Ed.1990, p. 61

[17] Buddhadeb Bose, A Bengali poet and prosewriter of considerable distinction, spent his early life in Noakhali town and his college days in Dacca.

[18] Noakhalir Mati o Manush (Bangla, The Soil and the People of Noakhali), Dr. Dinesh Chandra Sinha Ed., Gyan Prakashan, Calcutta,1st Ed., 1991, p.167

[19] According to the epic Mahabharata, the five brothers Pandavas lost a game of dice with their cousins, the one hundred Kauravas, lost their kingdom and wandered all over India. There are very few parts of India that they did not visit. Pandavavarjita means areas so remote that even the Pandavas could not visit them.

[20] Vincent A. Smith, The Oxford History of India, 4th Ed., 10th Impression 1992, p. 801

[21] Ashok Mitra (1917-1999), a member of the Indian Civil Service, and an important Demographer, was the Census Commissioner of India. The quotations and references here are from his autobiography Tin Kuri Dosh (literally three score and ten in Bangla)in which he has recorded very detailed and astute observations. Although a self-confessed Communist sympathiser in his early days, there is remarkable objectivity in his remarks on the subjects. Important : He is not to be confused with the Economist of the same name who was the Finance Minister of West Bengal for some time and became famous for his remark “I am not a gentleman, I am a Communist”

[22] Indian Civil Service (ICS) was a cadre of bureaucrats which formed the ‘steel frame of British administration in India’. People of this service, about a thousand in number of whom half were British and the other half Indian, manned all the key Government posts in British India. They were selected through a very rigorous process, and were very powerful, very handsomely paid, and considered above suspicion. A number of them have left their mark in fields quite unrelated to colonial administration. Writings of three of them, Annada Sankar Ray, Ashok Mitra and Hiranmay Banerjee, have been used extensively as source material in this book.

[23] Tin Kuri Dosh (Three score and ten) (Bangla), Dey’s Publishing, Calcutta, Part II, 1st ed., 1993, p.106

[24] Sailendra Nath Sengupta was the Deputy Director of the State Statistical Bureau, and Jatindra Mohan Datta an Advocate and an Encyclopaediac. Ashok Mitra was coached in the relevant subjects by them in 1949 when he took charge of Census Operations.

[25] 'Purbapurusher Sandhane' (In Search of Our Ancestors) (Bangla), Ononna, Dacca, 1st Ed., 2001

[26] Sufis are a mystical sect of Muslims who believe that human life is like a journey (safar) in search of God, and the ultimate objective of the traveller is to attain that perfect knowledge of God (ma'rifah) which is diffused through all things. . . . the unprejudiced student of their system will observe that Tasawwuf or Sufism is but a Muslim adaptation of the Vedanta school of Hindu philosophers (Dictionary of Islam by Thomas Patrick Hughes, see Bibliography)

[27] Meghnad Saha (1893-1956). An outstanding physicist, with original contributions to Astrophysics in his theory of Thermal Ionisation and its application to the Interpretation of Stellar Spectra. Saha hailed from Dacca city and moved to Calcutta after independence, and became one of the very few true champions the East Bengal refugees had ever known. He was elected to the Lok Sabha (Lower House), of the Indian Parliament from North-West Calcutta on a congress ticket in 1952, and held that seat till his death in 1956. Saha also served for some time on India’s Planning Commission.

[28] Bhabatosh Dutt (1911-1997) celebrated professor of Economics of Presidency College, Calcutta, teacher of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, spent his boyhood in Daulatpur (District Khulna) and in Dacca, and has recorded his reminscences in his autobiographical sketch Aat Doshok (literally 'Eight Decades' in Bangla), Pratikshan Publications Private Ltd., Calcutta 1st Ed., 1988

[29] Rajshekhar Bose (1880-1960) (pseudonym Parashuram) a Bengali humorist and litterateur with an unparalleled brand of very dry humour . Bose trained as a chemical technologist and held the top post in Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works, a pioneering Indian-owned venture, for many years. He also has to his credit a concise Bengali edition of the classic Mahabharata, and a Bengali dictionary, Chalantika.

[30] A Lungi is a wraparound worn by men below the waist, usually of checquered cotton, similar to a Sarong of Indonesia. As opposed to this, a Dhoti is a much longer piece of cloth, also worn by men below the waist, but wrapped separately around the two legs, and the tail passed between them and tucked in at the back. In Bengal the former was a hallmark of Muslims, the latter of Hindus. Nowadays a lot of Hindus wear lungis, but very few Muslims in West Bengal wear dhotis, and none in Bangladesh. This terminology is peculiar to North India, especially Bengal, and does not apply to South India.

[31] The Bengal Muslims 1871-1906 : A Quest for Identity, by Rafiuddin Ahmed, Oxford University Press, 2nd Ed., India Paperback 2nd Impression, p. 106

[32] Khwaja (also Sir) Nazimuddin, a scion of the Nawab family of Dacca, whose ancestors had come from Kashmir as traders and settled down in Dacca, eventually to become major Zamindars big enough to be called Nawabs. The family spoke, and probably still do, only Urdu and not Bangla. Nazimuddin, a prominent Muslim League leader had been a minister in Fazlul Haque’s coalition ministry of 1937, and Premier in the Muslim League ministry of 1943. He became the Prime Minister of Pakistan after the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan.

[33] Abul Kashem Fazlul Haq (1873-1962) , also called Sher-e-Bangal (Tiger of Bengal),Premier of Bengal heading the Krishak Proja Party - Muslim League coalition in 1937-41, and the Progressive Democratic Coalition (also called the Shyama-Haq coalition) in 1941-43. Although supporting the Muslim League’s Pakistan resolution in 1940, Haq was a rarity among Muslim politicians of Bengal of his time who could look upon Bengalis as Bengalis, and not as Hindus or Muslims. After partition he became the rallying point of all opponents of the League in erstwhile East Pakistan, and sailed to a landslide victory in 1954 as the head of a United Front to become the Chief Minister of East Pakistan. The next year he made a trip to Calcutta where he made a speech advocating the reunion of the two Bengals. On return he was deposed but was later rehabilitated and taken as a Minister in the Pakistan central cabinet of Chaudhry Muhammad Ali, and was made the Governor of East Pakistan in 1956.

[34] Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897-1999), centenarian, sometime secretary to political leader Sarat Chandra Bose, sometime broadcaster, and above all a prolific writer of nonfiction in Bangla and English. His celebrated works in English include Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Continent of Circe, Thy hand, Great Anarch, and Clive of India. His writing is said to be coloured by his very strong Anglophilia (he had been living in Oxford for quite some time before his death) but is nevertheless very important. His great failing is said to be his tendency to show off his knowledge and erudition (which, however, were truly formidable). Excerpts from Chaudhuri in this book are from his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian and Thy Hand, Great Anarch.

[35] Kishorganj is a subdivisional town in erstwhile Mymensingh district where Nirad C. Chaudhuri was born and spent his childhood. Kalikachchha is a village in the Brahmanbaria subdivision of erstwhile Tipperah district where Chaudhuri’s mother came from. Coincidentally, this author’s mother also came from the same village.

[36] For a fuller and concurring view of the gap between the two religions in the subcontinent see ‘Freedom at Midnight’ by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, 1st Ed., Simon and Schuster, New York, 1975. pp. 36-42

[37] Thy Hand, Great Anarch, 1st Ed., Chatto & Windus, London, 1987. p. 469

[38] Sarat Chandra Bose (1889-1950) a leading barrister of the Calcutta High Court, philanthropist, one of the foremost Congressites of undivided Bengal. Although Bose occupied a premier position in the politics of the province for a long time he could leave little impression owing to his lack of political foresight. He died a broken man after independence.

[39] Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-?) known throughout India as ‘Netaji’ (The Leader), was indeed a leader with unbelievable charisma. His greatest achievements were all after he left the shores of India. Although he never had any formal military training, he organised out of British Indian POWs in Japanese camps in South-east Asia, the Indian National Army or Azad Hind Fauj, which fought the allied armies and along with the Japanese drove up from Burma (now Myanmar) to set foot on Indian soil at Mairang in Manipur on March 18, 1944. Meanwhile reverses were suffered by the Japanese, and severe strain on his supply lines forced him to retreat South and East. He was last seen at Taihoku, Taiwan, on August 19, 1945 boarding a plane. The official version is that shortly thereafter he died in a crash. This is not believed by many, and there are good reasons to think that he was taken prisoner by Russians somewhere in the Soviet Far East, and killed while in captivity. A bachelor till late in life, he married his secretary, the Austrian-born Emily Schenckl, before leaving Germany.

[40] 'Babu' (or Baboo) is a suffix attached to the first name of a Bengali Hindu gentleman. Bengali Muslims never use it. The term was formerly used also as prefix to the full name of such a gentleman, e.g. Babu Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya. The word eventually also came to mean 'a clerk' because a large number of Bengali Hindus used to work as clerks. The word is gradually going out of use now.

[41] The Hindu Mahasabha was founded by Dr B.S.Moonje and was the principal party in British India to speak for Hindu interests, although the bulk of the Hindu support went to the Congress. It died a slow death after independence, and now exists only in name. Syama Prasad Mookerjee left this party in 1948 and formed the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951. The principal pro-Hindu party in today’s India, and the principal party in the ruling coalition now in 2000, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is descended from this Bharatiya Jana Sangh.

[42] Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), known as ‘Bidrohi Kobi’ (the rebel poet) was one of the most important Bengali Muslim litterateurs of all times. Born at Churulia, District Burdwan, West Bengal, Nazrul is famed for his fiery yet lyrical verse, his easy assimilation of Arabic and Persian words into Bangla, and his appeal cutting totally across religious lines. Nazrul preached Hindu-Muslim amity all his life, and is equally revered in present-day West Bengal and Bangladesh. He also fought in the First World War in Mesopotamia in the Bengali regiment. He spent the last years of his life as a vegetable, having been affected by an incurable brain disorder, and died in Dacca.

[43] S.Wajed Ali (1890-1951), a West Bengali Muslim from a distinguished family from Hooghly, and a Barrister and writer. One of his sons is Ahmed Ali, the famous photographer, and Ahmed Ali's daughter is Nafisa Ali Sodhi, sometime swimming champion and film actress. Wajed Ali's writings show an astounding clarity of thought, and ought to receive more recognition in promoting Hindu-Muslim amity.

[44] S. Wajed Ali Rochonaboli (Collection)(Bangla), Syed Akram Hussain Ed., 1st Ed., Bangla Academy, Dacca, Bangladesh, 1985

[45] Amar Dekha Rajneetir Ponchas Bochhor (Fifty Years of Politics, as I saw it) (Bangla) by Abul Mansur Ahmad, 8th Ed., Khoshroz Kitab Mahal, Dacca, Bangladesh, 1999, see pp. 11, 19, 27, 29, 77.

[46] Syed Mustafa Siraz, Contemporary powerful Bengali Muslim writer from Murshidabad, West Bengal. In Salma, a very poignant short story, he describes how the three Ashraf wives of the storyteller look down upon Salma, the fourth wife, who is Atrap.

[47] Jukto Bonger Sriti, ibid. p. 9

[48] Sir Rajendra Nath Mookerjee an outstanding industrialist who rose from a very humble and rural beginning to hold, under his Managing Agency Martin Burn Ltd., such giant and diverse industries as Indian Iron and Steel Co., Indian Standard Wagon Co., Burn & Co., Hooghly Docking and Engineering, several light railway companies, collieries, tea estates etc. As a pioneer among Indian industrialists he is considered in the same league as Sir Jamshetji Tata and Ghanshyam Das Birla, the founders of the house of Tatas and Birlas. Unfortunately, unlike the latter, his house failed to keep pace with the times and disintegrated when hit by a recession in the 1960s.

[49] A Barrister is a lawyer who has been ‘called to the bar’ from one of the ‘Inns of the Court’ of London, and has to adhere to an ancient and strict code of conduct. There are four such inns, namely Lincoln’s, Gray’s, Inner Temple and Middle Temple. Bengal has had a long love affair with this institution and still sends a few boys and girls each year to London to get trained for this purpose. As opposed to Barristers, indigenously trained lawyers were put into different classes such as Advocates, Pleaders, Vakils, Mukhtars etc. All these distinctions have now been abolished in India.

[50] Mirza Abol Hasan Ispahani, Scion of wealthy one-time Calcutta commercial and financial empire, M.M.Ispahani Ltd., one of Jinnah's’ closest personal friends in the party, a major backer and financier of the Muslim League. Ispahani’s role in the purchase and distribution of rice during the great Bengal famine of 1943, made possible through the largesse of Suhrawardy, was a shameful chapter in the history of the province at the time. The Ispahani empire continues, now based in Karachi.

2008-05-08T15:51:00.000-07:00

Chapter 2

THE COUNTDOWN : POLITICS OF BENGAL BETWEEN THE TWO PARTITIONS, 1905-1947

Looking at the present crop of politicians of West Bengal (this is in 1999) it is difficult to imagine what a star-studded firmament the politics of Bengal in early part of the century was. Beginning with Surendra Nath Banerjee, Lord S.P. Sinha, Bipin Chandra Paul and C. R. Das, there were stalwarts of the calibre of Subhas Chandra Bose, Sarat Chandra Bose, J.M.Sengupta, B.N.Sasmal and A.K.Fazlul Haq. With the advent of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on the political scene of India the centre of gravity of Indian politics had of course shifted to him, but the province was still very much in the forefront in every way. Quite a far cry from the present state of being in the backwoods.

It is neither possible nor intended to give even an overview of the politics of Bengal during this very eventful half-century. Volumes have been written on this period, and further volumes will continue to be written. However, it is impossible to understand the Hindu exodus from East Bengal without bearing in mind the political framework of the times and the major political events that took place during the period preceding partition of the province. After all, the exodus was a purely political phenomenon – neither religious nor economic. Religion was merely the human attribute exploited in this case by the relevant politicians, and the economic disaster that followed was the result, not the cause of the exodus. In fact economic factors had nothing whatsoever to do with this particular brand of persecution --- Muslim Ashraf and Atrap combined without qualms to drive out Hindu zamindar, pleader, artisan, fisherman and cultivator.

First of all, an explanation as to why the period 1905-1947 has been chosen is called for. 1905 was the year of the first partition of Bengal, an event of very far-reaching political significance. In between there was the politically watershed year of 1920. This was about the time when problems between Hindu and Muslim in undivided India began to take on serious proportions. This was also, coincidentally, the year when Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi made a serious entry into the politics of India with his non-cooperation movement. This was also the year Lokamanya Balgangadhar Tilak died. The ‘problems between Hindu and Muslim’ referred to are basically communal riots between Hindu and Muslim, of which Bengal had more than its fair share. 1947, on the other hand was the year of India’s independence and Bengal’s second partition, the year in which atrocities against Hindus in erstwhile East Pakistan began with overt or covert state sponsorship, and gradually took on the form of another holocaust.

Such state-sponsored atrocities against Hindus have not stopped even after the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. They have merely taken on a much more covert form, which is really a case of bad habits dying hard. The year 1992 had seen unspeakable horrors against Hindus once again, in the wake of demolition of a disused mosque built on the birthplace of the legendary Lord Rama at Ayodhya in India. It was this particular set of atrocities that prompted the tigress from Mymensingh, a frail Muslim woman doctor called Taslima Nasrin, to come out with her unforgettable volume Lojja (Shame) that truly marked a watershed in this otherwise drab landscape. More on Taslima and Lojja later.

To start, take a brief look at 1905. Lord Curzon had been appointed the Governor-General and Viceroy of India in December 1898, and served in that post till 1905. He was not known for his fondness of Indians, and was even less fond of Bengali Hindus in particular. Before leaving he delivered a parting kick to the province in the form of the first partition of Bengal. According to his scheme the existing Bengal Presidency (which at that time included the present states of Bihar and Orissa) was divided into two parts. The western part, comprising the Presidency and Burdwan divisions together with Bihar, Chhota Nagpur and Orissa would form the rump Bengal. The eastern part would be joined with Assam, to be known as the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. This scheme was hatched by him much earlier, and he toured the province to garner support for the same, helped by his able lieutenant Sir Bamfylde Fuller. Sir Bamfylde then became the governor of the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam, with its capital at Dacca. Their main selling point for the scheme was that it would fetch for the Muslims a province in which they would be in majority and would not have to play second fiddle to the Hindus. Predictably, they got the support of a number of Muslim landowners of East Bengal, among them Salimullah, the influential Nawab of Dacca. Sir Bamfylde had gone one step ahead of his boss in his salesmanship. Bengali folklore is replete with stories of a king who had two queens – Suo Rani, the great favourite, on whom the king lavished love and gifts, and Duo Rani, the neglected, cast-aside one. Sir Bamfylde used to publicly proclaim[1] that for him the Hindu was the Duo Rani, and the Muslim Suo Rani.

The partition had been done with the clear objective of breaking the back of the Bengali Hindu, and currying favour with the Muslims. There was widespread opposition to it from all Hindus and a significant number of Muslims, but Lord Curzon remained stuck to it saying that it was a ‘settled fact’. Among the prominent people who publicly opposed the partition were the poets Rabindra Nath Tagore, Rajani Kanta Sen, Kaliprosonno Kavyavisharad, Dwijendra Lal Roy ; assorted public men and men of letters such as Surendra Nath Banerjea, Ramendra Sundar Tribedi, Bipin Chandra Paul, Suresh Chandra Samajpati, Monoranjan Guha Thakurta, and many others. However the number of prominent Bengali Muslims who opposed the partition was very heartening. They included the Barrister Abdul Rasul, Moulavi Abul Qasem, Abul Hossain, Dedar Bux, Deen Mohammed, Abdul Ghafoor Siddiqui, Liaqat Hossain, Ismail Shirazi, Abdul Halim Ghaznavi, and others. Aqatullah, younger brother of Salimullah, the Nawab of Dacca, was a very prominent protester. This list of prominent Muslims is quite interesting, because never again in the politics of Bengal – divided or undivided – would Hindus and Muslims join hands in such large numbers on any issue.

The period between 1905 and 1920 was a period of disquiet for the whole of the subcontinent. There were the Morley-Minto administrative reforms in 1910, the repeal of the partition of Bengal in 1911, and moving the capital of British India from Calcutta to Delhi with the inauguration of New Delhi in the same year with a royal visit. Meanwhile armed rebellion as an expression of nationalism gained ground in Bengal. The first man to be sent to the gallows in 1909, a young man called Khudiram Bose, was followed by countless others. The first world war was waged in 1914, and continued upto 1918. Two young Bengali Hindu revolutionaries, Jatindra Nath Mukherjee and Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya collaborated with the German consul at Shanghai, and planned to import two shiploads of armaments and land them at Raimangal in the Sundarbans and at Balasore in Orissa. The plan did not work out. Jatindra Nath Mukherjee, also known as Bagha (Tiger) Jatin, was killed in a gun battle with the police at Balasore. Bhattacharyya escaped abroad, changed his name to Manabendra Nath Roy (better known as M.N. Roy) and became an associate of Lenin during and after the Russian revolution. A British army officer called Dyer in 1919 opened fire upon a peaceful gathering in a square at Amritsar in Punjab and killed 1516 people in cold blood. Rabindra Nath Tagore renounced his Knighthood in protest.

Meanwhile the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms were introduced in India in 1919 and ushered in a period of Dyarchy. In this system the total range of activities of the government was divided into two groups. One group was called ‘Reserved’ and contained the more important and critical departments, such as Revenue, Police and the Judiciary. These were kept exclusively in British hands. The other group, called ‘Transferred’ comprising the less critical departments, such as Health, Local Government, Education, etc. were put to a limited extent in Indian hands, but with such safeguards that the British retained the power of ultimate decision even on these subjects.

It was around this time that the country started getting polarised around the two principal parties of the country, the Congress and the Muslim League. The Congress, founded in 1885 by a retired British ICS man Allan Octavian Hume as a platform for dialogue between the elite among the Indians and the British quickly changed itself into a forum of anti-British Indians of differing intensities. Although there was no religious bias to the party to begin with, Muslims were lukewarm about the party from day one. Vincent Smith, an eminent historian writes[2] : “The Muslims in general watched the growth of the Congress from a distance and stood aloof from its controversies with Lord Curzon. But having allowed it to become dominantly Hindu in character through their abstention, they took alarm at the first sign of concessions to its demands. From this sprang the deputation to Lord Minto in 1906, led by the Agha Khan, which demanded separate electorates for Muslims in any representative system that might be introduced.”

The Muslim League, founded in 1906 by Nawab Salimullah of Dacca, also changed its character. It was originally conceived as a political organ of the Muslim landowning class. However in 1913 a very urbane, very anglicised, and anything-but-a-devout-Muslim barrister from Bombay called M. A. Jinnah joined the League. He had joined the Congress in 1906, and joined the League while still with the Congress. He was born in Karachi in 1876 as Mahomet Ali Jheenabhai among a Shi’ite Muslim sect called Khoja Ismaili who, curiously enough, are governed by Hindu personal laws. Under his leadership the League gradually became the rallying point of all Indian Muslims who wanted to be different from Hindus in as many ways as possible. The Congress however continued to persist in the illusion that it was for Hindus and Muslims alike. This illusion, as we shall see, persists to this day, and was one of the factors that brought untold misery to the subject of this book, the East Bengali Hindus.

At this stage a brief digression on the subject of M.A.Jinnah would be in order. What sort of a person was this M.A.Jinnah who, as we all know now, brought about the political division of the subcontinent, the creation of a state called Pakistan, the greatest migration in history, the great Calcutta killings, and needless misery to countless people of India, largely because of, and by the force of his enormous ego? A man who is worshipped as the Qaid-e-Azam, and hated for the vivisection of the country, depending on which side of the political and religious divide one is on, could not have been an ordinary person. Some of the best insights into his character are available from the autobiography of his onetime junior in the legal profession, M.C.Chagla[3].

According to Chagla, Jinnah around 1920 was a completely irreligious person who never prayed, never visited a mosque, and was very fond of ham sandwiches and pork sausages, food absolutely prohibited by his religion Islam. Chagla describes him as the uncrowned king of Bombay, idolized by the youth for his sturdy nationalism. How did such a person become the narrow sectarian leader that we know him to be? Chagla holds two factors to be primarily responsible. First, wherever he was, he had to be the leader, and he saw no chance of this with the Congress being in the total grip of Gandhi[4]. Second, his personal life : he had married Ruttie, a Parsee Zoroastrian girl many years his junior, daughter of his friend Sir Dinshaw Petit. It was an incompatible match, and had resulted in an unhappy marriage, but Jinnah truly loved her. Ruttie was an avid nationalist, and a good influence on Jinnah, politically speaking. Ruttie died early, and after that Jinnah's only companion at home was his unmarried sister Fatima who was as communal-minded as Ruttie was liberal. Chagla has specifically remarked that she enjoyed Jinnah's diatribes against the Hindus, and if anything, injected an extra dose of venom into them[5]. What followed, of course, is history.

Now to return to the state of the country : the times around 1920 was extremely eventful in many other ways, such as Gandhi’s protest against the exploitation of indigo farmers in Champaran, Bihar, followed by the same against the infamous Rowlatt Act, and finally the launch of his non-cooperation movement ; the end to transportation of Indian ‘indentured labour’ to Mauritius, the West Indies, Fiji, and South Africa ; and many others. However, two events particularly relevant to the subject of this book took place at this time. The first was Jinnah’s severing ties with the Congress following serious differences between him and Gandhi with regard to the latter’s non-cooperation movement. The second took place not in India, but in faraway Sevres in France on 14th May, 1920. It was the publication of the terms of a treaty proposed by the British with the Turkish Sultan. His Ottoman empire had fought on the side of the Germans in the war, and was therefore dismembered. The European part of the empire came under the administration of a commission. The Arab Asian part – comprising the Arabian peninsula, Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia (later Iraq) went to Britain and France, under the garb of League of Nations mandates. Only Asia Minor (present Turkey) remained directly with the Sultan. Till the Sultan acceded to these terms his empire would remain under the direct control of the allies.

Now apart from being the ruler of Turkey the Sultan, having had temporal jurisdiction over Mecca, was also, ex officio the Caliph or Khalifa, the temporal head of pan-Islam. The Muslims of India, or the fundamentalists among them at any rate, were therefore quite agitated over this political emasculation of the Sultan and started a political movement which came to be known as the Khilafat movement. The Indian National Congress under Gandhi allied itself completely and wholeheartedly to this movement.

Gandhi’s intention behind doing this was obviously to involve the Muslims in the struggle for independence and thereby forge some kind of a united front against the British. Gandhi, unlike his successor Jawaharlal Nehru, was deeply aware of the basic religiosity of Indians[6] and therefore considered Khilafat to be an ideal channel for reaching his objectives. The British, on the other hand, were counting on the deep schism between the two communities and were quite disturbed about the designs of Gandhi. Lord Reading, the Viceroy of India, wrote to Lord Montagu, the Secretary of State for India pressing him to alter the terms of the Sevres treaty, with a view to placate the Muslims of India. Meanwhile Mustapha Kemal Pasha came to power in Turkey. He was wedded to the idea of modernising and secularising Turkey. He replaced Arabic alphabets by Roman ones in writing the Turkish language, abolished the purdah (wearing a veil) system for women and made it illegal to wear the Fez, the red conical tasseled cap that had become the hallmark of the Muslim in the early part of the twentieth century. As one of the first steps towards this modernisation and secularisation he abolished the Caliphate, and the Khilafat movement in India died out.

In the wake of the Khilafat movement, however, other things were happening in India. On the Malabar coast,[7] the northernmost part of the present-day state of Kerala, in August 1921, a group of Muslims of Arab descent known as the Moplahs started agitating against the British. Their rebellion, however, quickly took an abject anti-Hindu turn. The official estimate of deaths, practically all Hindus in this Muslim-majority area, was as much as 2,339. There was widespread forcible conversion of Hindus and desecration as well as destruction of Hindu temples. Some three years later, in September 1924, terrible anti-Hindu riots broke out at Kohat in the North-West Frontier Province. Desecration and destruction of Hindu temples also took place in Amethi in the United Provinces and Gulbarga in Bombay Presidency. The year 1926 saw as many as thirty-five Hindu-Muslim riots in the country. In the riots in Bombay city that took place in 1929 several hundreds died. Out of these the Moplah massacre and the Kohat riots were total anti-Hindu pogroms. The Congress, however, made only a few feeble noises against the Moplah massacre. In respect of the Kohat riots Gandhi started a fast – a hunger-strike actually – at the residence of Moulana Mohammed Ali[8] in Delhi in order to foster goodwill between the two communities and continued for twenty-one days. These riots marked the beginning of the communal rioting that would plague the subcontinent for the remainder of the century.

Gandhi’s unstinted support for the Khilafat movement, however well-intentioned it might have been, together with the feeble reaction of the Congress to the anti-Hindu pogroms of Malabar and Kohat, were terrible mistakes, because they sent all kinds of wrong (and presumably unintended) signals to past and potential anti-Hindu rioters. The first and most important signal received by the Muslims was that the Hindu-dominated Congress would henceforth, so long as Gandhi was in charge, bend over backwards in any given situation to please the Muslims. That trait had already been shown in Gandhi’s participating in a sectarian, retrogressive movement like the Khilafat to reinstall a temporal religious leader many thousands of miles away with whom no Indian Muslim should have had any reason to have any business.

M.C.Chagla, who has been mentioned earlier in connection with the personality of Jinnah, has roundly criticised Gandhi's participation in the Khilafat movement. In his autobiography he writes "I have always felt that Gandhiji was wrong in trying to bring about Hindu-Muslim unity by supporting the cause of the Khilafat. Such unity was built on shifting sands. So long as the religious cause survived, the unity was there; but once that cause was removed the unity showed its weakness. All the Khilafatis who had been attracted to the Congress came out in their true colours, that is as more devoted to their religion than to their country". In Chagla's view it was the Muslim League under the leadership of Jinnah which was then the party of patriotic, secular, modernised Muslims, and the Congress should have allied itself with the League[9].

The second unfortunate signal sent by Gandhi's alliance with the Khilafatis was that, provided a sufficiently large number could be incited to participate in an anti-Hindu riot, nothing much would happen either to the riot inciters or to a mob. Most certainly the Congress would not, repeat not, ask for punishment for the guilty, because that would amount to committing two sins : first, showing that they were prepared to take up cudgels on behalf of Hindus, and therefore could not be said to be equitable towards Muslims ; and second, obliquely admitting that the British alone could keep peace among Hindus and Muslims.

The Congress’s usual reaction to any anti-Hindu riot henceforth would be a mild and inane statement, calling for cessation of all hostilities and restoration of peace and goodwill between the two communities. The worst that could happen following an anti-Hindu riot was that Gandhi himself would come down to the spot of the riot, and appeal for universal peace, hold prayer meetings, or go on fast. Not a breath about bringing the guilty to book. Then some Muslim leader somewhere would make some gesture to make Gandhi break his fast, such as by promising that they would henceforth use their good offices to prevent further rioting. Then Gandhi would break his fast, and the next few days would be all Bhai-Bhai (we are all brothers), until the next riot. Meanwhile the rioters would have had their fun of torching, looting, killing and of course, raping. All in the name of a holy war upon infidels.

This view is supported by as ardent a Nehru-admirer as Ashok Mitra who could not help feeling regret at the fact that even after the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946 (see Chapter 3) neither Nehru nor Gandhi saw it fit to visit Calcutta[10]. Mitra could attribute this only to the fear that any such visit immediately following the killings (in which, according to Mitra, the guilt of the Muslims was many times that of the Hindus) might result in their being dubbed anti-Muslim. Thus, (conclusion author’s, not Mitra’s) the right or wrong of the situation was of no consequence. What mattered to the leaders, including the Mahatma, was that they should under no account risk being called anti-Muslim.

An anti-Muslim riot was another matter. Then the Congress and the Muslim League would vie with each other to get tough with the rioters. Thus, during the Noakhali carnage (see Chapter 3 for details) where Hindus were butchered, their women raped and brutalised by the hundreds, and families forcibly converted to Islam by the villageful, all that Jawaharlal Nehru did was to meekly follow Gandhi from village to village. What Gandhi did in his turn was to visit villages once inhabited by Hindus with the message that they should come back to their homes. Or rather what had once been their homes, and were now charred remains thereof. But during the Bihar riots that followed in retaliation, where Hindu killed Muslim, the selfsame Jawaharlal Nehru seriously suggested that the Royal Indian Air Force should be brought in to strafe Hindu villages[11], and Gandhi of course threatened a fast unto death.

These signals had a profound influence on the turn of events in the province of Bengal. Here, first, the Muslims were in the majority. Secondly, they could be inflamed much more easily in the name of waging a Jihad, holy war. Thirdly the logistics of inflaming passions among Muslims existed in the form of their prayer meetings five times a day. And now they were being told that an occasional deviation would result, at worst, in yet another fast by Gandhi. The inevitable result followed. The increasing number of Muslims flocking to the Muslim League felt emboldened beyond belief. With one party among the two principal ones in the country being their very own, and the other trying to placate and appease them in every conceivable way, the future was surely theirs.

In the midst of all these the communities were fast becoming so clearly divided as to make any talk about ‘common interest’ increasingly an absurdity. The fringe of Muslims with the Congress, who were called ‘Nationalist Muslims’ at that time, was constantly dwindling. Meanwhile M.A.Jinnah had returned to India from Britain to be elected the ‘Permanent President’ of the Muslim League and the Muslim League had become synonymous with this one man. By and large the Hindus and Muslims looked up respectively to the Congress and the Muslim League as their own parties, and to Gandhi and Jinnah as their supreme leaders. There were a few exceptions to this rule. Chaudhri Khaliquzzaman of the United Provinces was one, but eventually he yielded to pressure and joined Jinnah in 1937. Another, Allah Baksh of Sind, was assassinated. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan of the North-West Frontier, also known as the Frontier Gandhi, leader of the Red-shirted Khudai Khidmatgar (who were a voluntary organisation rather than a political party) remained close to but separate from the Congress. Only the Unionist Party in Punjab, and the Krishak Proja Party in Bengal held out as strong, self-willed, mainstream Muslim political parties distinct from the League. The former was a party which represented rural, as opposed to urban, interests in Punjab, and was led by Mian (later Sir) Fazli Hussain, followed by Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan, and Khizr Hyat Tiwana. This party cut across religious lines, and had among its leaders Lala (later Sir) Chotu Ram, representing Hindu Jat agricultural interests and a number of leaders from among Sikh agriculturists. The latter was led by A. K. Fazlul Haq and represented Muslim agriculturists while the Muslim League in Bengal belonged to the Muslim elite, namely the Zamindar class. More about this party later in this chapter.

The sensible thing under such circumstances for the Congress would have been to ally with these parties, who had credible and sober Muslim leaders, so as to draw Muslims away from the rabidly communal Muslim League. Yet the Congress continued to persist in the illusion that they alone represented Hindus and Muslims alike, and in order to reinforce their own faith in it were prepared to do anything – anything at all - to please the Muslims. This did not hurt Hindus from the provinces where they were in an overwhelming majority, such as Bombay Presidency, Madras Presidency or the Central Provinces and Berar. This did not hurt the Punjabi Hindus or Sikhs either, because of the presence of the Unionist Party described above ; nor the Hindus in the North-West Frontier Province because Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, very close to the Congress, held sway there. This did not even hurt the Hindus in the United Provinces or Bihar because, in spite of the substantial Muslim minority being solidly behind the League, the majority was still with the Hindus. On the other hand it hurt the Bengali Hindus like none else, because there was no one here to save them from the tyranny of the Muslim League except the Congress, and that party would do nothing to help the Hindus for fear of being dubbed communal. The one slim ray of hope that existed with Fazlul Haq’s Krishak Proja Party was adequately taken care of by the Congress’s remaining equidistant from them and the League, followed by a most regrettable and pigheaded refusal in 1937 to make a coalition with them.

In such a state Round Table Conferences – some three rounds of them – were held in London among the various concerned parties, namely the British, the Congress the Muslim League and diverse other groups. Nothing much came out of them. In 1932 Ramsay Macdonald, the Labourite Prime Minister announced his 'Communal Award'. This award fixed communal representations in the provinces and was given its final shape by the Poona Pact of 4th September 1932 which secured general as well as special representations for the scheduled or depressed classes. This was followed finally by a mammoth piece of legislation known as the Government of India Act 1935, which received royal assent on 4th August 1935. Vincent Smith describes it as “the last major constructive achievement of the British in India”.

What did the 1935 act do? In short, it enlarged the scope of popular representation subject to the paramountcy of the British. It put an end to the Dyarchy of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms and introduced the federal principle with the corollary of provincial autonomy and the principle of popular responsible government in the provinces. Muslim-majority Sind was separated from Bombay Presidency (which had an overall Hindu majority) to form a separate province. A new province of Orissa was formed from the Orissa Division of the former province of Bihar and Orissa and the adjacent portions of Madras Presidency and Central Provinces. Burma was completely separated from India, and a separate act called the Government of Burma Act was re-enacted in the very next session of the British Parliament.

Provincial elections took place in February 1937 and resulted in striking Congress successes in the Hindu-majority provinces. The Muslim League did well only among Muslims in the Hindu-majority provinces. The Congress, conversely, drew practically a blank among the Muslims. Of the 836 non-Muslim seats that the Congress contested they won as many as 715 ; but of the 485 Muslim seats they contested 85 and won only 26. The Muslim League won only two out of the 86 Muslim seats in the Punjab, 40 out of 119 in Bengal, and none at all in Sind and the North-West Frontier. Thus, very ironically, the Muslim League made a very poor showing in the land mass that is today known as Pakistan.

Two things happened in these elections which made rift between the Congress and the Muslim League irreparable -- and in effect strengthened the position of the Muslim League. The first happened in the United Provinces where the Congress and Muslim League had contested the seats on an understanding that there would be a coalition if they won. This was termed ‘independent cooperation’ by Jinnah and was adopted not just in U.P. but also in all Hindu-majority provinces. Jinnah went on to declare “There is really no substantial difference between the League and the Congress . . . . we shall always be glad to cooperate with the Congress in their constructive programmes”.

When the results came out it was found that the Congress had won a majority of its own in seven out of the eleven provinces. As a result the Congress went back on its understanding. Jawaharlal Nehru declared, with historic shortsightedness, that everybody else will have to ‘simply fall in line’ with the Congress. This actually reinforced Jinnah’s oft-taken position that however much they talked about cutting across religious lines, the Congress could not be trusted to look after the interests of the Muslims. Maulana Azad has termed this action of Jawaharlal a blunder equal to the one he made nine years later on July 10, 1946 when, by a thoughtless remark at a press conference, he gave an opportunity to Jinnah to wriggle out of the League’s reluctant acceptance of the Cabinet Mission proposals (see later in the chapter).

Bhabani Prosad Chatterjee, in his well researched “Deshbibhag : Poshchat o Nepottho Kahini” (in Bangla, meaning “The Partition : the Background and what happened behind the scene [12]) has commented that had

the Congress obliged the League by accommodating them in the United Provinces, the Hindus would surely have accused them of appeasing the League[13]. It is difficult to accept this position. Chatterjee has not mentioned who among the Hindus would have made this accusation. Only the Hindu Mahasabha would have done it, and they did it even otherwise, not without any justification. In truth the reason lay in the Congress’s eternal grand delusion : that they, and they alone, represented all castes and communities through the length and breadth of India.

The second incident took place in Bengal. Here, three parties emerged, with none being able to secure a majority. Fazlul Haq’s Krishak Proja Party, representing the interests of Muslim agriculturists secured most of the seats reserved for the Muslims, but that was not sufficient for him to form a ministry. Haq himself was deeply suspicious of the Muslim League, and wanted to have no truck with them. A number of prominent members of the party, though devout Muslims, were nationalistically inclined, and wanted a coalition with the Hindu-dominated Congress. The Congress however remained stuck in a totally inflexible position, which later proved disastrous, that they would rather sit in the opposition but would not enter into any coalition. Fazlul Haq thus was driven into a coalition with the Muslim League and is said to have remarked, in so many words, that he had been thrown to the wolves. An understanding was reached between him and the Muslim League leaders Suhrawardy[14] and Nazimuddin through the good offices of a Bengali Hindu Industrialist called Nalini Ranjan Sarker[15] and the Coalition Ministry took office in late 1937. Suhrawardy and Nazimuddin had, until the previous year, belonged to a party known as the United Muslim Party which merged with Jinnah’s Muslim League through the efforts of Ispahani and a few others[16].

This refusal of the Congress to form a coalition with Fazlul Haq has already been termed pigheaded, and was the result of a decision of the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) who refused to make an exception in the case of Bengal. This was probably the first nail to be driven in the coffin of the East Bengali Hindus, though very few realised it as such at that time. Nor was it a result of following some inflexible principle, because the selfsame AICC permitted such a coalition in Assam. Now why did the AICC do it? Was it an act of simple political stupidity that occasionally occurs in the life of every nation and moulds the destiny of millions? Or was it something deeper, an act of spitefulness? And if the AICC did it why didn’t the Bengal Congress raise their voice against such a decision, and in favour of coalition with Haq? Perhaps we shall never know. However we can look at observations of contemporary watchers and try to reach our own conclusions.

Nirad C. Chaudhuri, as the secretary of the Bengal Congress president Sarat Chandra Bose, had the opportunity of observing the situation at very close range. It is generally acknowledged that his objectivity, astuteness, and power of observation could not be seriously faulted if the British were not concerned. He has said[17] : “I am unable to say whether the treatment of Bengal by the Congress was deliberate. But there is no doubt that there was indifference to Bengal in the Congress, if not some real antipathy, which, in spite of being only latent, influenced policies. . . . . Here I have only to add that at that early stage even Sarat Bose showed lack of foresight by being opposed to office acceptance”.

These were all momentous events, the Communal Award of 1932, the Government of India Act 1935 and the taking office of Fazlul Haq’s coalition ministry in 1937. What did they mean for Bengal, or more precisely, Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims ?

Again, Nirad C. Chaudhuri had spoken about these with remarkable clarity. He has this to say[18] : “Let me begin with the political situation in the strict sense. The starkly obvious feature was that, under the provincial constitution imposed on Bengal by the Government of India Act 1935, Bengali Hindus were permanently debarred (italics his) from exercising any political power in their province . . . . . . except through the charity of the Muslims which was not likely to be bestowed. . . . . they were reduced to a permanent statutory minority, disenfranchised as to power, although given the franchise to elect members to the legislature”. It ought to be mentioned that this situation continued till the partition of the province (except for the brief interregnum of Fazlul Haq’s ministry, 1941-43) till the province was partitioned and Hindu-majority West Bengal came into being. Chaudhuri also wrote[19] in the then popular Bengali monthly Sanibarer Chithi in September 1936 “ Today, as a result of the Communal Award of 1932, there is going to be a dominance of Muslims, as against the Hindus, over the governance of Bengal. . . . . They (the Bengali Hindus) are apprehensive that as soon as the Muslims get political power they would, in education as in literature, undermine the very culture based on ancient Indian ideals which was the pride of the Bengali Hindu. The fear is neither baseless nor unjustified. . . .” (Translation his).

Meanwhile there were legislative and economic changes which bettered the lot of the Muslim peasant. The Bengal Tenancy Act, the legislation forming the framework of the Zamindari system, underwent two amendments, all in favour of the ryot, the tenant peasant, most of whom in Eastern Bengal were Muslim. Jute prices also registered a steep upward movement around this time, and jute cultivators were almost all Muslim. This economic empowerment had an immediate political fallout. Muslims began to increasingly occupy posts of Presidents (who were hitherto mostly Hindu) of Union Boards, the lowest rung in the system then prevalent of Local Self-Government.

In the meantime, while the Congress was proceeding on the Gandhian path, and the Muslim League was busy trying to wrest as much as possible for the Muslims, a different kind of movement was in full swing in Bengal. This was the movement of those who had chosen the path of violence to freedom. They were confined largely to Bengal, and to some extent to Punjab and the Maharashtra region of the Bombay Presidency. The British used to call them terrorists, but in Bengal they were known as Biplobi or Revolutionaries. Their epoch was Bengal’s Ognijug or Agniyuga, the era of fire.

Normally when one talks of Revolutionaries one almost automatically thinks of Marxists or Communists, but these people had nothing to do with Marxism. In fact the Marxists or Communists had played a very underhand and nefarious role in India’s freedom movement – more on this subject later. The inspiration for the movement came from a variety of sources – mainly from the patriotic song Vande Mataram composed by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the teachings of Swami Vivekananda, and to the part of the Hindu scriptures known as Bhagavad Gita, which is actually a collection of the counsel that Lord Shri Krishna gave to the warrior Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra.

This phase of India’s struggle for freedom actually began in the early years of the century, led by a brilliant person called Aurobindo Ghosh who had qualified for the ICS, but failed the test of riding a horse. He eventually left the movement for a life of spiritualism, and came to be known as Sri Aurobindo of Pondicherry. The movement did not have any central control, as a result of which it ebbed and flowed with varying strength at various points of time. Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki were among the first to take shots at the British. Khudiram’s death by hanging and Prafulla’s in a gunfight provided inspiration for hundreds of others. During the First World War some of the revolutionaries tried to collaborate with the Germans – the efforts of Bagha Jatin in this regard have also been referred to earlier.

It is not that the Revolutionaries did not have any organisation at all, merely that they had no central organisation, planning, coordination or control. In fact they used to operate under the loose control of a number of organisations spread throughout the province, especially East Bengal. One very important such organisation was the Anushilan Samiti which had more than five hundred branches in East Bengal. Among the others were Jugantar Dal, Attonnati Samiti, Sri Sangha, Prabartak Sangha and others. A high point in the Revolutionary movement was reached on 18th April 1930 when a group of very ordinary middle-class Bengali Hindu Bhadralok, having formed themselves into an organisation called the Indian Republican Army (doubtless under inspiration from their Irish counterparts), led by a schoolteacher called Shurjo Sen, also known as Masterda, raided the district armoury at Chittagong and cut off Chittagong from the rest of the world by simultaneously ransacking the telegraph office. Most of the group perished in the gunfights that followed, but Masterda, with his associate Tarakeshwar Dastidar were captured, tried and hanged. Their bodies were not allowed to be cremated for fear of unrest. Instead they were secretly thrown into the sea. Some others, such as a young intrepid woman called Pritilata Ohdedar, chose to commit suicide. Meanwhile a number of Indian and British police officers, such as Ellison of Comilla, Asatullah and Tarini Mukherjee were shot dead by other revolutionaries. The same year saw a gun-battle on the corridors of Writers’ Buildings in Calcutta, the seat of the Bengal Government, where three young men called Binoy Basu, Badal Gupta and Dinesh Gupta shot dead Simpson and Craig, two very senior police officers, and were themselves killed or subsequently hanged.

There were similar revolutionaries following the path of armed insurrection in other provinces too, notably in Punjab and in the Maharashtra part of Bombay Presidency. In fact the first among such revolutionaries to go to the gallows were the Chapekar brothers of Poona (now Pune). However, the preponderance of Bengal in this phase of the struggle for freedom is brought out by nothing else as clearly as the walls of the cellular jail at Port Blair, Andaman Islands. In the British days the Indian Penal Code prescribed the punishment of ‘transportation for life’ for certain offences, and that meant moving to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, which were penal colonies just as French Guiana and Devil’s Island were to the French. This practice was abolished after independence, and the cellular jail today stands as a national monument. Now, the cellular jail has the names of its inmates inscribed on the walls, and has them classified province-wise – and out of the thirty-two walls where such names appear, as many as twenty-three carry those from Bengal.

Two points are to be noted. First, these revolutionaries were, to a man, all Hindus. Secondly, barring those from the district of Midnapore, practically all the rest were from East Bengal, many of them from the districts of Barisal, Dacca, Faridpur, Chittagong and Tipperah.

Because of the lack of a central control, of any definite gameplan, and more than anything else of leadership, the revolutionary movement petered out. But it had put the fear of God in the British and had mobilised a lot of fence-sitters to commit themselves totally to independence of the country. While popular perception has it that the mainstream Congress movement, following the path of non-violence under Gandhi, was primarily responsible for bringing independence to the country, this is not accepted by all. In fact it remains an enigma to this day as to what precisely prompted the Imperial British to give up the first slice, the brightest jewel, of their empire, and go home without a serious fight. It is widely believed that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s Azad Hind Fauj or Indian National Army, and the Naval Mutiny of 1946 had played at least as important a part as Gandhi’s non-violent movements ; because these two caused the British to start doubting, for the second time since the War of Independence of 1857 (wrongly termed by some as the Sepoy Mutiny), the loyalty of their Indian troops. Along with these, the revolutionaries of Bengal and Punjab must have played a very important role too!

But that is not the end of the enigma. What happened to those among the fearless revolutionaries who survived, the majority of whom were Hindus from East Bengal? Very strangely, practically all of them left East Bengal after partition, hounded out by Muslims, without so much as a whimper. The enigma is, why did people, who had braved the imperial power of the British, succumb so meekly when challenged by the might of the much less powerful Pakistani state and their rag-tag Lungi-clad Muslim rioters? Why did such people run away from places that were their homes for hundreds of years? This question has been rarely, if ever, asked. An answer to this question, and also why it is not asked, has been attempted in chapter 10 of this book.

All these surviving East Bengali Hindu revolutionaries lived on to become embittered, frustrated, disgruntled old men in the refugee colonies of post-partition West Bengal. Their exploits were largely forgotten in the media blitzkrieg launched by the Congressites in their self-praise and in praise of Gandhi and Nehru and their non-violent struggle. Their grandchildren born in post-partition West Bengal refused to believe that they did the kind of things they claimed they did. All that they got (in material terms) for risking their lives and then being hounded out of their homes, were commemorative copper plaques, pensions, some franchises from state-owned companies, and railway travel concessions. Quite a few among them became Communists. One or two took to crime, and one became an expert bank robber, of course with a revolutionary objective. Not one of them ever opened his mouth against their being ousted from East Bengal.

We can now return to the mainstream independence movement. The next milestone in Bengal politics was the exit of Subhas Chandra Bose from the Congress in 1939, followed by his exit from the country in 1941.

It happened this way : In 1938 Subhas Chandra Bose was a brilliant young man of only forty, with great personal charm and magnetism. He was the younger brother of Sarat Chandra Bose, President of the Congress in Bengal, which gave him considerable political pedigree as well as clout. He had just come back from a long sojourn in Europe where he had gone for medical treatment. He was a powerful speaker, of a very presentable appearance, a confirmed bachelor, of unimpeachable personal integrity and was totally untainted by any scandal. With all these he had acquired an irresistible appeal to the intelligentsia, and it was only natural that he should be considered for the highest political office that a Hindu in British India could aspire to – namely the presidency of the Indian National Congress. At that time the hold of Gandhi on the Congress was so complete that no one could think of reaching that office without his endorsement, and no one could think of continuing in that office without his support. Gandhi endorsed Subhas’s candidature for the Congress to be held at Haripura in 1938, and Subhas was elected president.

The next three years in his life after this was an anticlimax. Immediately following his election problems started between the two of them. Unfortunately Subhas’s skill at politicking was next to nothing compared to Gandhi’s. Gandhi managed to get practically all the first-rung leaders of the Congress, such as Patel, Nehru, Kripalani, Bhulabhai Desai, Sarojini Naidu, Azad and others leagued up against Subhas. The time for electing the president for the next session, to be held at Tripuri, near Jabalpur, came, and Gandhi endorsed a quiet, if colourless, person called Pattabhi Sitaramayya for the post. An election was held. Such was Subhas’s appeal that he got elected in spite of Gandhi’s active opposition, and Gandhi promptly went on record saying that Pattabhi’s defeat was his defeat. After this his camp made life miserable for Subhas, with the result that he was forced to resign in exasperation, also leaving the Congress in the same motion, to found a new party called the Forward Bloc. This proved to be great political mistake on Subhas’s part. In one stroke he had thrown himself out of the political mainstream of the nation. Even his brother Sarat Bose did not follow him, and remained with the Congress. After this, in January 1941, despite being under police surveillance, he escaped from his house and went to Nazi Germany, and thence by submarine to Japan. His greatest exploits all relate to the period after this exit, but the fact remains that with this he was lost to Bengal.

Subhas Chandra Bose was a natural, charismatic leader, and his exit from Bengal robbed the province of a person who could hold a brief for the province before any forum in the world. His appeal also ran across communal lines, and he had the capacity to persuade the Muslim majority of Bengal to take a rational line vis-a vis the Hindus. As already said, the Congress, despite being an overwhelmingly Hindu party, and existing because of Hindu support alone, was always reluctant to take up the cause of Hindus for fear of losing a Muslim support that wasn’t there. Fortunately for the Hindus of Bengal, there rose above the political horizon, at this juncture, a leader of unmatched clarity of thinking, fearlessness and integrity. His name was Syama Prasad Mookerjee[20], and for the Bengali Hindus he was to prove to be their last hope in politics – although they did not realise it then, and have only begun to realise it after all these years.

Syama Prasad entered politics at the instance and insistence of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the president of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha, who had then just been released from prison and had come to visit Bengal in August 1939. The Congress’s pandering to Muslim interests in order to garner their votes, at the cost of Hindus who had kept the party in business, had thoroughly revolted Syama Prasad. He heard Savarkar’s speech at the Hindu Mahasabha conference at Khulna and came in contact with him. Meanwhile other Mahasabha leaders, such as Ashutosh Lahiri, N.C.Chatterjee (father of Somnath Chatterjee, parliamentary leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in the 1980s and 90s) had perceived the great promise of the man and were pressing him to join. Another person who was instrumental in finally persuading him to join the Mahasabha was Swami Pranavananda, founder of the Bharat Sevashram Sangha.

Another very important thing happened on September 1, 1939 in faraway Europe. Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded Poland, and Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister rose in the Parliament at Westminster to say, “Gentlemen, we are at war with Germany”. As a British colony India was dragged into the war which was, till then, a purely European affair – even the United States of America had not joined it then. The Congress wanted an assurance from the British regarding India’s independence after the war as a quid pro quo for India’s joining the war, and the British government flatly refused. The Congress then resigned their ministries in all the seven provinces where they were in power. The British were not terribly hurt. But the happiest person was Muhammad Ali Jinnah who termed the day of such resignation as the ‘day of deliverance for the Muslims’.

Meanwhile Fazlul Haq was having a very hard time with the Muslim League diehards. It was his dream to educate the illiterate masses of Bengal, and in spite of having been Premier he had selected for himself the portfolio of Education rather than the much more politically important Home or Finance portfolios, leaving these to the Muslim League. His politics was so fundamentally different from that of the communal zealots of the League that nobody expected them to stick together for any length of time. He had been more pressured than persuaded to support the Pakistan Resolution of 1940 at the Muslim League session at Lahore, much against his wishes as it turned out later. Finally in 1941, he decided that enough was enough, and after having a word with Syama Prasad, left the ministry which then collapsed. He then formed, in December 1941, the Progressive Coalition ministry with the Hindu Mahasabha, in which Syama Prasad became the Finance Minister. This was popularly known as the Syama-Haq ministry, and this was the last time over a long period that Bengali Hindus were going to get some justice from their government.

Despite the fact that the cabinet enjoyed the confidence of the Provincial Legislative Assembly, the Governor waited for a full week, from the 3rd to the 11th of December, before swearing the cabinet in. And before he did so, he dealt it a terrible blow. On the 11th, a few hours before the swearing-in, he got Sarat Chandra Bose arrested under the Defence of India Regulations, and incarcerated him in the Presidency Jail. The supporters of the Coalition were all aghast and advised Fazlul Haq not to swear the cabinet in. However this would have meant playing right into the hands of the British, and Haq did not do it. Instead he decided to get his cabinet in first, and then apply pressure on the Governor to release Bose. However, this design also failed. The Governor told Haq that this was a decision of the Central Government, and there was nothing he could do about Bose's arrest[21].

The real reason for such conduct was that the British hated the ministry. First, they were right through clearly partial to the Muslims, though not all of them were as brazen as Sir Bamfylde Fuller (see Chapter 1) about it. Secondly, their entire administrative strategy at the time rested, to a large extent, on quietly fomenting and exacerbating Hindu-Muslim tension, and the Progressive Coalition ministry was literally a monkey wrench into their works. This element in their administrative strategy was so basic that even Annada Sankar Ray, who is otherwise unduly mild towards the British even while criticising them in his Jukto Bonger Sriti, is very explicit on this score. He mentions a case where a Brahmin and a Muslim were arrested during the Civil Disobedience movement. The British District Magistrate released the Muslim immediately, telling him repeatedly that the British had no quarrel with the Muslims, but kept the Brahmin in lock-up for a week. Thus, Ray observes, it was rubbed into him that the Government does not desire amity between Hindu and Muslim[22]. Thirdly they were even more partial to the Muslim League than they were to the Muslims, and could not take kindly to a ministry that had deposed them. The hatred was manifest from a telegram sent by Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy, to Amery, the Secretary of State for India on the subject of unleashing repressive measures on the populace who had participated in the ‘Quit India’ movement (see below) : “Herbert (Sir John, the Governor of Bengal) is not very certain of the attitude of Haq, who, under Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s influence shows signs of wobbling, with the result that the Bengal Government may be reluctant to take necessary action”. So they looked for opportunities to dethrone this ministry and reinstall the Leaguers. Such opportunity was not late in coming, and the occasion was provided by the Congress’s ‘Quit India’ call.

In fact the Hon’ble Sir John Arthur Herbert, Governor of Bengal, was a very complex character whose ideas nevertheless fell admirably in line with the Imperial designs of the British. He was known as ‘Herbert the pervert’ in intimate circles for some of his strange proclivities. He had also inherited the love of Muslims and hatred of Hindus from his predecessor of an earlier generation, Sir Bamfylde Fuller (q.v.). He set for himself a task of Muslimizing the Police forces and went about this in a very Machiavellian way.

For their own reasons the British had decided to have two parallel Police departments in their Presidencies. Thus, for Bengal there was Calcutta Police, with jurisdiction over Calcutta, and Bengal Police for the rest of Bengal. They were not just separate and independent departments but had totally different cultures. Calcutta Police was much more the glamorous of the two, with their smart white uniforms (as opposed to drab khaki of the moffusil), and the resplendent red turbans of their constables. Their headquarters, Lalbazar, was modeled after the Scotland Yard of London. The sergeant cadre of Calcutta Police in those days was manned almost exclusively by Anglo-Indians, generally known as Lalmukho (Red-faced) sergeants. However the sub-inspectors’ cadre was manned largely by Indians, mostly Bengalis. Because of the glamour of the Calcutta Police and the fact that its officers were subject to transfer only within the city, a number of young men from good, aristocratic families of Calcutta were attracted to this cadre, and as a result most of the Officers-in-Charge of the Police Stations, who were of Inspectors’ rank in the force, were Bengali Hindus.

Herbert created a number of functional departments in the Calcutta Police Headquarters, such as Criminal Records, Cheating, Murder and so on. He then imperceptibly drew away the Hindu Inspectors from the posts of Officers-in-Charge to head these departments and had them replaced by Muslims. As a result, by the time Suhrawardy was in position for the run-up to the Great Calcutta Killings (see Chapter 3), what are called ‘Line Functions’ in Management Science today, or ‘Command postings’ in the Army were entirely in the hands of Muslim officers. Quite a lot of Suhrawardy’s work thus had already been done in advance by Herbert[23].

In August 1942, in its Bombay session, the Congress called upon the British to ‘Quit India’. This is variously known as the “Quit India’ movement, the August Kranti or Biplob (Uprising) and so on. As a movement it was not a well-planned or coordinated one. However, it was enough for the panic-stricken British to promptly put all the Congress leaders in jail. As a result the movement became a loose cannon and at places, one hell of a cannon. One such place was the Midnapore district of Bengal, the home of such dissimilar characters as Khudiram and Suhrawardy. The district had earned great notoriety after the assassination of three of its District Magistrates – Douglas, Burge and Peddie – so much so that thereafter the government stopped sending Britishers to the district to become its magistrate.

In certain parts of the district, notably in the Tamluk and Contai subdivisions, total independence was proclaimed. The areas were cut off from the rest of India by uprooting railway lines and severing telegraph connections. The British retaliated with brutally repressive measures, deploying both the police and the military who absolutely took the law in their own hands. They made few arrests. Instead they killed, burnt, tortured, maimed and raped, all with a carte blanche issued by governor Herbert.

At this juncture a terrible cyclone, accompanied by tidal waves, hit the Midnapore coast in the very same Tamluk and Contai subdivisions. This was on October 16, on Ashtami day of the Durga Puja, the biggest festival of Bengali Hindus, and the streets were full of people in Contai town. In no time the town went under five feet of water. This was a time of the year when no cyclone is normally expected, and the population was taken totally unawares. Ashok Mitra[24] writes that some thirty thousand people lost their lives in the first fifteen minutes. It is still believed by many that the District Magistrate of Midnapore, Niaz Mohammed Khan, an ICS officer who later opted for Pakistan and became an important civil servant there deliberately withheld a cyclone warning on the grounds that ‘disloyal people had no right to live’. At any rate, according to Ashok Mitra[25] he recommended to the government in his report that, in consideration of the political mischief wrought by people from the district, neither should the government take any relief measures for at least one month, nor permit any non-governmental organisation to do so. Was this being more loyal than the king – or more malevolent than the devil?

The conduct of Niaz must have been observed with considerable approval by Suhrawardy, although the latter was not in power at this time. For later, when Suhrawardy returned to power by the grace of Governor Herbert, he put Niaz to good use in the run-up to ‘Direct Action’, also known as the Great Calcutta Killings. This is described in the next chapter. Niaz is credited with various other feats, such as an attempt to Islamise the Arakan coast of Burma (later Myanmar) by settling Muslims from Chittagong there. He succeeded in this, but only temporarily, because later, in the 1990s the Buddhist Myanmarese government drove out all these Muslims, known as Rohingiyas, back into Bangladesh. We need only remind ourselves at this stage that it was under administrators like Niaz a few years later that the Hindus of East Bengal had to live.

The unbelievable hardship to which the population of the area were subjected to by this combination of human repression and the natural calamity was carefully hidden by the British administration from the public at large, even from the provincial cabinet. When Syama Prasad came to know of this, entirely through unofficial channels, he was incensed. He rushed to Midnapore, and upon observing the deliberate and inhuman official callousness, took up the matter with the Governor Sir John Herbert who, quite predictably, did exactly nothing. Syama Prasad, in protest resigned from the cabinet on November 20, 1942. Sir John was waiting for such opportunities. Around this time he somehow (possibly by hinting that he would form an all-party government of which Haq would be the Premier) had persuaded Fazlul Haq to sign a resignation of his cabinet, but he kept this up his sleeve for a while. A few months later, when Haq said in the Provincial Assembly that he would have a Judicial Inquiry instituted to determine the cause of the disaster and the relief measures[26] he sacked the Haq cabinet on March 28, 1943 with this resignation. Thereafter, using his extraordinary powers he installed a Muslim League cabinet led by Nazimuddin, with Suhrawardy as the Minister in charge of Civil Supplies. Nazimuddin flatly refused to take any non-League Muslim into his cabinet, and Haq was out. Herbert also got what he wanted : a rubber-stamp provincial cabinet, with no voice of conscience like Syama Prasad or Haq.

At this point it is necessary to take a look at the role played by the Communist Party of India at this juncture and later. This is because, as will be seen, the Indian Communists, in order to secure political gains, wholeheartedly supported the demand for Pakistan voiced by the Muslim League, and eventually played a pivotal role in preventing proper rehabilitation of the refugees from East Bengal. In order to understand their behaviour during these epoch-making years it is also necessary to briefly digress into the origin and development of Indian Communists.

Around the middle years of the twentieth century it used to be said about Indian Communists in jest, “ Who is that man sweating away in an overcoat on this steamy afternoon ? Oh, that is Comrade so-and-so. But why the overcoat? Because it is snowing in Moscow.” There was considerable truth in the joke, because in those days the Indian Communists were blind followers of the Soviet political line, regardless of its applicability to Indian conditions or of the national interests of India. Just how blind, and where this landed them and all those that listened to them can and ought to form the subject of a distinct line of study. For the purposes of this book the discussion will have to be limited to the bare mentioning of three aspects, namely : first, their position during India’s freedom struggle ; second, their collaboration with the British Government during the war, and especially their depiction of Subhas Chandra Bose as a Japanese stooge ; and third, their role in and following the partition of the country and of Bengal.

The Communist Party of India (CPI) was founded, not in India, but at Tashkent in the erstwhile Soviet Union (now Uzbekistan) on October 17, 1920. This was very symbolic of the fact, observed throughout the life of communism in India, that the Indian communists were always far away from the aspirations of the people – in fact there was always a lack of basic understanding of Indianness among them. One of the founder-members was Manabendra Nath Roy, better known as M.N.Roy, who has been mentioned earlier in this chapter in connection with revolutionary activities in Bengal during the First World War. Roy very soon fell out with Dange, another founder-member, and the Comintern appointed a British communist with Bengali roots, Rajani Palme Dutt, to lead the party. Thereafter Zinoviev, a member of the then-ruling ‘Troika’ of the Soviet Union (of which the other members were Stalin and Kamenev), ordered the fledgling CPI to become an appendage of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

The CPI was opposed to the independence movement from day one. In the first world Congress of the Communist International held in Moscow in 1920 the Programme of the International called Gandhiism a philosophy that was fast emerging as a stumbling block in the way of a people’s revolution. A motion in the sixth International held in 1928, also in Moscow, pointed out that it was the duty of all communists in India to expose the Congress in India, and to resist the efforts of Swarajists, Gandhians and Congressmen of all hues.

Rabindra Nath Datta remembers how the Communists in Noakhali formed small groups to guard Police Stations, Bridges and Telegraph lines from possible attacks by Congressites during the 'Quit India' movement of August 1942.

Their treatment of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose during the war (which they used to call ‘Imperialist War’ until Germany attacked Russia, and ‘Peoples’ War’ thereafter) causes them no end of embarrassment today. Especially in West Bengal where Netaji Subhas is revered as the greatest national hero of the freedom struggle, and where, coincidentally, the Communists have been in power since 1977. In fact Jyoti Basu, the Communist Chief Minister of West Bengal had said in a speech on Subhas’s birthday that they had made a mistake in regard to Netaji. He did not elaborate how he, or his party, proposed to make amends for this ‘mistake’. Probably his condescending to admit the mistake was enough. At any rate, the depiction of Netaji during the war is, at once, interesting and instructive.

The ‘People’s War’, the organ of the Communist Party of India at that time, printed a series of cartoons of Subhas at that time. One of them, published in the November 21, 1943 issue showed Subhas Chandra Bose as a midget dressed in military tunic, guiding the Imperial Japanese Army into India. In the August 8, 1943 issue Subhas’s face was shown as mask hiding a vile and cruel Japanese face. One of the slogans in Bangla that they coined, calling all comrades to arms, ran as follows:

“Comrade, dhoro hatiyar – dhoro hatiyar
Swadhinata shongrame nohi aaj akla
Biplobi Soviet, durjoy Mohachin
Shathey aachhey Ingrej, nirbheek Markin.”

which, freely translated, means as follows:

To arms Comrades – to arms, Comrades!
We are not alone in this struggle for freedom
The Revolutionary Soviet Union, the invincible, Great China,
The British, the fearless Americans – they are all with us.

It is to be noted that Mohachin (Great China) referred to Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang China of the time, and not to Mao’s Red China. The punch line, of course, is the description of the American (Markin in Bangla) GI as ‘fearless fighters’ - by the Communist Party of India.

After the ban was lifted on the Communist Party of India, Secretary Puran Chand Joshi sent a telegram to Harry Pollitt, Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In the telegram, apart from mouthing the usual inanities about the ‘Anti-Fascist Solidarity of the Indian People’, he also mentioned that his co-revolutionaries had taken a suicidal path, referring of course to the Congress’s Quit India movement. To Ashok Mitra this seemed to be very clever-clever. Everyone knew that the telegram would be censored, and the idea was to let the Government know, without seeming to intend to do so, that the CPI was completely on their side[27].

And finally, the matter of East Bengal refugees, which is the reason why the conduct of the Communists in India is very important for the purposes of this book. When the clamour for Pakistan by the Muslim League, on the basis of Jinnah’s two-nation theory was warming up, and Congress leaders were in jail following the uprising of August 1942, the CPI released a ‘thesis’, drafted by one Gangadhar Adhikari. The substance of the thesis was that there was no such nation as India, that India was really a conglomeration of as many as eighteen different ‘nationalities’ and that each one of these nationalities had the right to secede from the conglomeration. Now the fact was that neither the Parsees of Bombay (now Mumbai), nor the Christians of Mangalore, nor the Jews of Cochin had shown the slightest inclination to secede from India, nor to declare themselves as a separate ‘nationality’. It was only Jinnah’s Muslim League, representing the opinion of the vast majority of the Muslims in India, who claimed that they were a different nation and wanted to secede ; and they loved the Adhikari thesis. However, the CPI’s espousal of Pakistan did not stop here. CPI leaders, such as Sajjad Zaheer, B.T.Ranadive, P.C.Joshi and others, actively wrote and otherwise propagandized in favour of the ‘right of secession of the Muslims of India’.

This was all before the partition actually took place. Probably the Communists expected that in the fledgling state of Pakistan they would be much better off as a party than they were in undivided India. Alas, this was not to be. The atheist Communists with Hindu names were treated no differently from their God-fearing Hindu brethren, and with the exception of very few like Moni Singh they had all to leave their beloved Pakistan for which they had done so much clamouring.

Dhananjoy Basak[28], formerly of Nawabpur, Dacca City, recalls that his cousin Gopal Basak was an important organiser of the Communist Party of India, and had been named in the Meerut Conspiracy Case. People like P.C.Joshi and Muzaffar Ahmed were regular visitors to their house at Nawabpur. He had, however, taken fright at the look of the Muslim majority after the riots of 1946. He was one of the first among their clan to flee to India after the country as partitioned.

Prafulla Kumar Chakrabarti, one of the very few serious researchers on the subject of East Bengal refugees generally agrees with this conclusion[29], and provides further insight into the blundering ways of the CPI. According to Chakrabarti the Communist party initially “simply refused to accept the existence of the luckless victims of communal hatred . . . . . the party felt that once the panacea of partition was implemented the communal virus would be completely eradicated from the Indian body politic. The party directed its Pakistan cadres not to migrate to India . . . . even (front ranking leaders such as) Sajjad Zaheer, Krishnabinode Roy and Mansur Habibullah were expelled from the party when they came back to India after their release from Pakistan jail”.

What happened after partition in West Bengal is relevant to this book only so far as the same influenced events in East Bengal. The conduct of Communists had such an influence only to a marginal extent, and therefore will be mentioned only in passing. There were a number of ex-revolutionaries among the refugees who had turned Communist after their revolutionary fervour had died out. They were joined in West Bengal by the local Communists, and together they formed a Communist core among the refugees. This formation of a core has been masterfully dealt with in Prafulla Chakrabarti’s book mentioned above, and the serious reader is referred to that book for a fuller treatment of the subject. The refugee problem in Bengal was mismanaged to an extent beyond belief by the Nehru government, as will be seen later in this book. It is this that helped the Communists grow in the state, something that did not happen in most other parts of India. And it is that growth in the refugee camps of those days that culminated in the unbroken rule by the party in the state since 1977.

The Communists taught the refugees to fight for their rights. So far so good. However the forms of fight were such as would in later years brand Bengali refugees, without justification, as a feckless, lazy, unreasonable, undisciplined constantly agitating bunch of people. The refugees were taught to demand cash doles, not jobs, to travel in trains without tickets, to hold up road traffic as a form of protest and to squat on other peoples’ land. The government obliged, spoiling the habits of an entire generation and making heroes out of the Communists. The government made plans to resettle the refugees in the Andaman Islands. This was a very good idea, because the islands had a climate and soil very similar to that of East Bengal. They were moreover totally virgin, with no possibilities of any clash with the local population, something that happened later in parts of Dandakaranya. The Communists persuaded the refugees to refuse rehabilitation in the Andamans, and demanded resettlement only in West Bengal. There was opposition in powerful quarters against the East Bengal refugees going to the Andamans, and those quarters could not be more thankful.

Ironically, after the Communists were voted to power in 1977, and some of the later refugees were under resettlement in Dandakaranya (a rocky and semi-arid tract of land at the tri-junction of the states of Orissa, Andhra and Madhya Pradesh) some misguided non-political elements among them led them to return to West Bengal. The refugees sold, literally for a song, whatever they had been given by the government for setting up a new life there, as also what they had earned for themselves. They then trooped to West Bengal in the hope that the newly installed Communists would help them[30].

Here they met a different lot of Bengali Communists who did not need their support any more. They were summarily told to return to Dandakaranya. These refugees had burnt their boats and were not to be persuaded so easily to return. They defied the government and sailed, in makeshift country boats, to a remote uninhabited island called Marichjhaanpi in the Sundarban delta and tried to set up a settlement without any help from the government. The government retaliated by sending the police on the one hand and Communist goons on the other. Some of the refugees were killed by these goons. Some, in trying to escape from them by swimming across the estuary, were eaten by crocodiles. The rest were packed off in special trains to Dandakaranya where they went, made refugees a second time, by a set of politicians who came to power by dangling before their compatriots the prospect of rehabilitation in West Bengal. Sunil Ganguly[31] has described poignant scenes of this period in his immensely popular novel in Bangla, Purba-Pashchim (East-West)[32].

Now we can return to the Bengal of March 1943 when Sir John Herbert, the Governor of Bengal, ousted the ministry of Fazlul Haq, and installed in its place the Muslim League ministry with Khwaja Nazimuddin as the Premier, and Suhrawardy as the Minister for Civil Supplies. In 1946 Suhrawardy became

the Premier replacing Nazimuddin. During this period most important posts at the cutting edge of the government, such as the Officers-in-charge of the police stations, came to be manned by Muslims, pushing Hindu officers to ineffectual posts. The government was unabashedly partisan, and said so in so many words. It was a government from which a Hindu could expect no justice.

What the situation was like in those times has been described by in his inimitable style by Rajshekhar Bose in one of his short stories, Goopee Shaheb. Goopee Shaheb (real name Gopinath Ghosh, a Hindu) was an eccentric who used to keep scorpions as pets in his pockets. One day a pickpocket called Chottu Mian (a Muslim) tried to practise his profession on Goopee, and was promptly delivered several near-fatal stings by Goopee’s pets. The author, who was a roommate of Goopee in his 'mess' (bachelor accommodation), was called to furnish bail for Goopee. For it was Goopee, and not Chottu, who had been prosecuted by Gulzar Hussain, the Muslim Officer-in-charge, Muchipara police station, on the charge of attempted homicide of Chottu by getting him stung by scorpions. The author protested meekly while furnishing bail. Gulzar Hussain roared back, telling the author not to try to teach him the law ; for, according to him, even if poverty sometimes drove Chottu to pick pockets, it fell on Gulzar, Mr. Suhrawardy and the Governor to take care of the matter. Goopee had no right to take the law in his own hands.

Sunil Ganguly, in his Purba-Pashchim, writes of the filling of a vacancy of a lecturer in a Government college near Calcutta. The job was given to a Muslim with a third class M.A. degree in preference to a Hindu with a first class degree. When this was pointed out to Nazimuddin he stated quite brazenly that it was the decision of the provincial cabinet that the job must go to a Muslim. First or second class would naturally be preferred, but third class would also do, so long as the candidate was Muslim [33].

That is what those days were like. It was after passing through days for more than four years that the country and Bengal got independence and partition on 15th August 1947. That was however not to be before the province also passed through the unbelievable trauma of three macro-horrors in the space of these four years. These horrors were : first, the Bengal Famine of 1943 ; second, the Calcutta Killings of August 1946 ; and the third, the Noakhali Carnage of October in the same year. These three events saw the death of so many people on such a massive scale in so little time, and such unspeakably nefarious and unconscionable conduct on the part of the Muslim League as well as of the British governments, that they deserve at least a full chapter to be devoted to them. Hence, the next chapter.

CHAPTER 2
[1] Jogesh Chandra Bagal, in his historical work in Bangla, Muktir Shondhane Bharat, ba Bharater Nobojagoroner Itibritto, S.K.Mitra & Bros., 1st Ed., 1940, p. 245

[2] The Oxford History of India, ibid. p. 806

[3] Roses in December, an autobiography, with epilogue ; by M.C.Chagla ; Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Mumbai, 10th Ed., 1994. Chagla (1900-1981), a Bombay Muslim barrister just like Jinnah, was in many ways Jinnah's exact antithesis. While Jinnah after the 1920's became a totally communal Muslim politician, Chagla remained in the profession and entered the judiciary to become a puisne judge at the Bombay High Court in 1941. Later he became Chief Justice, and after retirement, a judge in the International Court of Justice at The Hague, Indian ambassador to the U.S, U.K., and finally, Union Education Minister in Nehru's cabinet.. All his life he was a strictly secular person -- secular in the true sense, for he staunchly believed in concepts such as the Uniform Civil Code, and was a strong critic of minority appeasement policies followed by successive governments in India. See pages 84-85, 160-161 of the autobiography for this aspect.

[4] ibid., p.78-79

[5] ibid., p. 119

[6] Swami Vivekananda had compared the action of trying to take religion out of the hearts of Indians to trying to make the Ganga River flow backwards from the sea to the Himalayas and then making it flow on a new channel (Jago Juboshokti, 3rd Ed., p. 24, in Bangla). Yet that is what Nehru had attempted in independent India, with predictably disastrous results.

[7] Forty years later this Malabar coast again became famous in the same context when E.M.S.Namboodiripad, the first communist Chief Minister of India, in order to appease the Moplah Muslims, carved out a Muslim-majority district called Malappuram in this area. Namboodiripad was one of the strongest adherents of the theory that a ‘little bit’ of Muslim communalism was to be tolerated, even welcomed, but anything remotely resembling Hindu communalism was to be nipped in the bud.

[8] Moulana Mohammed Ali together with his brother Shaukat Ali were leaders in the Khilafat movement, who eventually became champions of Muslim rights (Vincent A. Smith, ibid. p. 807)

[9] Roses in December, ibid, p.78, 81

[10] Tin Kuri Dosh, ibid. Part II p. 232

[11] The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, by Louis Fischer, 1st paperback Ed., Harper and Row, New York, 1983, p. 447

[12] “Deshbibhag : Poshchat o Nepottho Kahini” (in Bangla) by Bhabani Prosad Chatterjee, 1st Ed., 1993 Ananda Publishers, Calcutta.

[13] ibid. p. 35

[14] Husseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (1900-1959), Barrister, Ashraf Muslim from the Midnapore district of present-day West Bengal, Civil Supplies Minister and later Premier of Bengal in the Muslim League ministry, 1943-47, Prime Minister of Pakistan, 1956-57 Suhrawardy was guilty of many misdeeds in his political life, including black market operations in the great Bengal famine of 1943, and inciting and actively promoting the notorious great Calcutta killings. In 1947 he tried to form, with Sarat Chandra Bose, an independent Bengal instead of accepting partition. A very flamboyant person in his personal life, Suhrawardy while still Premier, used to frequent a nightclub called the ‘Golden Slipper’ in Calcutta, and used to drive his own Packard. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre in their ‘Freedom at Midnight’ have described him as setting himself the prodigious task of bedding every cabaret dancer and high-class whore in Calcutta (p. 255).

[15] Nalini Ranjan Sarker (1882-1953) founder of the Hindusthan group of companies with interests in Insurance, Real Estate, Edible oils and several others. Later joined the Congress and became the Finance Minister of West Bengal.

[16] Jinnah of Pakistan, Stanley Wolpert, Oxford University Press, 2nd Indian Impression 1989 p. 143

[17] Thy Hand, Great Anarch, ibid p. 465

[18] ibid. p. 458

[19] ibid. p. 467

[20] Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901-1953) Often called Bharat Kesri (Lion of India), the second son of Sir Ashutosh Mookerjee, (known popularly as Banglar Bagh, the tiger of Bengal). Syama Prasad, in his young days was an educationist, having become the Vice-Chancellor of the venerable Calcutta University at the very young age of 33. He entered politics at the instance of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the president of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha, and began political life as the Vice-President of that party. He was the first significant Bengal politician to see clearly what fate the Hindu minority in Bengal was suffering and would suffer, and also to speak out openly against it. In 1941 he formed a coalition Government with A.K.Fazlul Haq which gave Bengal a just and equitable administration. He left this cabinet in protest against the British treatment of the victims of the Midnapore cyclone. In 1947 he became the Industries Minister in Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet, but left it in 1950 in protest against Nehru’s treatment of the Hindu refugees from East Bengal. He became the founder-President of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (predecessor of the present-day Bharatiya Janata Party) in 1951. He forcibly entered Kashmir against the policy of the Nehru government to allow Indians to enter the state only with a permit. He was taken prisoner and died in captivity under very questionable circumstances in Srinagar jail.

[21] Amar Dekha Rajneetir Ponchas Bochhor (Fifty years of Politics as I saw it) in Bangla, pub. Dacca 1970, by Abul Mansur Ahmed (1898-1979). Abul Mansur Ahmed was a journalist, editor of Krishak, and later Nobojug, the official organ of the Krishak Proja Party, and very close to Fazlul Haq.

[22] Jukto Bonger Sriti, ibid. p. 18

[23] The contents of this and the previous few paragraphs are based on an interview of Nirupom Som (b. 1930), an officer of the Indian Police Service who had served as both Commissioner of Police, Calcutta and Director-General of Police, West Bengal. Som’s father was a judicial officer in the Bengal District Judiciary having retired as a District and Sessions Judge, and therefore he had lived all his life amidst Government folklore. Some of what he said is undoubtedly from the police grapevine, but nevertheless cannot be summarily dismissed.

[24] Tin Kuri Dosh, ibid., Part II p. 146

[25] ibid. p. 147

[26] ibid. p. 147

[27] ibid. p. 120

[28] Interviewed June 2001

[29] The Marginal Men : The Refugees and the Left Political Syndrome in West Bengal ; by Prafulla Kumar Chakrabarti, Naya Udyog, Calcutta ; 2nd Ed., 1999, p. 39-44

[30] Interview with R.A.Rangaswamy, sometime Executive Engineer, Dandakaranya Development Project.

[31] Sunil Ganguly (b. 1934), a popular contemporary Bengali novelist of West Bengal and himself a refugee from Faridpur, East Bengal.

[32] Purba-Pashchim (East-West), a novel in Bangla, Ananda Publishers, Calcutta, 1st Ed., 1997

[33] Purba-Pashchim, ibid., p. 94

2008-05-08T15:33:00.000-07:00

Chapter 3

THE THREE HORRORS OF THE FORTIES

The nineteen-forties were not good years for most countries of the world (except perhaps, Switzerland). The decade meant war, deprivation, deaths, the holocaust, rationing, shortages, and all the things that generally make up human misery. For Bengal however, it could be said that the years were quite extraordinarily bad, because the province suffered three major traumas, not counting partition. These have been enumerated in the last paragraph of the last chapter, and it is not pleasant to repeat them. However, one feature stands out from all three traumas: they were all man-made. The first was the result of an incredibly cynical and inhuman scorched-earth policy (called the ‘Denial and Evacuation’ policy) followed by the British, aided in no mean measure by the mischief of the Muslim League ministry that they had just installed. The other two were simply unmitigated horror unleashed by Muslim upon Hindu with active or passive state participation, a foretaste of what lay in wait for the Hindus of East Bengal.

It is here that this chapter is relevant to the subject of this book. Of the three horrors, the first was a result of British misdeeds coupled with Muslim League inaction and mischief ; the last two were deliberate, diabolical acts by the Muslim League, with the British standing by impotently. It is no wonder that Hindus of East Bengal met their fate with the Muslim League in power.

It is fashionable in secular circles in India today to accept a theory unquestioningly, that every communal riot is the result of misdeeds of a few villains, in which the rest of the peace-loving population unwittingly gets embroiled. A street hoarding put up by the Communist Government of West Bengal in Calcutta in 1992 read “Amra Eksonge Chhilam/Amra Eksonge Achhi/Amra Eksonge Thakbo/Dhormo Niye Hanahani Korbo Na” meaning “We (Hindus and Muslims) have always been together/We are together/We shall always be together/ We shall not fight each other for Religion”. The lie of the lines is manifest and does not have to be explained. Ashok Mitra, the veteran administrator also strongly disagrees with this view. He says, in the context of Govind Nihalani’s telefilm Tamas (Darkness), based on the book of the same name by Bhisham Sahni, that this is just wishful thinking and oversimplification, betraying the Ostrich-like attitude of the ‘so-called (Indian) Marxists’[1]. This is exactly what has been referred to as the Indian ‘Holy Ghost of Communal Harmony and Secularism’ in the preface to this book. Mitra goes on to say that only those who have no first-hand experience of communal riots, or those who refuse to face reality in the name of ‘secularism’ and ‘humanism’ can choose to ignore the terrible violence that religious fervour can bring about.

But it is advantageous to proceed in a chronological order. The Bengal famine of 1943 was the first in line. What makes it particularly horrific is the fact that it was not a result of any flood, drought or pestilence but entirely a man-made tragedy, What was it like?

It was a time when the skeletal remains of what had once been human beings, and were now barely so, used to roam the streets of Calcutta by the thousands, crying Ektu Phan dao go ma (O mother, give us some ‘phan’ – the supernatant starchy liquid that is poured off after rice has been boiled). These were mostly women clutching to their bosoms even more emaciated children with huge heads, protruding bellies and matchsticks for limbs. They died by the thousands on the streets, as often from eating too much after days of starvation as from starvation itself. Corpses floating by on the Hooghly River were a common sight. They used to come from nearby districts, chiefly Midnapore, where the cyclone of October 1942 had killed off an astounding number of people, mostly men who were out of doors when the cyclone surprised them. The womenfolk were then left to fend for themselves, and finding nothing at all to eat, traveled to Calcutta. The people from faraway districts such as those in East Bengal found this difficult, and stayed on where they were, to die there. Ashok Mitra at this time was the Sub-Divisional Officer of Munshigunge in Dacca district and describes these deaths in words that are at once poignant and macabre.

According to Mitra[2], the real ordeal for the people of Munshigunge began in August 1943. Till July they had somehow survived. One more month was too much. The people that he used to observe in the countryside were emaciated beyond belief, with their skins sticking like paper to their skeletons while the bones protruded out. Their body hair stuck out like thick black pins all over their bodies. Their stare was blank, there was no light left in their eyes, and they used to take quite some time to focus on anything. The mass deaths started next month, and the worst period was between 15th September and 15th October. By this time the district administration had started Langarkhanas (Soup Kitchens) all over, of which there were nearly a hundred in Munshigunge. The fare at the beginning was rice without the phan poured off, later replaced by Khichuri made of three parts rice, one part masoor dal (a protein-rich lentil), some turmeric, mustard oil and salt, some fried potatoes and gourd. This nutritious fare following months of starvation immediately used to cause their bodies to swell up like balloons, and their skins stretched to a translucent state like that of the white of an egg. And then they would die. Mitra says that he had given up all hopes to make these people live, his only satisfaction being that the poor souls had got to eat a bellyful before they died.

According to Rabindra Nath Datta, in the rural areas of Noakhali district during the height of the famine the affected people used to roam around during the day in search of something to eat, and at night used to come and lie down in the grounds of the Haat (weekly market). Every morning around half-a-dozen of them would be found dead. The bulk of these people were cultivators and Muslim. The local Muslims formed parties to identify the Muslims among the dead (by checking whether the males were circumcised or not), and buried them in a mass grave after reading their Namaaz-e-Janaaza (funereal rites). The few Hindu corpses among them would be thrown into rivers or canals. The shrimp and the crabs in these canals would then feast on the dead bodies. The famine-affected people would then catch and eat such shrimp and crabs, and would promptly die from Gastro-Enteritis.

According to Syama Prasad Mookerjee[3], in Midnapore a starving man fell unconscious from sheer excitement at the sight of food in a Langarkhana before he could put any in his mouth. He died shortly afterwards.

Now what caused this unspeakable human tragedy? Amartya Sen has remarked that a major famine is possible only in a totalitarian and secretive polity, because in any other polity information about famine immediately results in a clamour for corrective measures, and at the same time help pours in from different quarters. On the other hand a Dictator sees a famine as a proof of his failure to govern.. Thus, to him, unless a famine is hidden from the rest of the world – including the rest of his own country as far as possible – it may lead to his own downfall. In recent times such famines have taken place in Asia in Mao Zedong’s China in the late 1950s and in Kim Il-Jong’s North Korea in the 1990s – both totally closed, very secretive, very totalitarian polities. Surely the British in Bengal in 1943 could not have been like Mao and Kim? True, there was a war raging, but the British government was still answerable to the Parliament, and an Indian-run government was ruling at Calcutta albeit under British suzerainty!

In fact, in Bengal of 1943 the British Government was no different from Mao’s and Kim’s – just as repressive, and just as secretive, as we shall see.

The root of the famine lay apparently in two unrelated incidents: primarily in the advance of the Imperial Japanese towards India, and secondarily in the Midnapore cyclone of October 1942. According to Ashok Mitra the process began not with any act of the Japanese, but with the disappearance of Subhas Chandra Bose from his Elgin Road residence on January 27, 1941 (this has been referred to earlier), and later his tying up with the Axis powers[4]. Nirad C. Chaudhuri differs with this, saying that Subhas was not under any kind of surveillance at all, and his disappearance was of no great significance to the British[5], but most people would accept Mitra’s version. Mitra had much more interaction with Herbert than Chaudhuri did, and as an ICS officer was much better placed or qualified to read the mind the Governor or of the provincial administration than Chaudhuri. Encyclopaedia Britannica also supports the view that he was closely watched. On the other hand probably the incurable anglophile Chaudhuri could never bring himself round to believe that the British police could be outwitted by the desi Subhas and his young nephews.

According to Mitra Herbert took the disappearance of Subhas as a personal affront, a gigantic slap on his face, as Mitra puts it. Linlithgow (the Viceroy) and Whitehall must also have found this particularly galling, because it signified a failure on the part of the Police too. Subhas’s tying up with the Germans and the Japanese made matters worse, because at this juncture the Royal Navy, hitherto considered invincible, was taking a terrible beating at the hands of the Japanese. Japanese kamikaze suicide bombers off Singapore sank H.M.S. Prince of Wales and Repulse, two prize battleships of the Royal Navy, on December 10, 1941. On January 19, 1942 the Japanese attacked the British colony of Burma. A few bombs dropped in Bengal, especially in the Calcutta docks, and the Feni area of Noakhali district near the Burma border. India was apparently the next stop, and Bengal the threshold. The entire British administration was on its edge. It was at this juncture that the Congress started its Quit India movement, and the extent to which Midnapore carried it has already been stated.

Mitra says that the attack on Burma made Herbert lose all sense of proportion. He, on his own, without even consulting the Provincial Government (the Progressive Coalition cabinet at this time) decided to launch a scorched-earth policy of the type followed by the Russians in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Ukraine and Russia. Herbert called it the policy of ‘Denial and Evacuation’. But there was a difference. In Ukraine and Russia the Germans were a reality, not a threat; also the Russians and Ukrainians were not fond of the Germans, to say the least. The scorched-earth policy was therefore spontaneous. As opposed to this the Japanese were a mere distant threat. In fact they never came to India. In all probability they had no intention to come to India – their occupation of Burma was probably directed towards cutting off the land route to China. Also the people of Midnapore had no more hatred of the Japanese than they had of the British. Therefore they had no intention to burn their own produce and run away from their own land. It appears that largely these excesses of Herbert prompted the extent of the revolt in Midnapore in August 1942.

These fine points were totally lost on the fear-crazed Herbert. Also, later in the year, to his fear of the Japanese was added a desire to wreak vengeance on the ‘natives’[6] for what they did during the Quit India phase. He carried out the twin policies of Denial and Evacuation in Midnapore under a veil of total secrecy and in an absolutely draconian manner. Such was the secrecy according to Mitra that there was neither any reporting in the press nor did anything get recorded in the archives. As a result it will never be known when exactly the policy has first put into implementation in Midnapore and when it was withdrawn.

However what happened in Munshigunge was right in front of Mitra’s own eyes and as the Sub-Divisional Officer (SDO) he was very much part of it. He joined his post on February 5, 1942, and in the manner of ICS officers of those days immediately undertook an intensive tour of the sub-division. There were a number of Gonjo-s (the equivalent of the North Indian Mandi) for storing rice and paddy in the area. In none of them he found any stock of more than a few hundred bags of rice, although he was told that in major gonjo-s like Mirqadim or Louhajang there always used to remain a minimum stock of some ten thousand bags of rice.

What happened actually? Governor Herbert’s scorched-earth policy of Denial, that’s what happened. It worked two ways. First, Government agents, together with the Police, would raid all locations where major stocks of foodstuff could be expected. They would then throw away the rice or forcibly take it away, to be stocked in Government warehouses. Anyone who resisted was not only beaten up severely, but was also not paid a farthing. How much rice or paddy was thrown away in this manner will never be known. What was stocked in warehouses began to be released from June 1944, when rationing was first introduced. Because of total lack of any hygiene or care in these warehouses the rice became putrid and foul smelling and mixed with muck and tiny pieces of stone called kankar – inedible for all practical purposes.

The other aspect of Herbert’s denial policy was the mass destruction of all indigenous means of transportation of foodstuff. This meant the sinking of thousands of country boats (some of them, such as the balam nouka, being as big as small barges) in East Bengal, and the breaking of tens of thousands of bullock carts everywhere. Even bicycles were not spared. This stopped movement of rice from and to the interior. On the other hand movement by rail, steamer or truck was not stopped. However rail wagons manufactured in India were exported in large numbers, causing a serious shortage all over the Indian Railway system. It must be remembered that at that time movement by road was only a small proportion of the total, the major part of bulk movement of food grain being by rail.

With the removal of rice from the market and the destruction of all country transport, the inevitable result followed : prices soared. The price of rice per maund (about thirty-six kilogrammes or eighty pounds) in February 1942 was about Four Rupees. It jumped to Sixteen Rupees per maund in December 1942, and to a Hundred Rupees in September 1943. The little rice that was in the market therefore moved away to where the purchasing power was, namely to Calcutta. The countryside just starved. How they starved has already been described in Mitra’s first-hand account of Munshigunge and Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s description of Midnapore.

According to Mitra the unholy combination of three people at the helm were primarily responsible for this tragedy[7] in which, according to unofficial estimates, five million people died. These three were Secretary of State for India L.S.Amery ; Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy ; and, of course, Herbert. Just a nod from Lord Linlithgow to transport foodgrains on a war footing from other provinces to Bengal could have flooded Bengal, because there was no shortage of foodgrains in the North, West or South. No such nod was, however, forthcoming. Both Linlithgow and Amery tried very hard to conceal the facts and the implications of the famine from the British Parliament, although Amery, in his diary, has tried later to put the entire blame for this on Churchill. They also hid the entire tragedy from the food-surplus countries like U.S.A., Australia or New Zealand – these countries would have definitely come to the rescue of the province to whatever extent possible under the conditions then prevailing. Even the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, a very British-friendly newspaper, made caustic remarks about the secretiveness of the Bengal Government during this time. All these point to the apathy of an Amery, the cynicism of a Linlithgow, and the unspeakable vengefulness of a Herbert, sick in mind and body,.

Herbert eventually fell so ill while the famine was raging that Sir Thomas Rutherford, the Governor of Bihar had to be asked to take additional charge of the Governorship of Bengal from September 6, 1943. Herbert died shortly thereafter, on December 11. Meanwhile on October 5, 1943 Lord Wavell replaced Linlithgow as Viceroy. Things immediately began to take a turn for the better. Herbert hardly ever stirred out of the Governor’s residence (the present Raj Bhavan of Calcutta), and Linlithgow did not pay a single visit to Bengal during the famine. As opposed to this on October 26, 1943 Lord and Lady Wavell with Rutherford walked the streets of Calcutta to take a look at humanity dying en masse because of the misdeeds of other humans.

Ashok Mitra, self-confessed Communist sympathiser, is full of regret when he tries to describe the role of the Communist Party of India in the famine. Front-ranking leaders of the Party, such as S.A.Dange and P.C.Joshi made long speeches in the first Congress of the Communist Party at Bombay held on May 23-26, 1943. The famine was a reality then, and the worst was yet to come. The entire content of their speeches was full of exhortations to the people of India to strengthen the war effort. Not once did they mention that the famine was a result of the misdeeds of the British, not even that in order to win the war it was necessary that the people should be fed. Their speeches appeared to Ashok Mitra to be directed mainly at pleasing Linlithgow and Maxwell who had lifted the ban on the party a short while ago[8].

Mitra is also quite positive about another aspect of the famine. To this day it is widely believed that the primary cause of the famine was reckless hoarding by Hindu foodgrain traders. The name of one Ranada Prasad Saha, a major wholesale trader of rice in East Bengal, along with a few others, is often mentioned in this connection. According to Mitra the famine was not at all the result of hoarding by traders. True, there was quite a lot of hoarding – but according to him this was not even a tertiary cause of the famine, rather it was the effect. This bogey of hoarding by local traders was mouthed with remarkable consistency by all British officials right up to Amery, presumably to cover their own tracks.

Mitra relates the instance of a raid that he and his colleague in the police, Madanmohan Lal Hooja, did on the warehouses at Mirqadim. He says that there was no way that the traders might have been forewarned about their raid, yet they found only a few hundred bags in one corner of one godown. Still, just to create an atmosphere against hoarding they arrested the owner of the godown, one Basanta Mondal, whom they handcuffed and walked round Mirqadim village with a rope tied round his waist before being put in lock-up. All guns belonging to him and his family were confiscated. Both Mitra and Hooja had to face a lot of flak later for this act, for Basanta Mondal was a nephew of the influential Raja of Bhagyakul (a major Zamindari), and they would both have been in serious trouble were it not for the support given to them by Llewellyn, the District Magistrate[9].

Amartya Sen, in a scholarly study of the famine[10], has also completely rejected what is known in Economics as FAD (Food Availability Decline) to be the reason for the famine. This was found to be the cause of the famine by the Famine Enquiry Commission. According to the Commission the number of people who died uin the famine was around 1.5 million, but Sen quotes one of the members of the Commission, W.R.Aykroyd, to have said in 1974 that the number was really between 3 and 4 million. As expected, Sen deals primarily with the Economics of the famine, almost to the total exclusion of the Politics of it. The Denial policy of Governor Herbert is disposed of in a single footnote, and Evacuation is not touched at all. Amartya Sen is of the view that the policy of 'boat denial' contributed to a general rise in the price of fish, while that of 'rice denial' caused local scarcities.

Sen's entire analysis is based on published material -- he was only ten years old when the famine took place, too young to even carry a coherent memory of it. Mitra, on the other hand, has written his stuff entirely on first-hand experience. He was also in the thick of the administration and as a member of the exclusive ICS club privy to most of its secrets. They both, however, seem to agree on one central point : the famine was not the result of any scarcity of foodgrains caused by any crop failure, flood, drought or pestilence. In other words it was man-made.

So much for what the British did. Now to the deeds of the Muslim League cabinet that Herbert so lovingly installed in April 1943, and very specially of the Minister in charge of Civil Supplies, Husseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. Suhrawardy, as we shall see, first made a fool of himself by absurd remarks about the famine, and then attempted to 'do his bit' in the most questionable manner possible. True, the famine was not his creation, it was principally Herbert's – but he did whatever was possible under the circumstances to make things worse.

In a hard-hitting speech made in the Bengal Legislative Assembly on July 14, 1943, Syama Prasad Mookerjee lambasted Suhrawardy and his performance. Certain parts of the speech were so telling that they deserve to be quoted: ". . . . Now, Sir, in one of the statements issued by Mr. Suhrawardy it was said that the worst feature of the last Ministry's food policy (meaning Fazlul Haq's Ministry) was its insistence on shortage. That was on 17th May (1943). Then again, he said 'There is, in fact a sufficiency of foodgrains for the people of Bengal'. I ask specially the members who are sitting opposite, anxious to give their support to the Ministry, to demand an explanation from Mr. Suhrawardy. What were the data before him that justified him to make that remark that there was in fact a sufficiency of foodgrains for the people of Bengal? Not satisfied with this bare statement, he proceeded to remark 'Full statistical details, which will clearly demonstrate that there is a sufficiency, will soon be published'. Where are those statistics? Have they been collected, or are they being manufactured?"

When these words were being spoken neither Suhrawardy nor any of the Muslim League members said a word in protest, because they had nothing to say. Worse than that, each one of them knew that Suhrawardy had been glibly mouthing these falsehoods merely to please Herbert, through whose grace they were now Ministers. And even worse, they all knew that the majority of the victims of the famine were Muslims, mainly artisans, sharecroppers and landless agricultural labour, who had been worst hit by Herbert's policy of Denial and Evacuation.

Syama Prasad went on to say "Mr. Amery declared (in the House of Commons) – ‘Yes, there is some trouble in India and in Bengal, but there is no shortage of foodstuff in the country; there is only hoarding and maldistribution . . . .’ Now Sir, what happened next? Mr. Suhrawardy declared that there was plenty of foodstuffs in Bengal. All that had to be done was to find out the foodstuff even from under the taktaposhes[11]. After a tired and busy day he seriously made a speech declaring that, if necessary, he would himself go under the taktaposh of every householder and bring out the rice. I know that many householders got nervous. If Mr. Suhrawardy really starts entering into the households and going under the taktaposh at night or even during daytime, heaven protect those householders from the after-effects of those ministerial attacks! Could there have been, I ask, a sillier approach to a problem vitally affecting the lives of millions of people?"

Such comic-opera conduct in the face of an indescribable human tragedy was characteristic of Suhrawardy. He put out a public notification in English and Bangla which ran as follows: "An Appeal and a Warning : You must not grind the faces of the poor (Abedan o Shotorkobani : Gorib jonosadharon ke aar utpiron kora cholibe na)". To this Syama Prasad quipped in his speech "Who is that 'you'? Is Mr. Suhrawardy standing before a mirror and addressing himself, or was he seriously addressing the people of Bengal?"

Ashok Mitra describes a small incident of his personal experience with Suhrawardy which throws a lot of light on the character of the man. Suhrawardy had come to visit Munshigunge on November 28, 1943. By that time the worst was definitely over. Suhrawardy addressed a gathering of about five hundred in the playing field of Haraganga College. In this meeting Suhrawardy first expressed the ritual regrets for the death of so many people. Then a local Advocate, in a fit of sycophancy while delivering his speech, compared Suhrawardy to Goddess Lakshmi (the Hindu Goddess of prosperity) descended from heaven and requested him to investigate why the local administration did not let him know about the starvation deaths. Suhrawardy pounced upon this and said that when he had spent such a lot of money in famine relief during the last few months, he could easily have spent another few Crores and sent a consignment of rice to Munshigunge – if only he had been informed in time. At this Mitra lost his cool, and said in public that the Minister should rather investigate why, in spite of the SDO sending so many telegrams, the news did not reach him.

Mitra says Apurba Chanda (who had taught Mitra in his college, and was now Suhrawardy’s Secretary and had accompanied him to Munshigunge), before leaving left a word of friendly advice. He said Suhrawardy was a very vindictive man. Mitra should therefore collect and carefully preserve all papers which would show that Mitra had indeed repeatedly asked for famine relief. This advice was worth Chanda’s weight in gold, as Mitra put it. Suhrawardy sent officer after officer to Munshigunge who pestered him until early 1944, and it was only these papers that saved him from further trouble[12].

The positive contribution of Suhrawardy to famine relief efforts was the appointment of Sole Purchasing Agents of the Government of Bengal for the purchase of foodgrains from neighbouring provinces with the eventual intention of distributing them through a rationing system. Incredible as it may seem today, Suhrawardy appointed M.M. Ispahani Ltd. (see endnote 50) as such Sole Purchasing Agents without any competitive bidding, without negotiations either with Ispahani or any other agent, without taking the Assembly into confidence, as if he was dishing out some largesse from his personal funds. Not only so, but thereafter the Government, under Suhrawardy's orders, made an advance of Rs. 20,000,000 – Twenty Million or Two Crores of Rupees – to the Ispahanis without any contract, without a single scrap of paper. What followed was what any commercial organisation would do given such unbelievable opportunities. They looted. Ispahani being one of the principal financiers of the Muslim League, it should not be difficult to imagine where a part of the money went, and why Suhrawardy did what he did.

Syama Prasad in his speech before the Bengal Assembly addressed this question also. He said “ I have nothing personal against Mr. Ispahani . . . . it is a question of principle. It was nothing short of a scandal that the ministry should have appointed a particular firm as its sole agent, and what is more, advanced about two crores of rupees to that firm without a single scrap of document. Can Mr. Suhrawardy produce a single contract entered upon between the Ispahanis and the Government of Bengal? It is a mockery”.

Such was the handling of a human tragedy done by The Hon'ble Mr. Husseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, in reward of which he was made Premier of Bengal in 1946 replacing Sir Nazimuddin. But this bungling was nothing compared to what he did on August 16, 1946, which is remembered to this day as the Great Calcutta Killings. The run-up for this started much earlier sometime in 1945, when he proceeded to change the complexion of the Calcutta Police beyond what Herbert had done earlier.[13]

The constables of the Calcutta Police were, as a rule, recruited according to what was known as the A.B.C.D. rule – which meant that they were drawn all from the districts of Arrah, Balia, Chhapra and Deoria. These are districts around the boundary of the United Provinces and Bihar, in the area generally known as Bhojpur. People from this area are well-built, tough and loyal – almost ideal police constable material. There was just one problem that Premier Suhrawardy had with them. They were all devout Hindus, and moreover, worshippers of Lord Hanuman, the Hindu God who personifies strength, manliness and undying loyalty to his master, Lord Rama. They, therefore, could not be trusted to carry out the designs that Suhrawardy had in mind.

In order to get round this problem Suhrawardy turned to Niaz Mohammed Khan, the ICS officer who, while District Magistrate of Midnapore, had carried out Herbert’s nefarious designs of crackdown on the participants in the Quit India movement. The idea was to Muslimise the Calcutta Police. Why the Calcutta Police in particular? Because Calcutta had already been chosen by the Muslim League as the theatre of the bloodbath that had been scheduled on 16th August 1946, in what they would call ‘Direct Action’, and what the rest of the world would eventually call the Great Calcutta Killings.

Niaz Mohammed Khan, under Suhrawardy’s orders journeyed to the Northwest to recruit Punjabi Muslim and Pathan constables for the Calcutta Police. Pathans are Pashto-speaking Muslim tribesmen inhabiting the barren hills of the frontier, and are divided into a large number of tribes such as Afridi, Mohmand, Waziri, Khattak, Yusufzai etc. Blood feuds among them between different tribes or different groups (called khel) in the same tribe are still very common. These tribes are by nature extremely fierce and cruel – in fact they had been extensively used in British jails in India for application of third-degree methods. Under the benign leadership of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) party a considerable number of them had become mellowed and come closer to the Indian mainstream, but this had made little difference to the people away from towns like Peshawar and Kohat. There was another feature that should be mentioned. Because their womenfolk were all kept in strict purdah – the Pathans are first cousins of the present-day Afghan Taliban – these rural Pathans had no respect for women, nor were they accustomed to seeing women out in the open. This had some extremely unsavoury consequences.

Harrison Road (now known as Mahatma Gandhi Road) is one of the arterial roads of Calcutta, connecting the two Railway terminuses at Sealdah and Howrah. On this road premises no. 100 was a rambling six-storey mansion inhabited by Hindu families. The building was also located at the very boundary of Hindu and Muslim dominated areas. One day several of these Pathan policemen barged into 100 Harrison Road and gang-raped a number of the women in the building. There was a huge furore, but none was prosecuted. One reason why the partition of the province of Bengal found favour with the Hindus of the province was ‘the misbehaviour of Punjabi Muslim policemen who had recently been recruited by the provincial government’[14].

As already mentioned, after Herbert fell ill in September 1943, Rutherford, the Governor of Bihar took additional charge as Governor of Bengal. The next permanent Governor of Bengal was Richard Casey, an Australian, and an engineer by profession. He is said to have been disgusted with the ways of the ‘Poms’ in India and sometime later asked to be relieved. On February 18, 1946 he was replaced by Frederick Burrows, the last British Governor at Calcutta, an ex-Railway Guard, who later played a very questionable role during the Calcutta Killings and the Noakhali Carnage.

The ‘big picture’ of all-India politics was meanwhile changing very fast. In the first post-war British election the Conservatives lost and Labourite Clement Attlee became the Prime Minister. One of his first steps in regard to India was to send a Cabinet Mission to India led by Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the Secretary of State for India, the other two members being Sir Stafford Cripps (of the 1942 Cripps mission fame) and A.V.Alexander. The Mission held a number of meetings with the Congress and the Muslim League and on May 16, 1946 made a set of proposals which fell short of partition of the country. The substance of the proposals was that the country would be constituted as a federal polity with residuary powers to the provinces, and the provinces would be classified into several groups depending on their geographical location and the religious complexion of the population.

The Muslim League, however reluctantly, accepted the proposals and so did the Congress, through a Congress Working Committee resolution of June 26. However Jawaharlal Nehru, who was the President of the Congress at the time, in a press conference held on July 10 in Bombay resiled from this position and declared that the Congress would enter the Constituent Assembly ‘completely unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise’ ; and also that grouping of provinces, as proposed by the mission, will not work. Consequent upon this, the Muslim League on July 29 withdrew their acceptance of the Cabinet Mission proposals.

Maulana Azad[15], in his autobiography ‘India Wins Freedom’ has termed this act of Jawaharlal Nehru an ‘astonishing statement’ and one of those unfortunate events that change the course of history[16]. He also deeply regretted that on April 26, 1946, while stepping down from the Presidency of the Congress he had issued a statement proposing the name of Jawaharlal Nehru and had appealed to all Congressmen that they should elect him unanimously. He called this the greatest blunder of his political life. He goes on to say that his second mistake was not supporting Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel who, had he become the Congress President, would never have committed the mistake Jawaharlal made, and which gave Jinnah the opportunity of sabotaging the Cabinet Mission plan[17]. The book was first published in 1958, after his death, but in accordance with his wishes, thirty pages of the book were withheld, to be published thirty years later. In this part of the book he writes “Jawaharlal Nehru was one of my dearest friends and his contribution to India’s national life is second to none. I have nevertheless to say with regret that this was not the first time that he did immense harm to the national cause. He had committed an almost equal blunder in 1937 when the first elections were held under the Government of India Act 1935”[18]. M.C.Chagla in his autobiography has also been critical of this terrible mistake of Nehru[19].

Together with withdrawal of acceptance of the Cabinet Mission proposals the Muslim League also announced that August 16, 1946 will be a day of ‘Direct Action’ by the League in support of Pakistan. No explanation was forthcoming as to what would constitute such ‘Direct Action’. An editorial in ‘The Times’ of London of July 30 called the Direct Action call of the Muslim League a most regrettable one. On the same day Sardar J.J.Singh of the India League of U.S.A. made an appeal to the United Nations to intervene in the matter to prevent a bloodbath.

Jawaharlal thereafter, faced with a fusillade from his partymen for having exceeded his brief, tried to eat his words and work out a solution with Jinnah. This time however Jinnah would not budge. Viceroy Wavell asked Jawaharlal to call upon Jinnah at his house in Bombay, and try to prevail upon him. Jawaharlal did so, and again Jinnah did not budge. In fact, while on August 15 Jawaharlal was sitting with Jinnah at his house in Bombay, trying vainly to persuade him to withdraw the threat of Direct Action, Suhrawardy in Calcutta was applying the finishing touches to the plans for the morrow.

Suhrawardy in 1946 had just been installed as Premier of Bengal by Governor Burrows with whom he had a very cosy relationship. A handsome and imperious man, he openly moved around with his handpicked set of personal guard. Unbelievable as it may seem today, these were Muslim criminals, the scum of Howrah’s bustees[20], Bengal’s very own Hell’s Kitchen. One of these, Meena Peshawari, earned special notoriety during the killings. Bhabani Prosad Chatterjee quotes Leonard Mosley as having remarked that Suhrawardy was the kind of party boss who firmly believe that a politician who can control a polling booth with his private army of goons will always be in power[21]. Ashok Mitra describes Suhrawardy as a ‘rough, tough bully’ compared to Nazimuddin who was said to be a very quiet, gentle person. According to Mitra Burrows was very close to Suhrawardy ; also, the British Government had decided that only a man like Suhrawardy could establish the suzerainty of the Muslim League in Bengal, and such suzerainty was in British interests[22].

Suhrawardy declared a public holiday on Friday, August 16. The Congress staged a walk-out in the Bengal Legislative Assembly on August 12 in protest against declaring a public holiday in response to a call by a particular political party without taking the Assembly into confidence. On August 15 an adjournment motion demanding a debate on the same question was defeated in the Bengal Legislative Council (upper house of the Provincial Legislature).

Ashok Mitra writes that when the City of Calcutta went to sleep on the night of August 15, 1946, no one, including perhaps the plotters for the 16th, could gauge what was going to happen in the next few days. However the rest of his account of the killings, written quite meticulously, indicates that on the contrary the gameplan for that day had been circulated among

Muslims of the city, at least a substantial number of them, by word of mouth. The pro-League newspaper ‘Dawn’ of Karachi on August 16 published an advertisement which gave a call to use of force as being the only way to achieve what the Muslims want. S.N.Usman, the Mayor of Calcutta and the Secretary of the Calcutta Muslim League circulated a leaflet in Bangla which read “Kafer! Toder dhongsher aar deri nei! Sarbik hotyakando ghotbe!” (“Infidels! Your end is not far off! There will be a massacre!”). Another pro-League newspaper ‘Morning News’ said in its editorial that hurting a Britisher was not only against the Bombay resolution of the League, it was also against the tenets of Islam – thus obliquely telling its readers that hurting Hindus was quite permissible[23].

According to Leonard Gordon, the biographer of Sarat Chandra and Subhas Chandra Bose, and Richard Lambert, a researcher of the University of Pennsylvania the pamphlet circulated by Usman, the Mayor of Calcutta read as follows : "The call to the revolt comes to us from the Qaid-e-Azam (epithet applied to Jinnah by Pakistanis - author). This is the policy for the nation of heroes (meaning Muslims) . . . . . The day for open fight, which is the greatest desire of the Muslim nation has arrived . . . . . by fighting you will go to heaven in this holy war . . . . . Let us all cry our victory to Pakistan, victory to the Muslim nation and victory to the army which has declared jihad"[24].

The black day began with a large public meeting of the Muslim League in the Calcutta Maidan. Stanley Wolpert writes “Major L.A. Livermore reported from his perch atop Fort William that ‘there was a curious stillness in the air’, and . . . . . .as dawn broke, . . . . . . . . Muslim workers from Howrah’s Jute Mills began pouring into the city headed toward Ochterlony’s needle monument for the mammoth meeting to ‘celebrate’ Direct Action day”[25]. No one from any non-Muslim press was present at the meeting. Suhrawardy and the supposedly gentle Nazimuddin both made very rabid speeches. Suhrawardy’s speech was monitored by the Army intelligence, and he is quoted by Wolpert as having said that he would see how the British could make Mr. Nehru rule Bengal. Direct Action day would prove to the first step towards the Muslim struggle for emancipation. He advised them to return home early and said . . . that he had made all arrangements with the police and the military not to interfere with them. Military intelligence patrols further noticed that the crowd included a large number of Muslim goondahs (hoodlums) and that their ranks swelled as the meeting ended. They made for the shopping centres of the town where they at once set to loot Hindu shops and houses[26].

According to Mitra the gathering was peaceful to begin with. A little later, however, some skirmish was noted at one end of the Maidan abutting Chowringhee, Calcutta’s main thoroughfare. Then the real bedlam started. The people who had come to attend the meeting had also come prepared to kill and loot and were suitably armed with muskets, crowbars, huge daggers and swords, large pieces of stones, and of course, the Muslim League flag. They then spread out, howling their battle cries “Allaho Akbar (God is Great), Pakistan Zindabad, Muslim League Zindabad (Long Live Pakistan and the Muslim League), Lekar Rahenge Pakistan, Ladke Lenge Pakistan (We shall achieve Pakistan by force)"[27].

At about 10 A.M. a gun shop on Chowringhee was looted. The mob fanned out and started setting upon Hindus all over the city. In the South Port Police area there was a small Oriya Hindu pocket in a Muslim majority area. Some three hundred of the Oriyas were butchered in fifteen minutes[28]. It was a patient, painstaking process in which the marauders ferreted out Hindus and killed them in cold blood, usually by stabbing or bashing their heads. For those who do not know, it is very easy to tell Hindu from Muslim. In those days any Hindu home would have some deity, and any Bengali Hindu married woman would always wear vermillion on the parting in her hair. And ultimately the acid test always remained – a Muslim male had to be circumcised. The marauders were not just goondahs or ruffians. Seemingly suave, sophisticated young men, quite a few college students among them, crazed by the spirit of Jihad, participated in the mass murders. A hapless Bengali Hindu family had just alighted from a train at Sealdah station and were trying to find their way home. The rioters caught up with them, stripped a fifteen-year-old girl to nothing, and made her stand at the crossroads in full view of the world. Not a single policeman was in sight anywhere. Then the torching began. Hindu-inhabited areas such as the southern part of Amherst Street, Bortola, Jorasanko were in flames in no time. The fires burnt right through the night, punctuated by the war-cries of “Allaho Akbar, Ladke Lenge Pakistan”. The only exception was in the Northern part of Amherst Street where people from both communities got together and stayed unmoved by the mayhem all around them. Similarly it was a few well-meaning Muslims who rescued the unfortunate teenage girl at Sealdah.

The process continued unabated the next day. An Additional Judge of Alipore Court was killed while trying to save a little boy who was fleeing for his life from the goondahs. A fruitseller in Jorasanko shot dead his neighbour’s wife. Muslim crew on the steam launches on River Hooghly rammed country craft of Hindu boatmen and drowned them. Until midmorning of this day, that is the 17th there was no sign of any policemen anywhere.

Amal Chakraborty, then about 15, and a student of Class IX in the Metropolitan Institution of Sealdah at Calcutta used to live at that time in the YMCA's Overtoun Hall at the junction of College Street and Harrison Road. From his window he observed battle lines being drawn up. The northern footpath of Harrison Road was Hindu, the southern Muslim. There were stabbings, cries for help and water, and corpses lying on the carriageway. No one removed them, and they rotted and bloated there, and Chakraborty and his fellow inmates had to live in the stench.

Suhrawardy was camping at the Control Room of the Calcutta Police at Lalbazar, busy ‘watching the situation’. No police officer had the authority to move any men without his personal orders. It is believed that some officers defied him on his face and took out their forces. Generally the police, especially the Pathan policemen specially recruited by Niaz Mohammed Khan and the Anglo-Indian sergeants showed supreme indifference to whatever was going on. It also appeared that at least a section of them were under orders to foment trouble, not prevent or stop it. As for the Army, Wolpert writes that the Brigadier in charge of Calcutta, J.P.C.Mackinlay, had ‘ordered’ his troops to be ‘confined to barracks’ that day (quotation marks Wolpert’s), and observes that thus India’s largest, most crowded and most communally volatile city was left virtually naked[29]. The Fire Brigade worked overtime right through, but were stopped at many places by marauding Muslim mobs.

Lieutenant-General Sir Francis Tuker, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of India’s Eastern Army, called the killings “unbridled savagery with homicidal maniacs let loose to kill and kill and maim and burn. The underworld was taking charge of the city . . . the police were not controlling it”. Major Livermore observed that Calcutta was the battlefield of a battle between mob rule and civilisation and decency. When the 7th Worcesters and the Green Howards (both British troop formations) were called out they found College Street ablaze and the few unburnt houses and shops completely sacked, in Amherst Street the litter of mass looting, in Upper Circular Road the rubble left by the fire-bugs, on Harrison Road the cries of wounded and terrorised residents[30].

From the next day however, that is August 18, Suhrawardy’s goons and compatriots (some of whom had nothing to do with the riots) started getting a taste of their own medicine. The lead was taken by the Hindu Kalwars (ironmongers and scrap dealers) from Bihar and U.P., who were then joined by Sikhs and Hindu Bengalis. Armed with crowbars, Kripan (the Sikh dagger), swords and other lethal weapons they set out to avenge the last two days’ depredations. In this they showed an incredible ferocity that was not hitherto known to exist in them. As with Hindu dwellings, there was also widespread torching in Muslim areas. Suhrawardy was probably not prepared for any reprisals from Hindus whom he must have taken as followers of Gandhi, and therefore necessarily incapable of violence. The massacre of Muslims in retaliation therefore took him by complete surprise. It is primarily these reprisals that forced him to call a halt to the devilry that he had, by unspeakable abuse of state power, unleashed. Meanwhile the atrocities rolled on to the 19th, by which time the Hindus had more than evened the score. A senior Imperial Police officer told Ashok Mitra that on the 18th Suhrawardy was found sitting forlornly at the Lalbazar control room table, mumbling to himself ‘My poor, innocent Muslims’! [31]

How many people died in the killings? No official estimate is available, the reason for which is probably that the killings were started by none other than officialdom. Bhabani Prosad Chatterjee puts the figure at about five thousand, with another fifty thousand or so grievously injured. The damage to property, of course, was beyond estimation. Lord Wavell had remarked that more people lost their lives in the Calcutta Killings than in the Battle of Plassey[32] and had informed Pethick-Lawrence that the toll was 3,000 dead and 17,000 injured. Wolpert quotes unofficial claims of “as many as 16,000 Bengalis . . . murdered between August 16-20, 1946”[33]. The number of dead was presumably determined by body count, and it is here that the estimates varied, because a large number of bodies had been thrown into the River Hooghly, or in the canals that pass through the city, or were pushed into manholes. Ashok Mitra at the time was living at Chandernagore, then a French possession, about thirty-five kilometres from Calcutta, on the other bank of the River Hooghly. A colleague of his, Noor Mohammed Khan, had his wife in hospitalised at the School of Tropical Medicine at Calcutta. When Khan was beside himself with worry for his wife, Ashok Mitra with his wife and Khan set out in his car on August 21 (his chauffeur refused to drive to Calcutta) and drove down to Calcutta over Grand Trunk Road, Willingdon Bridge, Barrackpore Trunk Road, Shyambazar five-point crossing and Central Avenue. On the way, all the way from Dunlop Bridge to the School of Tropical Medicine, he found the road littered on both sides with rotting corpses, severed limbs, and charred remains of houses, the air thick with the stench of putrefaction[34].

Muslim League’s call for ‘Direct Action’ was supposed to have countrywide operation. Why, then, was Calcutta singled out? Several reasons have been suggested. Bhabani Prosad Chatterjee thinks one reason might be the fact that staging the bloodbath in Calcutta would have attracted the attention of the whole world to the might of the Muslim League, since at that time Calcutta was the most important city in India, indeed the second city in the British Empire. Another reason might be that Suhrawardy was trying to curry favour with Jinnah, and the killings gave him an opportunity to do that[35].

Maulana Azad remarks in his 'India Wins Freedom' : "Sixteenth August 1946 was a black day not only for Calcutta, but for the whole of India.The turn that events had taken had made it almost impossible to expect a peaceful solution by agreement between the Congress and the Muslim League.. This was one of the greatest tragedies of Indian history and I have to say with the deepest of regret that a large part of the responsibility for this development rests with Jawaharlal[36]".

Whatever might have been the reason, there is no doubt that The Calcutta Killings of 1946 were a result of a sinister, diabolical plot hatched by some very cynical, criminal minds who thought nothing of sending a few thousands of their countrymen (including a lot of them from the community whose interests they were supposed to be protecting) to a premature end in the most ghastly manner imaginable. Jinnah, asked about the killings by a foreign news agency later in August showed no signs of regret, replying “If Congress regimes are going to suppress and persecute the Mussalmans, it will be very difficult to control disturbances”[37]. As an example of deliberate abuse of state power to cause mass murders it compares well in intensity, though not in breadth, with the Nazi holocaust and the Killing Fields of Pol Pot in Cambodia.

Judging from the timing of the editorial in ‘The Times’ of London, and the appeal by J.J.Singh of the India League of U.S.A., it is clear that the plot for staging the killings could not have been unknown to the British, certainly not to Burrows or Wavell. Yet the killings were allowed to proceed unabated for the first day, and a part of the second, before Burrows decided to call the Army in. The orders of Brigadier Mackinlay, mentioned earlier, to confine British troops to their barracks, and Suhrawardy’s assertion in his Maidan speech that the police or military would not interfere with what the Muslims did, unmistakably points to a nefarious conspiracy between Suhrawardy and Burrows. The British, as the sovereign power, were certainly guilty of standing by and amusing themselves while Suhrawardy’s goons stabbed and torched.

A Muslim view of the Killings has been recorded in Mizanur Rahaman’s book ‘Krishna Sholoi’ in Bangla, meaning ‘Black Sixteenth’[38]. Mizanur Rahaman is an important contemporary literary person of Dacca, and is the editor of a trimonthly publication called Mizanur Rahamaner Patrika (Mizanur Rahaman’s Magazine). His is an eyewitness account, for he was then about thirteen, and a student of class eight in Mitra Institution (Main) of Calcutta at the time, and used to live in the predominantly Hindu area of Garpar. Mizanur Rahaman cannot, by any standards, be called a particularly communal or partisan Muslim, and yet in his writing there is a constant effort to whitewash the guilt of the Muslim League in the killings. He describes a conversation between himself and some of his Hindu classmates, in which he describes the call for ‘Direct Action’ to be one of a strike against the British. He describes how he was caught in a crossfire of hurled brickbats between the two communities on Raja Dinendra Street in North Calcutta, and in that state was badly hit by a stick-wielding Bihari milkman. He has tried to establish that the rioting started not after Suhrawardy's Maidan speech, but early in the morning, and Muslims were casualties from the very beginning. And he has laid the blame for the riots squarely on the Bihari community of Calcutta, absolving both Bengali Hindus and Muslims from any complicity in the process.

It is very difficult to accept Mizanur’s efforts in whitewashing of Suhrawardy’s and Nazimuddin’s misdeeds in the face of independent testimony by people like General Tuker and Major Livermore, the research done by Wolpert, and the detailed, intimate descriptions of people like Ashok Mitra. His style of describing the incidents of the fateful days is very diffuse and imprecise, and is moreover overlaid by frequent sentimentalising, with the result that it is very difficult to sift fact from observation. It is quite possibly true that the riots had started early in the morning, at least in some parts of the city, or that there were some Muslim victims among them, or that the primary role in the rioting had been taken by Bihari Gowalas (Milkmen), Kalowars (Ironmongers) and Bihari Muslims. However, to deny Suhrawardy’s cardinal role in giving a murderous twist to the riots, or to deny the role of Bengali Muslims and Hindus is also equally incorrect.

On the other hand, Abul Mansur Ahmad (who was already an important Muslim politician close to Fazlul Haq) gives a different account altogether. He quotes Nazimuddin as having said that their struggle was not against the British, but against the Hindus. He also says that the murder hysteria of the Muslims had been taken to such a pitch that he was once he was asked by a friend (ordinarily a sensible, humane person) "how many Hindus have you killed? All your love for Muslims is just lip service"[39].

Ashok Mitra, ardent Nehru-admirer, has expressed great regret at the fact that even after the killings were over, not to mention during them, neither Nehru nor Gandhi saw it fit to visit Calcutta. Mitra could attribute this only to the fear that any such visit immediately following the killings (in which, according to Mitra, the guilt of the Muslims was many times that of the Hindus) might have resulted in their being dubbed anti-Muslim[40]. Thus, the observation must be made that, to the secular Congress leaders, the right or wrong of the situation was of no consequence. They would never be caught in public, so long as they could help it, saying that what the Muslims did was wrong.

Calcutta was not the only city affected by Jinnah's 'Direct Action'. Dacca, the second city of the province was equally affected, with the difference that here the Hindus were completely at the receiving end, and did not get any chance to retaliate. This author interviewed an eyewitness, Rabindra Nath Datta, a retired Insurance Executive now living in Calcutta in his modest flat at Salt Lake City. Datta is an idealist, a dynamo of energy at seventy-one, inspite of having to tend to his wife suffering from Alzheimer's, and an ardent admirer of Swami Vivekananda and Abraham Lincoln (framed photographs on his wall). He was a student at Dacca Collegiate School then, and used to live on Wyer Street in the Wari area of Dacca. This is what he had to say :

" On 16th August 1946, a large number of Hindu dwellings in Dacca were set on fire. Wari was a solidly Hindu area, and we were relatively safe, but for further safety's sake a large number of Hindus went and took refuge in the estate of Hardeo Todi. We could see the fires in the distance. Hardeo Todi was a wealthy Hindu businessman of the Marwari community who used to own a glass factory, and lived in a sprawling estate together with his sons Dhanulal and Brajlal. Hardeo gave refuge unreservedly, and there were no casualties among the Hindus of Wari.

Five or six days after the riots subsided a strange phenomenon was noticed. The atmosphere was still very tense, and very few people ventured out at night. One morning some eight or ten bloated and partially decomposed naked corpses were found to have been dumped beside the railway line running between Wari and Tikatuli. One look at the males among them (it was not easy to take that look) told one that the males were not circumcised, and were therefore Hindus. These corpses were clearly those of Hindus killed elsewhere and brought by truck during the night and dumped in the Hindu-majority areas of Tikatuli and Wari to scare the Hindus. This went on for quite a few nights. I took a photograph of the corpses. A few other boys and I formed a party to take the bodies during the day to Shyampur cremation ground and cremate them there. Meanwhile in school we were told by our Muslim fellow students that we would also have to share the fate of the corpses if we (meaning the Congress) did not concede Pakistan".

As usual, the person to rise in the most vociferous protest against this mass crime was Syama Prasad Mookerjee. A no-confidence motion was moved in the Bengal Legislative Assembly after the killings. In the debate that followed he again made a memorable speech, lambasting Suhrawardy and his cohorts for their open incitement to mass murder, at the same time emphasizing the irresponsible self-centeredness exhibited by the resident Whites (then called Europeans) of the city. Excerpts from his speech :

"Mr. Speaker Sir, since yesterday we have been discussing the motion of no-confidence under circumstances which perhaps have no parallel in the deliberations of any Legislature in any part of the civilised world. What happened in Calcutta is perhaps without a parallel in modern history. St. Bartholomew's Day of which history records some grim events of murder and butchery pales into insignificance compared to the brutalities that were committed in the streets, lanes and bye-lanes of this first city of British India. . . . . let me say this that what had happened was not the result of a sudden explosion, but it is the culmination of an administration, corrupt, inefficient and communal which has disfigured the life of this great province. But so far as the immediate cause is concerned . . . . it is said on behalf of the Muslim League that the Cabinet Mission proved faithless to Muslim interests and thereby created a situation which had no parallel in the Anglo-Muslim relationship in the country. What did actually the Cabinet Mission do? The Muslim League, the spoilt and pampered child of the British Imperialists for the last thirty years, was disowned for the first time by the British Labour Government . . . . (Loud noise from the Government benches) . . . . When Mr. Jinnah was confronted at press conference in Bombay on the 31st July and was asked whether direct action meant violence or non-violence, his cryptic reply was 'I am not going to discuss ethics'. (The Hon. Mr. Mohammed Ali : Good.). But Khwaja Nazimuddin was not so good. He came out very bluntly in Bengal and said that Muslims did not believe in non-violence at all. Now Sir, speeches like these were made by responsible League leaders. . . . All this was followed by a series of articles and statements which appeared in the columns of Newspapers -- the Morning News, the Star of India and the Azad. If . . . my friend Mr. Ispahani . . . . reads these documents . . . he will be able to find out that there was nothing but open and direct incitement to violence. Hatred of Hindus and jehad on the Hindus was declared was declared in fire-eating language . . . and the general Moslem public have acted according to the instructions. . . . . Sir, there is one point I would like to say with regard to the Britishers in this house. My friends are remaining neutral. I cannot understand this attitude at all. If the Ministry was right (then) support them, and if the Ministry was wrong you should say so boldly and not remain neutral. Merely sitting on the fence shows signs of abject impotence. (Laughter). My friend Mr. Gladding (a leader of the European group in the house) says luckily none of his people were injured. It is true Sir, but that is a statement that makes me extremely sorry. If a single Britisher, man, or woman, or a child had been struck, they would have thrown the Ministry out of office without hesitation but because no Britisher was touched they can take an impartial and neutral view! . . . . . It is therefore vitally necessary that this false and foolish idea of Pakistan or Islamic rule has to be banished for ever from your head. In Bengal we have got to live together."

But of course reality turned out to be quite different. Pakistan was born, to be broken up a quarter of a century later. In Hindu-majority West Bengal Hindus and Muslims learnt to live together, as Syama Prasad had wanted. Muslim-majority East Bengal, as we all know and shall see later in this book, was a different story altogether.

Now on to Noakhali from Calcutta, for the next horror. Everyone knows where Calcutta is, but very few know about Noakhali or what had made the place notorious. A few words about this forgotten corner of the world, which saw another bloodbath in 1946, would therefore be in order.

A look at the map at Fig.1 is called for. The mainstream of the holy Ganga leaves its holiness to the tiny Bhagirathi and enters present-day Bangladesh to become the ordinary but wide Podda or Padma. Padma then meets the mighty Brahmaputra (Jamuna in Bangladesh) coming from the north, and flows south-eastwards with its enormous volume of water. This combined stream is then met by the rain-fed Meghna flowing in a south-westerly direction. The river, which continues to be called Meghna beyond this confluence, then becomes virtually an inland sea, nearly twenty kilometres wide, flares out, and flows for another hundred kilometres before it meets the sea, the Bay of Bengal. The sluggish flow of this huge mass of muddy water also causes extensive siltation in and around its mouth which gives rise to formation of delta, roughly triangular islands known locally as char. Some of these chars in course of time got connected with the mainland, but their names remained.

The district of Noakhali, as it existed in the British times (all districts of undivided Bengal have since been divided up many times in independent Bangladesh - Noakhali of those days now consists of the districts of Noakhali, Lokkhipur and Feni), lay on the left flank of the combined Meghna as it was meeting the sea, and included a number of these islands or chars. It is dangerous to live on the chars as they are often less than a metre above high water level, and are the first prey to any cyclone. Nevertheless, the fertility of the soil on the chars, combined with the pressure of population on the mainland, causes many people to settle on these islands. The district was, and still is, almost totally rural and agricultural, the main produce being paddy, jute, coconut, paan(betel leaves) and supari (betel or areca nut). The district included a number of char islands, of which two – Hatia and Sandip – were quite big. Among the smaller ones were Char Alexander, Char Lawrence, Char Bele and several others. Another feature of Noakhali was its remoteness. In order to reach the district from Calcutta one had to take from Sealdah station a Broad Gauge train which would reach a steamer station called Goalondo. Then one had to take a steamer down the Padma till one reached another station called Chandpur on the Meghna near the confluence of Padma and Meghna. Then one had to board a slow Metre Gauge train which would take one via Laksam junction to Noakhali town, the district headquarters. Thereafter to reach a village or one of the chars one had to take a bullock cart or a country boat. It took nothing less than forty-eight hours to reach such a village from Calcutta. The means of transportation within the district were also primitive, being confined largely to bullock carts and country boats. Also, the district was criss-crossed by innumerable small rivers, canals and water courses, and transportation over land even by bullock carts was limited.

The population in the British days was overwhelmingly – more than eighty per cent – Muslim. Now it is around ninety-five per cent so. The minority Hindus were largely schoolteachers, lawyers, moneylenders, doctors, shopkeepers, small businessmen, artisans and the like. A few were small Zamindars. The Muslims were largely cultivators, the majority of them sharecroppers or landless agricultural labourers. On the whole the Hindus were financially somewhat better off than the Muslims. It is this financial disparity that was made use of by the Hindu-baiters in the run-up for the carnage. There was another disparity – not economic, not political, not social. It was the fact that Hindu women were considered prettier than their Muslim sisters, and being in the minority, and infidels at that, were considered fair game. This is not being facetious. Words to this effect were spoken by no less a person than Sir Frederick Burrows, Governor of Bengal, when the widespread incidents of molestation, kidnapping and rape of Hindu women in Noakhali were reported to him[41].

The carnage at Noakhali was begun by a Muslim League leader called Ghulam Sarwar assisted by a Moulvi (Muslim Priest) Rashid Ahmed and a Mukhtar (Lawyer) Majibar Rahman. Sarwar was a fire-breathing rabble-rouser from a Peer’s (Muslim holy man) family who had lately wrested the leadership of the Krishak Samiti (Cultivators’ Association) from milder leaders such as Khan Bahadur Abdul Gofran. Once begun, the violence gathered its own momentum and rolled on. The inspiration of course came from Suhrawardy’s launching of the Calcutta Killings (including the Hindu reprisals), and the assurance that under Suhrawardy’s benign rule and Burrows’s indifference the police could be trusted to look the other way while Muslim plundered Hindu. In fact that is what happened in the Calcutta Killings, and that is what would have continued to happen, had not the tide of rioting turned against the Muslims. There was no such fear in Noakhali. The overwhelming numerical majority of Muslims, and the remoteness of the area would ensure that there would be no retaliation, nor any official action in a hurry.

Sarwar’s motivation in starting the carnage was simple, and remarkably similar to Suhrawardy’s. Just as Suhrawardy wanted to curry favour with Jinnah and elevate himself to a National Level, so did Sarwar want to curry favour with Suhrawardy and raise himself to Provincial Level. He had won the 1937 elections on a Muslim League ticket, but had been refused a ticket by the League in 1946. He was determined to show his political bosses that he deserved a ticket. He began with touring the district, making rabid speeches and provoking isolated incidents of harrassment of Hindus, outraging the modesty of Hindu women, even killing. The Hindus looked for help from the Congress, but predictably, no help came. They then turned to the Hindu Mahasabha. Syama Prasad immediately promised them help, and came to Noakhali town and held a mammoth rally of Hindus at Arun School grounds. If this did not instil any confidence among the Hindus, it at least drew the attention of the District Administration to the fact that something sinister was in the offing.

Meanwhile Sarwar went round making his speeches. Just how provocative these speeches were can be made out only by a person who understands the Noakhali dialect (a lot of Bengalis, even East Bengalis, do not). Dr. Dinesh Chandra Sinha (b.1935), a retired Deputy Registrar of the Calcutta University, is himself a fugitive from Noakhali, and now lives near Calcutta. Dr. Sinha has quoted the main points of the speeches verbatim in the dialect in his work ‘Noakhalir Mati o Manush’[42]. An English translation is given below, with the caveat that it can never capture the explosive potential of the words.

1. Brothers, all the rice that you grow – who eats it? – Hindus!
2. Brothers, all the fat bananas that you grow – who eats them? – Hindus!
3. Brothers, when our women fall ill who paw and feel them all over? – Hindu doctors!
4. Brothers, why are we Muslims thin and underfed? – because we do not get enough to eat!
5. Brothers, why are the Hindus fat and greasy? – because they get all the best things to eat!

These are lies of course, however much one might want to see the struggle between the haves and have-nots in them. The twenty per cent Hindus of Noakhali could never eat up even a quarter of the rice and bananas that the eighty per cent Muslims grew. The bulk of the Hindus, who were mostly either in the white-collar professions or small tradesmen or artisans could be only marginally better off than their Muslim brethren. The third allegation is particularly provocative, for obvious reasons.

These words were very similar to those that unemployed ruffians and goons used to go around preaching, in a country far away from Noakhali and Calcutta. These ruffians and goons had names like Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering, Ernst Roehm, Alfred Rosenberg, Julius Streicher, Gregor Strasser ; and they were led by an discharged Austrian corporal called Adolf Hitler. The name of the country was Germany of the Weimer Republic, the time was in the nineteen-twenties, and the people about whom all this was said were called Jews, whose only fault was that they minded their own business and prospered while doing so. Nobody paid the goons any attention, and the Austrian corporal eventually became the Head of the German state. Rather similarly, the Congress or the rest of the country did not pay attention to what was happening in Noakhali. What happened in Germany thereafter was the War and the Holocaust about which everyone knows ; what happened in Noakhali was the Carnage which even the victims’ children do not know of.

The carnage began on October 10, 1946, the full moon night of Kojagari Lokkhi (Lakshmi) Puja when Bengali Hindus traditionally worship Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth. Sarwar and other League leaders had already created the necessary atmosphere by moving from village to village, making inflammatory speeches to the congregations at the daily prayers, describing in vivid detail what the Hindus had done to the Muslims during the Calcutta Killings, duly skipping the other part. As with the Calcutta Killings, elaborate arrangements had been made beforehand to ensure the success of the operation. The hinterland was cut off from Noakhali town by breaking the Sanko-s (one-pole bamboo bridges crossing canals). The boatmen in country boats were all Muslim. There was no way a Hindu could get away once the killings started. Still, to make doubly sure, Muslim League volunteers guarded all routes leading to railway stations.

There were qualitative differences with the Calcutta Killings. In Calcutta the intention of the marauders appeared to be primarily to loot and kill, or at least maim. In Noakhali the objective seemed to kill selectively, but mainly to rape and convert forcibly and to desecrate Hindu places of worship. The process was begun as usual with the familiar slogans of Nara-e-Takbir, Allaho Akbar, Pakistan Zindabad, Ladke Lenge Pakistan, Marke Lenge Pakistan, Malauner Rokto Chai (We want the blood of infidels). The areas attacked were Ramganj, Begumganj, Lokkhipur, Raipur, Senbag, Sandip, and some of the adjoining areas of Tipperah district. The atrocities then spread to Karpara, Narayanpur, Shaistanagar, Gopairbag, Noakhola, Gobindapur, Nandigram, Dalalbazar, Panchgaon, Sahapur and many other places.[43] The attackers had organised themselves into parties each of which they gave the fancy name of Fouj (Army). There were several of them, such as Mian’s Fouj (led by Ghulam Sarwar himself), Akbar’s Fouj, Qasem’s Fouj, and so on. The task of these Fouj-s – a few thousand bloodthirsty, Jihad-crazed peasants surging forward to kill, rape and forcibly convert a few hopelessly outnumbered victims – would be the envy of any army in the world.

The story of the escape of Nalini Ranjan Mitra (1892-1978), a schoolteacher of the village of Khilpara and a Hindu Mahasabha leader, from sure death at the hands of Sarwar’s goons is quite hair-raising and has been described in Dr. Sinha’s Noakhalir Mati o Manush (The Land and the People of Noakhali) in graphic detail. This escape was made possible only by the goodwill and ready wit of two illiterate Muslim youths. Likewise, a number of Hindu lives were saved by Muslims, although their continued security could not be guaranteed, and eventually all of them were forced to leave for Hindu-majority West Bengal. A shortened and abridged version of Dr. Sinha’s account, as heard from Mitra and his son Usha Ranjan Mitra, appearing in Bangla in his book[44], is given below:

Nalini Ranjan Mitra was at the time teaching at Khilpara (Noakhali) school which he had himself founded. He declared the Puja holidays for the school and came home to his home village of Sindurpur (also in Noakhali). Sindurpur was about four miles from Advocate Rajendra Lal Roy Chaudhuri’s house in Karpara. Roy Chaudhuri was the President of the district Hindu Mahasabha. Ghulam Sarwar had a hit list in which Nalini Mitra’s name figured just below that of Roy Chaudhuri. Nalini came to know upon reaching home that the entire extended family of Roy Chaudhuri, some twenty-six of them, had been butchered on October 11. He immediately set out with his wife Shobhonabala and the rest of his family in a boat manned by a boatman he knew very well, bound for the village of Dadpur, where Shobhonabala’s brothers lived and where the bedlam had not yet started. A little while later they heard shouts ‘There, there, Nalini master is running away – catch him’.”

What followed was a nightmare. A bloodthirsty mob came running and caught and fastened their boat. The family was saved from being butchered by the ready wit of a well-meaning Muslim peasant Qadir Ali, who pacified the mob by saying that there was no point in killing Nalini right away, he could be kept incarcerated in his home, until orders from Ghulam Sarwar were received. The family was sent back home.

That night it rained very heavily and there were no further raids. The family held a council of war and decided that the only way for Nalini to be saved was for him to go to Nandigram, a nearby village where a police platoon had camped. This itself was a very tall order, because to go to Nandigram Nalini would have to penetrate the seige thrown by Muslims all around his house. However, there was no alternative. Nalini therefore set out dressed as a Muslim for Nandigram, accompanied by Ramesh Das, a Hindu Barui (paan or betel leaf cultivator) and a Muslim called Ali. One advantage at the time was that the jute and paddy fields were all flooded and covered with fully grown plants. The jute plants grew at least five feet above the water and provided excellent cover. Ramesh and Ali left Nalini on the edge of a jute field and returned home by daybreak.

By that time the weather had improved and a raiding party arrived. They ransacked the house but could not find Nalini. One of the Muslims who had been laying seige the previous night meanwhile let it out that they had seen Ali, Ramesh and an unknown Muslim that night going out into the rain. The raiders immediately understood that Nalini has escaped and ran for the jute fields. By that time Nalini was nowhere near Nandigram. The raiders surrounded the fields and, shouting Allahu Akbar started combing the fields. Nalini lay hidden in the jute fields with just the tip of his nose above the water. In this state he lay still, for more than a day without food, with only the turbid and stinking water of the jute field to drink, bitten black and blue all over by insects, lacerated by the sharp edges of the plants, while the raiders watched for tell-tale signs of movements in the jute plants. Finally in the dead of night he managed to reach the house of the Pal family at the edge of the same village. This family had saved themselves by converting en masse to Islam. The Pals hid Nalini in a loft. The raiders came to search the Pal household a number of times but Nalini managed to stay hidden. After about four or five days Ramesh and Ali arrived at the Pal household and again in the dead of the night escaped with the half-dead Nalini to the police camp at Nandigram. Upon reaching the camp he fell unconscious, and thus he lay for more than twenty-four hours. Meanwhile the raiders, on a suspicion, killed Ramesh and mercilessly beat up Ali, but still continued with their search until a partially decomposed headless torso was found floating in a jute field. They then took this to be Nalini’s body and called off their search.

The entire family of Nalini was forced to convert to Islam. The men were driven to offer Namaz at the local Mosque. The women were placed under purdah and forbidden to come out. A group of Moulvis came and changed the names of the family members. A girl called Niru was named Nurjahan, Monu was named Mumtaz. The women were told to hold one end of a piece of cloth which passed out below the curtain (purdah). The other end was held by the Moulvis who recited verses from the Quran and the Haadis.

Meanwhile Nalini convinced the police at Nandigram to conduct a raid on Sindurpur to rescue his family. By this time the Police had been reinforced by a Military Contingent. All Hindu families who had been forcibly converted into Islam were rescued and taken to Choumuhani. They all renounced their conversion to become Hindus again. Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee had meanwhile set up a Relief Committee at Choumuhani and Nalini busied himself in this relief work. Nalini eventually, like everyone else, moved to West Bengal and became the Headmaster of Nangi High School near Batanagar in the district of South 24-Parganas. Nangi, incidentally, was and still is a Muslim majority area. It must also be mentioned that Nalini later got a letter from his Muslim students of Khilpara, regretting the incident and urging him to come back.

Louis Fischer, the American journalist, describes the Noakhali carnage thus[45] : "Mr. Arthur Henderson told the House of Commons on Nov 4, 1946 that the dead in Noakhali and contiguous Tipperah districts had not yet ben counted, but will, according to estimates, be low in the three figures category. The Bengal government put the number of casualties at 218; some families, however, hid their victims out of fear. Over ten thousand houses were looted in the two districts. In Tipperah 9,895 persons were forcibly converted to Islam ; in Noakhali ineaxact data suggested that the number of converts was greater. Thousands of Hindu women were abducted and married to Muslims against their will. . . . to convert Hindu women, Muslims broke their bangles and removed their 'happiness marks' on their foreheads which showed that they were not widows. Hindu men were compelled to grow beards, to twist their loincloths the Muslim way instead of the Hindu way, and to recite the Quran. Stone idols were smashed and Hindu temples desecrated. Worst of all, Hindus were made to slaughter their cows if they had any, or in any case to eat meat. It was felt that the Hindu community would not accept back into its fold one who had killed the sacred beast or partaken of its flesh."

In fact, one of the very few good things to have come out of the unmitigated evil of the carnage was the fact that the Hindus who had been forced to eat beef, or Hindu women who had been raped or brutalised by Muslims, were indeed accepted back into the Hindu fold. Rabindra Nath Datta had journeyed to villages in the far interior of the district with Gandhi's entourage. Here he had found Hindus in such a stage of demoralisation as to be reduced to the level of animals. Some of them had been tied up and incarcerated in huts. Most of the young, and even some middle-aged women had been raped and brutalised , some of them in the presence of the local Muslim womenfolk. Some men, including little children, had been killed. A common method of disposing of the latter was to toss them into a pond. All of them had been forcibly converted. Datta asked them to come with him so that they could be rehabilitated. Most of them were very sceptical about such rehabilitation as they had been made to eat beef and their womenfolk had been touched by the Muslims. Datta was prepared for this and had carried several copies of a booklet published by the Ramakrishna Mission. The booklet quoted a number of venerable Hindu religious and scriptural authorities emphatically saying that people subjected to forcible conversion, molestation and eating of forbidden food could come back to the Hindu fold without any difficulty. With this he had persuaded them to come with him (in this connection see Syama Prasad Mookerjee's remarks below and endnote on Prayashchitta). The local Muslims did not object, because the Hindus' departure would mean their property being available for grabbing.

Syama Prasad Mookerjee toured the affected areas of Noakhali and Tipperah districts and made a statement in Bangla which is quoted in Dr. Sinha’s Noakhalir Mati o Manush[46]. A freely translated version of the same is given below. “What happened in Noakhali and Tipperah have certain features which have no parallels in the history of communal riots in India. The Carnage at Noakhali was, of course, not a communal riot in any sense. It was a planned and concerted attack by the majority on the minority (the name for this in Eastern Europe, when practised against the Jews, was ‘Pogrom’ – Author). The central purpose of this attack was to effect mass looting, conversion and total desecration of Hindu temples and deities. Killing was mainly for the influential Hindus and for those who resisted the rampage. Rape and kidnapping of Hindu women was an essential part of the plan. From the slogans used in the attacks it is clear that the design was to cleanse the district totally of Hindus, and to establish Pakistan. The attackers were all Muslim League supporters and knew that it was their own Government which was ruling at Calcutta. This had emboldened them in their task to a very considerable extent.

It is not a fact that this pogrom was the act of a few hoodlums or that they had all came from somewhere far away. Practically all the atrocities were committed by local Muslims and the Muslim population of the district was generally sympathetic to what they were doing. There were a few exceptions among the Muslims who had managed to save Hindu lives. Their number is negligible. The Hindus who had been saved in this manner but who had not been able to run away have all been forcibly converted. Those who have run away have been looted of all their belongings. That such a carnage was in the offing had been brought to the notice of the district administration repeatedly and well in time, but the administration took no steps against the persons who were inciting hatred. These administrators have proved themselves to be totally unfit to hold their posts. So long as they continue in their posts it would be very difficult to restore peace in the district. After such a calamity only some fifty persons in Noakhali and a few in Tipperah have so far been arrested. Thousands of people have run away from their homes with only the clothes on their backs. They are now housed at camps at Comilla, Chandpur, Agartala and a few other places. The total number of such destitutes would be somewhere between 50,000 and 75,000.

Apart from these people another 50,000 or so are still marooned in areas where the administration has no say. These people need to be rescued immediately. They have all been forcibly converted. Their belongings have been looted, their spirit is broken. They are hardly human beings any more. Their names have been changed, their women have been ravished. They are being forced to wear Muslim clothes. The men have to attend mosques. The women are given religious instructions at home by Moulvis. All steps are being taken to ensure that they are totally cut off from their moorings and made to surrender completely to their tormentors.

They have lost the courage to even protest. They dare not meet any Hindus from outside who come to visit them unless they are with armed guards. Handbills are being printed in the names of influential Hindus in both their Hindu and Muslim names which say that they have wilfully embraced Islam. They are being forced to write to the Sub-divisional Officers to that effect. They can leave their villages only with the written permission of the local Muslim leaders. A few of them managed to meet me at Choumuhani near Noakhali and told their heartrending tales.

The immediate task at hand is to rescue the minorities who are still marooned, and completely in the clutches of the majority community. Until recently the rioters had kept the villages inaccessible by cutting off the means of communication. This has now partially been set right by the Military, but just access is not enough. Our volunteers will have to visit the villages to restore the morale and confidence of the thousands of Hindus.

It is a welcome development that the Military have decided to visit each and every village. They must remove certain officials from these villages, failing which they will find it very difficult to do any work. Punitive taxes must also be imposed. Such taxes were imposed on Hindus alone during the 1942 movement. This time punitive taxes upon the Muslims alone would be in order as they have not been able to give protection to the Hindu minority. When I discussed this aspect with officials I was told that there were a lot of Muslims who had helped the Hindus. I propose that if any Muslim can produce sufficient proof that he had helped the Hindus then he may be exempted. The destitute Hindus must be compensated from the money realised by way of punitive taxes and also from general funds.

Rehabilitation must be taken in hand immediately. Harvesting time is near. Those who have been ousted from their homes may not get their share of the harvest, in which case they will have nothing to eat. In order to be rehabilitateted the Hindus must be made to feel secure. They must be housed in temporary camps for the present until their homes and temples in their villages are rebuilt and their deities are reinstalled. This alone will restore their morale.

I do not accept that so many brothers and sisters of ours who had been forced out of the Hindu fold have left that fold. They were born Hindus, they are still Hindus, and they shall die Hindus. I have said this to all and sundry: there cannot be any question of any Prayashchitta (atonement for sins[47] ) for them to come back to the Hindu fold. There shall be no talk of any Prayashchitta.

Any woman rescued from a disturbed area and found to have been forcibly married to a Muslim shall go back to her family. All unmarried women and girls should be given in marriage as far as possible. Hindu society must get out of this horror with a clear sight and a view of the future. Else, its future is dark.

I have constituted committees for rescue, assistance, and rehabilitation at Noakhali and Choumuhani. Ten groups of five volunteers each, together with armed escorts, will shortly leave for the affected areas.

I make this statement only upon observing a small part of East Bengal. What we have seen and heard have no parallels in civilised society. There are disturbances and tension in many other parts of Bengal, including Calcutta. The administration has practically collapsed, for which the Governor and the Provincial cabinet are squarely responsible. We have warned them repeatedly, but with no effect. We can clearly foresee that lawlessness will get worse if these people continue in the administration.

In this hour of its peril Hindu society will have to realise something very important : it must stand unified, or else it will perish. It is perhaps God’s will that from this destruction the reawakening of Hindus will begin.

We are not to forget, at this hour of darkness, that we are 30 million Hindus living in Bengal. If we organise ourselves, and if at least some of us dare to brave all odds with resolution and without fear then we shall be able to vanquish our enemies and restore our rightful position in our motherland”.

The Noakhali carnage came to be widely known because of Gandhi’s famous visit to the district. Gandhi arrived at Choumuhani on November 7, 1946, almost a month after the carnage began and stayed in Noakhali till February 1947. Even before this, as information about the atrocities began to trickle out, well-meaning people from all over Bengal flocked to the district, wanting ‘to do something’, generally to give relief to the affected families. Of these the efforts of Syama Prasad Mookerjee have already been mentioned. Mrs. Ashoka Gupta, wife of Saibal Gupta of the ICS, was at that time at Chittagong, quite close to Noakhali. Nellie Sengupta[48] was at that time also at Chittagong and convened a meeting on October 26 to organise women’s teams for relief work at Noakhali in which Ashoka joined. A number of leaders accompanied Gandhi, others came along to join him. Among the prominent people who congregated in remote Noakhali then there were Acharya J.B.Kripalani and his wife (and a prominent congresswoman in her own right) Sucheta Kripalani, Sarat Chandra Bose, Surendra Mohan Ghosh, Muriel Lister, A.V.Thakkarbapa, and others. Among these Ashoka Gupta has recorded some of the reminiscences in a short volume entitled Noakhalir Durjoger Diney (During the Dark Days in Noakhali)[49]

Descriptions of atrocities recorded by Ashoka Gupta fall in the familiar pattern: pillage, rape, forcible conversion, occasional killing. A Hindu widow’s only means of livelihood was a cow. Her house was burnt down, the cow was slaughtered, and she was forced to eat the beef. Among the victims a large number of people were from the depressed classes – known then as Harijan and today in India as Scheduled Castes. A.V.Thakkarbapa, a longtime adherent of Gandhi, was the General Secretary of the Delhi branch of the Harijan Sevak Sangh, and had previous experience in relief work. His experience in the villages of Char Mandal and Char Ruhita have been recorded by Ashoka Gupta[50]. Most of the Hindu houses in the two villages had been either torched or looted. Two thousand people had been forcibly converted, six girls forcibly married to Muslims, one person was killed. Thakkarbapa noticed that even six weeks after the atrocities ended people still wanted to flee their villages. A major reason for their insecurity was the attitude of the Police Stations. The police would either not record complaints or would threaten or harrass those who came to complain.

Ashoka Gupta’s personal experience[51] was identical. Months after the atrocities, the Hindus were still deathly scared to speak out. As she was crossing a river in a ferryboat, a Hindu pointed at the Muslim boatman wearing a Red Cross armband and whispered that this very man was the leader of a bloodthirsty mob. She had somehow convinced a tormented young Hindu couple to come to Lokkhipur police station to record a complaint. The wife pulled a long ghomta[52] over her face and said, between sobs, that even two months after the riots were over, two or three Muslims came to their home every night, took her away and returned her early in the morning. The police officer asked for their names. The husband replied that telling their names would mean sure death for him. Was there any other way in which they could be saved from this unbearable state? Of course there was none, and the couple had to flee their village.

At Mojupur village two orphaned babies, a boy and a girl, were being brought up by their Mama (mother’s brother) and his wife, a childless and well-to-do couple. Their house was first looted, then they were asked to convert. When they refused they were set on fire alive, along with their belongings. Meanwhile news had reached Lokkhipur thana, where the District Magistrate McInnerny[53] happened to be present. He rushed to Mojupur with his force. The couple by then were near their end. The last words they said to McInnerny was to save the two babies. McInnerny handed over the babies to Ashoka. She sent the boy to Prabartak Sangha in Chittagong, but had to send the girl away to Comilla[54].

Sucheta Kripalani[55] once brought to the notice of McInnerny an incident of a kidnapped Hindu girl living as a daughter-in-law in a Muslim household. McInnerny met the family with his police force in the presence of Sucheta. The head of the family said that this was a marriage out of love between his son and the girl, there had been no force used. McInnerny sent for the girl. She seemed very broken and unable to talk, but she told McInnerny by gestures that she was here of her own free will. Sucheta asked McInnerny to take the girl aside and question her. McInnerny said that was hardly necessary, since this seemed to be a simple case of love followed by marriage. Sucheta burst out “Please Mr. McInnerny, please give me one case of love affair between the communities from 10th October to this day, after the riots. This is not a case of love marriage. Take evidence in a separate room so that the girl can speak the truth”. McInnerny relented and took her to a room separately. As soon as the girl was alone with McInnerny she fell on his feet howling, begging to be rescued. At Sucheta’s insistence McInnerny had to take the girl away immediately[56].

According to Rabindra Nath Datta, Ghulam Sarwar had it put out that whoever could rape Sucheta Kripalani would be honoured with the title of 'Ghazi' (Hero). For this reason Sucheta carried a capsule of cyanide on her while she was in Noakhali.

Datta had further heard that Rai Sahib Nagendra Kumar Sur, a leading lawyer of the Noakhali district bar, was kidnapped, taken to a lonely spot, and asked to dig his own grave. He had the guts to ask his tormentors why he should oblige them, since he was going to be killed anyway. They replied that if Sur dug the grave he would be beheaded in one stroke, but if he refused he would be tortured to death. Sur is said to have obliged them. His son Prasanta Kumar Sur fled to West Bengal, became a prominent Communist politician, Mayor of Calcutta and a Minister in the Government of West Bengal. This author had occasion to meet him and his son several times. At no point of time, either in public or in private, did he mention the death of his father. In this connection the reasons for Hindus to hide the atrocities committed on them are relevant, and these have been described and discussed in Chapter 10.

Ashoka did not find the slightest signs of remorse among the local Muslim population. To them Gandhi and the entourage had come to help only the Hindus. A Moulvi told her ‘You have come simply to help the Hindus. What do you care about the poor Muslims[57]’? Ashoka retorted that they had given sarees to poor Muslim women who did not seem to have one intact saree to wear, but the Moulvi was not impressed. At one point of time, near Dalalbazar, their Jeep got stuck in the soft soil of the new road embankment built out of ‘test relief’ funds. The Muslim workmen who were still working on that stretch of road refused to help out[58]. Bakul Guha Roy (later Mrs. Ganguly), a Hindu woman social worker and an associate of Ashoka, was on the way to Noakhali, and at Chandpur steamer station, in order to get to know the rural folk, went ahead to meet some rural families (all Muslims) along the riverbank. They were roundly abused, and generally received very badly. Prafulla Chandra Ghosh (longtime associate of Gandhi, first Chief Minister of West Bengal 1947-48, and again 1968-69) who was escorting them told them, after they came back crestfallen, that he had let them go only to let them find out for themselves what sort of odds they were up against[59].

One small voice of conscience heard among the Muslim Leaguers must be mentioned. This was that of Mr. Shamsuddin Ahmed, the Labour Minister in Suhrawardy's ministry. In one of Gandhi's prayer meetings at Choumuhani on November 7, 1946 he roundly condemned the misdeeds of the Muslim goons, and has been reported in Sinha's Noakhalir Mati o Manush.[60] Parts of his speech made on the occasion, freely translated, are quoted below.

". . . . I have myself toured the areas and spoken to the affected people. There is no denying that over a wide area, stretching from Ramganj to parts of Chandpur subdivision of Tipperah to Begumganj, there has been widespread violence and torture practised on Hindus. Hindus have been forcibly converted to Islam, they have been forced to wear lungis and round caps, their names have been changed, their women have been ravished. . . . . It has been said that the poor Muslims avenged their persecution by the Hindu Zamindars. If that is so then why was it necessary to convert them forcibly? In Noakhali there was no killing by the communities of each other ; there was just the killing of the minority Hindus by the majority Muslims."

Addressing the Hindus Mr. Shamsuddin said " There is no denying that you have been subjected to Zulm (or Julum, meaning use of force to achieve an improper objective). Islam does not teach Zulm. No one can be converted to Islam by Zulm. Those who have been forcibly converted have not really been converted at all. . . . . It is the duty of every right-thinking Muslim to persuade the Hindus of his village to come back and get rehabilitated there". This speech of Mr. Shamsuddin was very adversely commented upon by the pro-Muslim League newspaper Azad.

How did those in faraway New Delhi view the incidents in remote, inaccessible Noakhali? V.P.Menon, considered to be one of the architects of the transfer of power from British to Indian or Pakistani hands, writes : “ In about the second week of October 1946, there was large scale outbreak of lawlessness and hooliganism in the Noakhali and Tipperah districts of East Bengal. Large forces of armed police and military had to be employed to control the situation. The loss of life was not great, but the loss of property was considerable. Referring to these disturbances, a prominent politician, who himself hailed from East Bengal reported that whereas the lawlessness had been given the colour of pure goondaism, it was in fact not so ; it was an organised attack engineered by the Muslim League and carried out with the connivance of administrative officials (this is what would have been termed today as Human Rights Violation – author). The attacks, he said, were made by people armed with guns and other deadly weapons; roads were dug up and other means of communication cut off to prevent ingress and egress ; canals had been blocked and strategic points were being guarded by armed insurgents. Two of the Muslim League’s nominee to the interim Government were openly indulging in belligerent speeches. One of them went so far as to declare that the events in East Bengal were but part of the all-India battle for Pakistan”[61].

Gandhi's trip to Noakhali brought the obscure area to the front page of every newspaper of the country, and is still celebrated as one of the great journeys undertaken by the apostle of peace to restore sanity among his fellow human beings. Now the time has come to ask a few critical questions. What did Gandhi attempt? And with what success?

His mission was to restore confidence in the Hindus so that they could come back to their villages, and his method, according to him, was abiding, endless love for one’s fellow men. He chalked up a very punishing schedule for himself in visiting remote villages to hold prayer meetings there and kept it, moving over the very difficult terrain on foot at an incredible speed from strangely named hamlets like Toomchar and Qazirkhil to Atakhora and Lamchar. He had told Ashoka Gupta and others at the very beginning of their project : “Bear no ill-will towards anyone. Work without fear, mix intimately with the villagers. Success will come your way only if you remain completely fearless, stay on the path of truth, inspire confidence in the weak. The rioters will respect you only when they see true fearlessness in you, not any fake bravado[62].

Louis Fischer, the American journalist who described Gandhi as something of a combination of Jesus Christ and Tammany Hall[63], had covered the Noakhali carnage quite extensively in his biography of Gandhi[64]. He described the journey of the Mahatma theorugh Noakhali as a pilgrimage of penance, in which the pilgrim wears no shoes. Sometimes hostile elements, obviously Muslim Leaguers, strewed broken glass, brambles and filth in his path. He was once sitting on the floor of a hut in the midst of Muslims and discoursing on the beauties of non-violence. Sucheta Kripalani passed him a note saying that the man on his right had killed a number of Hindus. The Mahatma smiled and went on speaking. In the village of Palla, on January 27th, he was asked "What should a woman do if she is attacked? Should she commit suicide"? His prescription was in the affirmative[65].

Not one word about bringing the guilty to book. Instead he was advising rape victims to kill themselves!

Did Gandhi succeed in his mission? The simple answer seems to be a big NO. Can anyone succeed in convincing a large populace that they did wrong upon the minorities, when what they did is sanctioned by their religion in the name of Jihad[66]? His central purpose was to get the Hindus back to their villages in Noakhali where they would, if he had his way, live happily ever after in perfect harmony with the majority community, the Muslims. Did it happen? No, of course not, the good intentions and deeds of a large number of sensible Muslims notwithstanding. In 1946 while he was touring the district, Muslim Leaguers en masse excreted on the route that he was due to take, and also spread glass shards, nails and similar objects to make his journey difficult. Today, in 1999, fifty-two years after partition, and twenty-eight years after the formation of independent Bangladesh, there are practically no Hindus in what used to be the district of Noakhali in British India. The number of Hindus in that Noakhali used to be 411,291 as against 1,608,337 Muslims, namely 18 per cent,[67] while the percentage of Hindus in the land mass today known as Bangladesh was around 28 per cent. Today it is about 5% according to 1991 census, taking together the present-day Noakhali, Feni and Lokkhipur zillas (districts) of Bangladesh. The proportion of Hindus in the whole of Bangladesh is currently 10.5%.

Therefore Gandhi, the apostle of peace, advocate of universal love and brotherhood failed and Ghulam Sarwar, the sectarian, murderous loudmouth, succeded. This is not an isolated case of failure. Gandhi succeeded in packing the British off, but failed in every case where it was his intention to establish Hindu-Muslim amity. The case of his espousal of the Khilafat movement has already been mentioned. He could not prevent the recurrence of riots that rocked the country since the 1920s, culminating in the Punjab bloodbath of 1947-8. He could not prevent the partition of the country nor the expulsion of Hindus and Sikhs from what became Pakistan – total and one-time expulsion in the case of West Pakistan, partial and gradual in the case of the East. All that he could prevent was the reciprocal expulsion of Muslims from India (and that too not in Punjab). This is being mentioned as a matter of fact, without comment on the right and wrong of it. He failed in convincing the Muslims, where they were in a majority, that it was their duty to protect the Hindu minority. And he failed in all these cases because he was in gross error in regard to the basic nature of Hindu-Muslim relationship in India.

What was Gandhi’s error? The error was twofold : first, not being able to appreciate the significance of Jihad in the Islamic code ; and secondly, inability to foresee what a superbly skilful and powerful politician like Jinnah could do, and actually did, with the Muslim masses by wielding this aspect of the Islamic code, and the powerlessness of his own code of Ahimsa, love and non-violence, or passive resistance in the face of Jinnah’s brand of politics (see Chapter 11 for further treatment of this aspect). The Indian habit of deification of a great man has not let the nation comprehend the enormity of Gandhi’s failure.

Perhaps Gandhi alone understood it, because he was truly a great politician, and he died a very sad man in partitioned India.

About Jinnah’s emergence as the unquestioned leader of the Muslim masses towards the end of the nineteen-thirties, the eminent historian R.C. Majumdar had this to say[68]: “His (Jinnah’s) clarion call to the Muslims went home and changed the Muslim political outlook almost overnight. He touched the chord of religious feelings of Muslims which have always proved a potent factor in Muslim politics". The Mullahs in the countryside were soon up in arms against the Congress propagandists . . . . It was blasphemy, they told their flocks, to say that politics is a purely secular affair, and they reawakened in them all their old suspicions of Hindu intentions towards their faith.’ The Congress mass contact movement, which had made some headway, collapsed under the attack of the Mullahs. The Congress made frantic attacks to counteract Jinnah’s propaganda and passed resolutions guaranteeing full rights to the minorities, assuring them of the widest possible scope for developing in the fullest measure their political economic and cultural life along with the other elements of the nation and asking the Muslims to cooperate with the Congress for the common good and the advancement of the people of India. But all these fell on deaf ears”.

What people like Jinnah, Suhrawardy and Sarwar were trying to do was the same as what the Confederates did when they fired upon Fort Sumter in South Carolina in the faraway United States of America. They were trying to wage a Civil War. Meanwhile Gandhi and Nehru were happy in their pet perception that their party, the great Indian National Congress, represented Hindus and Muslims alike, that the Muslim League was an aberration and therefore its appeal could not last. They were lulled into a very strong belief in this perception by the results of the 1937 election. Therefore they not only underestimated the strength but mistook the very nature of their adversary and his designs. They were also in basic error regarding the Hindu-Muslim relationship in India, as has been explained earlier.

A Civil War cannot be won with love and non-violence, especially when those waging the war did not suffer from a bad conscience for having done so. Gandhi's Ahimsa or non-violence succeeded against the British because the latter always had among themselves some people who genuinely believed that the British in India were in the wrong, and in the process gave their whole British nation a bad conscience about India. Add to that the facts that the West had a tradition of Rule of Law and Libertarianism and also that Britain already had had a similar problem with the Irish in the very recent past, and it is not difficult to see why Gandhi's non-violence succeeded against them. After all, Non-Violence and Civil Disobedience were ideas that Gandhi got from the writing of a liberal western thinker, Henry David Thoreau of Walden Pond, Massachusetts. In this regard it is useful to recall what Henry Kissinger had remarked “In my view, India had survived its turbulent history through an unusual subtlety in grasping and then manipulating the psychology of foreigners. The moral pretensions of the Indian leaders (during and before the Bangladesh liberation) seemed to me perfectly attuned to exploit the guilt complexes of a liberal, slightly socialist West; they were indispensable weapons for an independence movement that was physically weak and that used the ethical categories of the colonial power to paralyse it.”[69]

On the other hand, Jinnah, Suhrawardy and Sarwar were not Westerners or foreigners, and the subtlety that Kissinger had observed among Indians in dealing with foreigners was not in evidence here. Moreover, these gentlemen had no problems of bad conscience like the British, because their conduct was endorsed by the inviolable religious doctrine of Jihad. Gandhi's non-violence would not have lasted half an hour against Aurangzeb, or the present-day Taliban of Afghanistan, and it did not last against Jinnah, Suhrawardy or Sarwar.

Likewise, Lincoln's opponents were fired with the idea of "Cotton, Slavery and States' Rights", and did not for a moment stop to think that African-Americans were human and slavery was evil, or that there was anything wrong in wrecking their Union. Lincoln, therefore, did not wait to convince the Confederates through negotiations or lofty moralising. He sent forth his soldiers, won the war with brute force, saved the Union, and then made his Gettysburg address declaring ‘malice towards none’.

India, unfortunately, had no Lincoln. Not only so, but its leaders were not prepared to fight to maintain the unity of the country, and described themselves as ‘tired men, getting on in years too’[70]. Therefore the country was partitioned.

As the succeeding fifty years would show, the partition did not solve a single problem, neither for India, nor for Pakistan, neither for Hindus nor for Muslims. On the other hand it created insurmountable problems for both countries and communities. In fact Mountbatten knew beforehand that it was going to be a disaster. He wrote in his diary "Partition is sheer madness, and no one would ever induce me to agree to it were it not for this fantastic communal madness that has seized everybody and leaves no other course open. The responsibility for this mad decision must be placed squarely on Indian shoulders in the eyes of the world, for one day they will bitterly regret the decision they are about to make"[71].

Nor could the dreaded ‘civil war’ be avoided. What happened in Punjab in the wake of partition and later in Eastern Bengal in 1950, 1964 and 1971 was nothing less than a civil war. Worse still, an inconclusive variant of a civil war is still in progress in Kashmir.

Perhaps the only similarity between the two parallel cases of Gandhi and Lincoln was that both of them were assassinated shortly afterwards. Here again the similarity ends. The victorious Lincoln was killed by a Southerner, from the other side; the beaten Gandhi, by a Hindu, from his own.

One of the first persons with any say in the politics of the country, to understand that this indeed was Civil War, and should be fought as such was Syama Prasad Mookerjee. In his diary (in Bangla), on 10th January 1946 he writes, “If Hindus and Muslims unitedly try to maintain Indian culture and traditions, and live side by side according to their own beliefs then there should be no problem. But if Muslims show overmuch of devotion to their own religion and try to dominate the Hindus then should the Hindus not think how they can defend themselves? The Hindu-Muslim problem will not be solved without a Civil War. We do not want a Civil War – but if the other side prepare themselves for it, and we do not do so, we shall lose the war”[72]. Earlier, on 4th January he wrote (in English) “Force must, in the last analysis, be met with force. An internal policy of non-resistance to armed violence would eventually condemn any society to dissolution”[73].

These were prophetic words, for these were spoken when no Hindu believed that the country would be partitioned, when neither the Great Calcutta Killings nor the Noakhali Carnage had taken place[74]. Nobody listened to him. His own party, the Hindu Mahasabha, was too small to be of any lasting impact, and in any case the Hindu consciousness in the country was dominated by the Congress and its stalwarts led by Gandhi. The Hindus listened to what the Congress told them, and the result is today well known. Only now, fifty years after his death under questionable circumstances, people are beginning to appreciate the greatness of the man, and the truth of what he had said, and what could have happened if they had listened to him. As Lord Keynes had said, human beings will do the sensible thing, but only after all alternatives have been exhausted.

[1] Tin Kuri Dosh, ibid. Part II p. 217

[2] ibid. p. 161-163

[3] Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Rashtrasangram o Ponchaser Monnontor, (Bangla) Mitra & Ghosh, Calcutta, 1st Ed., 1998, p. 43. The title of the book in Bangla means “Struggle for Power and the Famine of 1450”. 1450 in Bengali era (solar) corresponds to April 1943-April 1944.

[4] Tin Kuri Dosh, ibid. Part II p. 135

[5] Thy Hand, Great Anarch, ibid p. 646

[6] ‘Native’, meaning Indian, as opposed to ‘European’, meaning British, was a derogatory term in those days. The term ‘European’ was often conveniently extended to include Anglo-Indian, Indian Christian, or even anyone wearing western clothes.

[7] Tin Kuri Dosh, ibid. Part II p. 133, 143

[8] ibid. Part II p. 156

[9] ibid. Part II p. 150

[10] Poverty and Famines, by Amartya Sen, Oxford University Press, 1st Ed., third impression paperback 1999, p. 52-85

[11] A taktaposh is a spartan bedstead, a variant of what is known in other parts of India as a charpoy. It consists of a few cheap hardwood planks nailed together to form a horizontal surface suitable for lying upon, supported by four wooden posts of square cross section. It was a widespread practice in Bengal to stock the family's provisions and other possessions below the taktaposh.

[12] Tin Kuri Dosh, ibid. Part II p. 156

[13] This episode is based on an interview with Rathindra Nath Sengupta of the Indian Administrative Services (IAS – successor to the ICS of the British times), former Chief Secretary, Government of West Bengal.

[14] The Transfer of Power in India, V.P.Menon, Orient Longman, 1st Ed., 1993 Reprint, p. 355

[15] Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958) Congress President 1940-46, Education Minister in Nehru's cabinet 1947-58, was the foremost among the so-called 'Nationalist Muslims' of India, Muslims who had aligned themselves with the Congress rather than the Muslim League,and who opposed Pakistan. Jinnah used to call him the 'show boy of the Congress'. His autobiography 'India Wins Freedom' was first published after his death in 1958, but some thirty pages of the text were withheld according to his will, and were added thirty years later in 1988. The book was dedicated to Jawaharlal Nehru, and quite a bit of those thirty pages are very critical of Nehru.

[16] India wins Freedom, by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Orient Longman, Complete Version, Reprinted 1993, p. 164

[17] ibid. p. 162

[18] ibid. p. 170

[19] Roses in December, ibid, p. 81

[20] A bustee is a slum in Calcutta, usually a single storey construction of very cheap material and corrugated sheet or tiled roof. The equivalent terms in Mumbai and Delhi are, respectively, Zopadpatty and Jhuggi-Jhonpri colony. Dominque Lapierre’s Ananda Nagar, City of Joy, was modelled on Pilkhana, one of the worst bustees of Howrah. Pilkhana (literally, a stable for elephants) is a slum of unimaginable poverty and squalor located in Howrah, across the river Hooghly from Calcutta.

[21] Deshbibhag : Poshchat o Nepottho Kahini, ibid. p.87

[22] Tin Kuri Dosh, ibid. Part II p. 224, 226-227

[23] Deshbibhag : Poshchat o Nepottho Kahini, ibid. p.86

[24] Brothers against the Raj : A biography of Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose by Leonard A.Gordon, 1st Ed., Viking, New Delhi, 1990 (quoting a Sociology Ph.D. dissertation by Richard Lambert, University of Pennsylvania, 1951), p. 566

[25] Jinnah of Pakistan, ibid. p. 284

[26] ibid. p. 285

[27] Tin Kuri Dosh, ibid. Part II p. 229

[28] Interview with Nirupom Som, Indian Police Service, ex-Deputy Commissioner, Port Police, ex-Commissioner, Calcutta Police, ex-Director-General of Police, West Bengal.

[29] Jinnah of Pakistan, ibid. p. 284

[30] ibid. p. 285

[31]Tin Kuri Dosh, ibid. Part II p. 229-232

[32] Deshbibhag : Poshchat o Nepottho Kahini, ibid. p.87

[33] Jinnah of Pakistan, ibid. p. 286

[34] Tin Kuri Dosh, ibid. Part II p. 232-233

[35] Deshbibhag : Poshchat o Nepottho Kahini, ibid. p.87

[36] India Wins Freedom, ibid.p. 170

[37] Jinnah of Pakistan, ibid. p. 287

[38] Krishna Sholoi, (Bangla, meaning ‘Black Sixteenth’), by Mizanur Rahaman, Sahana, Dacca, 1st Ed.,
2000

[39] Amar Dekha Rajneetir Ponchas Bochhor, ibid., p. 196-197

[40] Tin Kuri Dosh, ibid. Part II p. 232

[41] Spoken to J.B.Kripalani, husband of Sucheta Kripalani (see later for her struggle in arranging relief for the Noakhali victims). Kripalani says he felt like hitting Burrows, but restrained himself. See India's March to Freedom, by D.P.Mishra, Har-Anand Publications, 2001, 1st Ed., p. 566

[42] Noakhalir Mati o Manush, ibid., pp. 95-96

[43] ibid. p.120-122.

[44] Noakhalir Mati o Manush, , ibid. pp. 129-138

[45] The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, ibid., p. 450

[46] ibid. pp. 122-126

[47] A very unfortunate custom prevailing in Hindu society until recently was that anyone who converted out of Hinduism, even if he was forced to do so, could not ordinarily come back to the fold. Prayashchitta was one way of doing this. Return to Hinduism is today actively administered by several organisations, among them the Arya Samaj and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

[48] Nellie Sengupta (1986-1973) British-born wife of ‘Deshapriya’ Jatindra Mohon Sengupta, Congress President, 1932. Nellie herself was the President of the Congress in 1933 when the party had been declared illegal. She stayed on at Chittagong in Pakistan even after partition, and worked for the Prabartak Sangha.

[49] “Noakhalir Durjoger Diney” (Bangla, During the Dark Days in Noakhali) by Ashoka Gupta, Naya Udyog, Calcutta, 1st Ed. 1999.

[50] ibid. p.33

[51] ibid. p. 34

[52] Ghomta (Ghunghat in Hindi) is the end of the sari made into a hood to cover the head of a woman for modesty. Once very common among Bengalis of both varieties, it has practically gone out of use among Hindu women, especially urban women, in West Bengal. Muslim women however still use it because of their religious compulsion to cover their hair.

[53] McInnerny, Irishman, ICS Officer, District Magistrate, Noakhali 1945-46. He stayed on in Pakistan after independence. He was fluent not only in standard Bangla, but also in the dialects of Noakhali and Chittagong, which most Bengalis from outside these districts do not follow..

[54] ibid. p.37

[55] Sucheta Kripalani (1908-1974) Congresswoman, Gandhian, Bengali-born wife of Acharya J.B.Kripalani. Sucheta was an irrepressible character, and has been described as such very fondly by Ashoka Gupta. She was the Chief Minister of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, 1963-67.

[56] ibid. pp. 62-63

[57] ibid. p. 14

[58] ibid. p. 20

[59] ibid. p. 73

[60] Noakhalir Mati o Manush, ibid. p.127-129

[61] The Transfer of Power in India, ibid. p. 318

[62] Noakhalir Durjoger Diney, ibid. p. 13

[63] Tammany Hall is the headquarters of the Democratic Party in New York City, supposed to be the abode of wheeling-dealing politicians

[64] The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, ibid.

[65] ibid., p. 450-454

[66] Jihad, Holy war upon infidels, the duty of every Muslim. 'A religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Mohammed' (Dictionary of Islam by Thomas Patrick Hughes, 1999 Edition, p. 243). It has been argued that Jihad does not condone atrocities upon innocent unarmed non-Muslims, that it necessarily includes an inner struggle that every Muslim must wage within himself to cleanse himself of all that is impure, and so on (based probably on the distinction made by Sufi writers between al-Jihad'ul Akbar, the greater warfare against one's own lusts, and al-Jihad'ul Asghar, the lesser warfare, against infidels, ibid.). The duty of religious war (which all commentators agree, is a duty extending to all times) is, however, quite explicitly laid down in the following verses of the Qur'an, and no such fine distinctions are made there: Surahs ix, 5,6; ix, 29; iv, 76-79; ii, 214, 215; viii,39,42. The Traditions are equally explicit on this score -- see Sahihu Muslim, Sahihu Bukhari. The academic Sufi interpretations are, it is submitted, rather unimportant to hapless non-Muslims who have been the victims of Muslim mobs baying for their blood in the name of Jihad.

[67] Noakhalir Durjoger Diney ibid. p. 76

[68] The History and Culture of the Indian People, R.C. Majumdar, General Ed., Vol. XI, Struggle for Freedom, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Mumbai, 2nd Ed., 1988, p. 606, quoting Coupland, R., The Constitutional Problem in India, Oxford University Press, 1945.

[69] White House Years, Henry Kissinger, Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1st Ed., 1979, p. 879

[70] Nehru’s conversation with Leonard Mosley, quoted in The History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. XI, Struggle for Freedom ibid., p. 768. A yearning to grab power at any cost is discernible.

[71] Freedom at Midnight, ibid., p. 151

[72] Syamaprasader Diary o Mrityu Prasanga (in Bangla) (The Diary of Syama Prasad and about his Death) Uma Prasad Mookerjee, Ed., Mitra & Ghosh, Calcutta, 1st Ed., 1988, p. 74.
[73] ibid., p. 58

[74] Much later, in early 1947 George Abell told Lord Mountbatten that the country was heading for a civil war. See Freedom at Midnight ibid., p. 95

2008-05-08T15:10:00.000-07:00

Chapter 4

PARTITION AT LAST

From the close of the war events all over India began moving with astounding rapidity. In Britain the Conservatives were defeated at the polls by the Labour Party, and the victorious Churchill had to make room for the quiet Clement Attlee. There was a mutiny in the Royal Indian Navy at Bombay on February 16, 1946 followed by that in the Royal Indian Air Force at Drigh Road, near Karachi. These two events completely shook the British in their faith in the undying loyalty of their Indian troops. In March 1947 Lord Wavell was replaced by Lord Mountbatten as the Viceroy, and the ordinary Lady Wavell by the truly remarkable Lady Edwina Mountbatten as Vicereine.

Meanwhile on September 2, 1946 the so-called Interim Government, consisting of ministers from both the Congress and the Muslim League, took office, in which Liaquat Ali Khan chose and got the Finance portfolio. He promptly turned out to be a complete stonewall to all proposals of the Congress, and the Interim Government was a government only in name. It was Lord Wavell, and later Mountbatten, the Viceroy, who both reigned and ruled.

The history of this period is well documented by authoritative persons such as Alan Campbell-Johnson, V.P.Menon, Penderel Moon, Leonard Mosley and others, and it is not necessary to recount the same except to the extent germane to the theme of this book. On June 3, 1947 the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Rt. Hon. Clement Attlee, rose in the House of Commons to announce the acceptance by the Government of the scheme to partition the country, and to table a statement by His Majesty’s Government to that effect. On June 20 the Bengal Legislative Assembly passed a motion for the partition of the province into East and West Bengal.

The decision to partition the province Bengal was a personal victory for Syama Prasad Mookerjee who had been indefatigably campaigning for such partition. The treatment that the Hindus got in the hands of the Muslims in East Pakistan after partition amply demonstrated his foresight in doing so. Jinnah was aghast at the proposal for partition and said that it was ‘a sinister move actuated by spite and bitterness’[1]. At one point Mountbatten asked Jinnah about his views on Suhrawardy’s idea of ‘sovereign, independent Bengal’ and Jinnah said in reply without hesitation, “I should be delighted. What is the use of Bengal without Calcutta? They had much better remain united and independent. I am sure they would be on friendly terms with us.”[2] Stanley Wolpert, author of ‘Jinnah of Pakistan’ observes that Liaquat Ali also agreed with Jinnah on this question and remarked to Sir Eric Mieville[3], “that he was in no way worried about Bengal because he was convinced in his own mind that the province would never divide”[4]. Obviously the expectation was that Muslim-majority independent Bengal, with its great city of Calcutta, would eventually get rid of its Hindu minority and become a part, or at least a satellite, of Pakistan. It is this dream of theirs that was shattered by Syama Prasad. Some years later when Nehru has remarked to Syama Prasad that he and his party had consented to the partition of the country, he had retorted “You partitioned India ; I partitioned Pakistan”[5].

This ‘sovereign, independent Bengal’ was the brainchild of a few Hindu leaders of the Bengal Congress who had sided with those leaders of the League who were staunchly opposed to partition of the province. Among these Hindu leaders the foremost was Sarat Chandra Bose ; among the Muslim League leaders none other than Suhrawardy, together with Abul Hashim, said to be a ‘progressive’ among the Leaguers in Bengal. Sarat Bose by this time had left the Congress (something that he did not do even when his brother Subhas left the party to form his Forward Bloc) and launched a party called the ‘Socialist Republican Party’. These gentlemen, in all their wisdom, thought of a sovereign, independent Bengal, which of course would have a Muslim majority.

The plan for sovereign independent Bengal was hatched in April 1947. According to Abul Hashim it would be a state where Hindus and Muslims would have equal rights and equal opportunity to conduct themselves in accordance with their own beliefs. A committee for preparation of a draft declaration for the formation of such a state was constituted at the residence of Suhrawardy in a meeting attended by Nazimuddin, Fazlur Rahman, Kiran Sankar Ray, Nalini Ranjan Sarker, Satya Baksi and others. The drafting was really done by Sarat Chandra Bose, who conceived it as a ‘Socialist Republic’. Mountbatten and Burrows both considered the scheme with interest, and it was at their instance that the term ‘Socialist’ was omitted from the draft. The draft was finalised and signed by Sarat Bose and Abul Hashim on May 20. According to this draft, the state would first be ruled by an interim government in which the Prime Minister would be Muslim and the Home Minister Hindu. Later there would be a Constituent Assembly with 16 Muslim and 14 Hindu members.

What aberration overtook these supposedly sagacious, politically experienced men like Sarat Bose and Kiran Sankar Ray to join forces with a man like Suhrawardy who, just eight months ago had unleashed such untold horror on the Hindus of Calcutta and Noakhali? With Kiran Sankar Ray it was quite possibly his yearning to retain his extensive Zamindari at Teota in the district of Dacca – he knew for sure that the Muslims would make short shrift of him and his Zamindari (as they actually did) once Muslim majority East Bengal came into being, while he might have a fighting chance in sovereign Bengal. As for Sarat Bose, it was even more inexplicable. He was a West Bengali, very firmly entrenched in Calcutta. Was it a desperate measure to regain political ground in the province that he had lost through erroneous political decisions and lack of foresight? With Suhrawardy it was clearly the fact that he too was a West Bengali, and would not stand much chance of getting as much prominence in East Bengal (the Premiership of East Bengal went to Nazimuddin) as he might possibly get in United Bengal. It was also said that he dearly loved the city of Calcutta. For all the wrong reasons, of course.

Be that as it may, and Providence be thanked, there was to be no Muslim-majority Sovereign Independent United Bengal. Hindu opinion was very firmly against it. The Amrita Bazar Patrika, a nationalist English daily of Calcutta, ran an opinion poll towards the end of April 1947, which revealed that as many as 98% of the Hindus wanted partition of the province. Had there been a Muslim-majority Sovereign United Bengal as planned by Bose and Hashim, the plight of all Bengali Hindus today would have been like the Sindhi Hindus, with no part of the country to call their own.

Bengal was eventually partitioned at the hands of an English Barrister of distinction, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the reason for whose choice was his lack of any connection with India[6]. Sir Cyril was assisted by four other members of the Boundary Commission Bijon Mukherjee, C.C.Biswas, M.A.Rahman and M.M.Akram, all of them lawyers. As the names tell, the first two were Hindus, the last two Muslims, and there was practically nothing that they agreed upon, with the result that the award, eventually published on August 17, 1947, two days after independence, was entirely the handiwork of Sir Cyril alone. One point is to be noted in respect of the terms of reference of the Commission : the Commission was required to partition the province on the basis of Muslim-majority and Non-Muslim-majority areas, not on the basis of Muslim-majority and Hindu-majority areas.

As was to be expected, neither the Congress (meaning the Hindus) nor the League (meaning the Muslims) were happy with the award. West Bengal got thirty-six per cent of the land area and thirty-five per cent of the population. Only sixteen per cent of the total Muslim population was left in West Bengal, but a whopping forty-two per cent of the Hindu population in East Bengal, numbering some thirteen million. Non-Muslim-majority Chittagong Hill Tracts was given to Pakistan on the grounds that its approach was only through Muslim-majority Chittagong. The League desperately wanted Calcutta in Pakistan, and their supporters had started believing that the province would be partitioned along the Hooghly River. Bhabatosh Dutt mentions Muslim professors of Islamia College, Calcutta (now Maulana Azad College) who wrote in their option forms “Pakistan, preferably Calcutta’. One of them had tried to console Dutt by saying ‘at least you are going to have Howrah’[7]. However, even before the Radcliffe award was out it became clear that Calcutta was going to remain in India.

The population of East Bengal, according to the 1941 census, was 28 % Hindu, 70 % Muslim and 2 % others, mainly Buddhists in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and a handful of Christians in the coastal districts and among the Garo tribesmen in the foothills of Mymensingh. As opposed to this, according to the 1991 census the population of present-day Bangladesh is 10 % Hindu, 88 % Muslim. And it is in these figures that the terrible injustice done to the Bengali Hindus, quite a bit of it by themselves, lies.

The geography of partition (see Chapter 1, figure 1) was very interesting. The whole of Dacca and Chittagong divisions went to Pakistan, and the whole of Burdwan division to West Bengal. The bulk of Presidency division, including the city of Calcutta remained in India, but most of the district of Jessore, and a part of the district of Nadia went to Pakistan. Most of Rajshahi division, went to Pakistan but the northern districts of Darjeeling and most of the districts of Jalpaiguri and Malda and a part of Dinajpur remained in India. These divisions were done on the basis of religious majority in each thana (area governed by each police station) and on the ‘principle of contiguity’. The princely state of Cooch Behar, minus some of the ‘enclaves’ (explained later in this chapter) remained in India and became part of West Bengal. The Bangla-speaking Sylhet district of Assam was subjected to an unnatural referendum (again explained later in this chapter) according to which most of the district opted for Pakistan, except for three thanas, namely Ratabari, Patharkandi, Badarpur and a part of Karimganj thana which opted for India and became part of the Indian state of Assam. The result was what has been shown in Figure 2.

West Pakistan took away a neat chunk of territory along the western fringe of undivided India, and created no further problems other than coming in the way of the tiny Indo-Afghan or Indo-Iranian trade. East Pakistan was quite another matter. Without meaning any disrespect, it created a cartographical monstrosity, a deep ulcer on the right flank of India. It practically cut off the then-existing state of Assam (now generally referred to as the Seven Sisters of the North-East, namely the states of rump Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Manipur and Tripura) – this region remained connected to the rest of India by the thin umbilical cord of the 30-kilometre-wide Siliguri corridor. It broke West Bengal into two parts, a small northern part consisting of the districts of Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri and Cooch Behar, and the large southern part consisting of the rest of the districts (these two parts were later on joined up during the states re-organisation of 1957). It made a total joke of the transportation system of East and North Bengal and Assam. It created anomalies like the exchange of Murshidabad and Khulna districts, the award of the Non-Muslim-majority Chittagong Hill Tracts to Muslim-majority Pakistan, and hitherto unheard-of problems like that of the North Bengal enclaves. Each one of these aspects requires explanation.

First, the referendum in Sylhet. Sylhet, the proper Bangla name of which was Srihotto, lies along the foot of the Khasi and Jaintia hills of the present-day Indian state of Meghalaya, the North Cachar and Mikir Hills of Assam, and the hills of the Indian state of Tripura. The rain-laden south-east monsoon winds get their first hit on these hills after cruising up from the Bay of Bengal over the low plains of present-day Bangladesh, and consequently it rains very heavily in these parts all the year round. All that water then runs down Sylhet district and out through the Meghna River, while in the process creating huge water bodies known as Haors – so huge that the boatmen crossing them have to navigate by the position of stars. This feature had given Sylhet a seafaring tradition despite being far away from the sea, and it translated itself into an adventurousness not known among many Bengalis from other Bangla-speaking parts of the country.

The district, even at the time of partition, was a rich one in mineral and agricultural produce, with tea estates along the Tripura foothills and a cement plant at Chhatak, run with limestone and coal from the Khasi Hills. Later on abundant reserves of Natural Gas were discovered. The density of population was however, much more than that in the Brahmaputra valley.

Consequently, several things happened. First, unlike in other parts, Muslims in this district took to liberal education. Secondly, they emigrated in large numbers to different parts of the globe (today parts around Canary Wharf, especially Brick Lane, in the Docklands of London are inhabited entirely by Sylheti Muslims), in the process developing a catholicity of outlook which gave the district a much better tradition of Hindu-Muslim amity than other parts. Thirdly the Sylhetis, particularly the Hindus among them, managed to get a disproportionately large share in the state machinery of Assam.

The reason for this is very interesting. The province of Assam in the British days consisted of three parts – the Assamese-speaking Brahmaputra valley, the Bangla-speaking Surma valley (synonymous with Sylhet) and the hill districts. The people in the hills kept pretty much to themselves and seldom ventured out of the hills. The Brahmaputra valley was relatively thinly populated as compared to Sylhet, and extremely rich in natural resources, such as a very fertile soil, abundant forest wealth, tea plantations and the only proven deposit of oil discovered upto the tiime of independence. The people therefore became quite affluent, and naturally rather less inclined towards Government Service. In fact the state of the valley attracted settlers from elsewhere, mainly land-hungry Muslim agriculturists from East Bengal. This was further encouraged by a conscious policy of Muslimisation of the valley followed during the rule of Premier Mohammed Saadullah. The bloody ethnic strife that plagued the valley in the nineteen-eighties was the result of this Muslimisation half-a century ago. That, however, is a different story. Readers interested in this aspect of history of the subcontinent are referred to Sanjoy Hazarika's book, 'Rites of Passage'[8].

It is this affluence of the Assamese from the Brahmaputra valley and the consequent disinclination towards Government Service that was responsible for the dominance of Sylhetis from the Surma valley in the Assam government during British rule. In India service in the government has always been equated with power, and there was no exception here. With their domination of the government the Sylhetis became powerful, and flaunted their superiority over the Assamese from the Brahmaputra valley. This was, naturally, not liked by the Assamease, nor by the Assam Congress which was dominated by Assamese-speaking leaders led by Gopinath Bardoloi, then the Premier and the first Chief Minister of the state after independence.

There never was any talk of partitioning Assam, a Hindu-majority province with a large tribal population, some of whom were Christian, some Hindu, and the rest following their traditional religions. However, as a result of Sylhet district being Bangla-speaking, marginally Muslim majority, and contiguous to the Muslim majority districts of Mymensingh and Tipperah of East Bengal, it was declared in the Statement made by His Majesty’s Government on June 3, 1947 that a referendum would be held in the district to determine whether the people wished to go to Pakistan or to India. A similar referendum was also held in the North-West Frontier Province. It should be noted that the critical factor in opting for these referendums was contiguity to the land mass which would later become Pakistan. There were other Muslim-dominated districts or parts of districts in the country, such as Bahraich or Moradabad in the United Provinces or Calicut in Madras Presidency, but nobody ever dreamt of such districts going to Pakistan.

Now, there was a strange catch in the whole process. The Assam Congress, led by Gopinath Bardoloi and his group, wanted the district to go to Pakistan so that the hegemony of their group would be assured in the rump province of Assam after independence. Maulana Azad obliquely acknowledges this when he says, in the context of the ‘grouping plan’ of the Cabinet Mission, that the objection to the plan within the Congress came from certain leaders from Assam who ‘were possessed by an inexplicable fear of Bengalis’[9].

To be fair to Bardoloi, this is not quite correct. In all probability Bardoloi was more afraid of Muslim domination of the province (which Maulana Azad would, understandably, be chary of mentioning) rather than Bengali domination, and not without reason. He had seen with his own eyes what Saadullah had done to his province, and correctly apprehended that verysoon the sparsely populated Brahmaputra valley would be overrun by land-hungry Muslims from East Bengal who would be encouraged by their Sylheti co-religionists. This was not an impossibility, and the result would have been loss of Assam for India. Debdas Ghosal[10], who spent his childhood at their Zamindari at Ramharir Char, near Goalpara town, Assam, still shudders when he remembers the gestures made by their Muslim peasants agitating for inclusion of the district in Pakistan. Although there never was any question of Goalpara going to Pakistan, it was a border district with a large Muslim minority, and the Muslim League decided to show their might even here to intimidate the Hindus. To do that they got the peasants to go around all over the Ghosal estate, with freshly-severed cows’ heads on stakes dripping blood, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar, Ladke Lenge Pakistan’. Bardoloi’s fears, therefore were quite justified. His great mistake was that he decided to throw away the baby with the bath-water, without sparing a thought for the Hindus of Sylhet.

The League of course wanted the district in Pakistan. This issue thus became one of the rarest things in those days in which the League and the official leadership of the Congress cooperated, albeit covertly. This is doubly remarkable because of the fact that in spite of the district being Muslim-majority, the League was not confident of a victory here[11]. The position was however substantially altered when the Assam Congress came forward to help the League, albeit largely through inaction.

This they did in several ways. First, the provincial leadership refused to extend any substantial help in the form of money, men, propaganda material or even moral support to the district leadership. Secondly, they connived with the League in disenfranchising the tea estate labourers on the grounds that they were not Sylhetis, or ‘sons of the soil’. These tea estate labourers were mostly ‘indentured labour’ from among the hardy people of the tribal areas of Bihar (now Jharkhand), and had been living on the gardens for at least two generations. There was therefore no reason why they should not vote, but in effect they were not allowed to do so. For the record it appears that the Congress did claim that the voters in the Labour and the Trade and Commerce constituencies – meaning mainly the tea labour – should be allowed to vote, but no effort was put in to carry through this very reasonable demand, and the demand failed. The district leadership of the Congress of course raised holy hell, but they had no access to the all-India leaders. The result, finally, was that the voting was done in the General, Mohammedan and Indian Christian categories[12]. A third method was physically preventing the Hindus from voting, with the state machinery looking the other way. Subodh Lal Shome[13] recalls that roadblocks had been erected by the Muslim League volunteers at a number of places in the rural areas around Chhatak to prevent Hindus from travelling to the nearest town to vote, and the Congress government of Bardoloi did nothing to ensure a free and fair election. A Hindu police officer by the name of Purkayastha took it upon himself to intervene and remove these without orders and even resorted to firing. However very few officers were capable of such daring.

The indefatigable Syama Prasad Mookerjee entered the fray, toured the district, and persuaded Hindu Sylhetis all over Bengal to travel to Sylhet and vote at the referendum. Some of them came from as far away as Delhi and Burma. It is believed that because of their different culture, a section of the Muslim population also voted for India ; and had there been a little effort on the part of the Assam Congress, the district would not have been lost to India.. Ultimately however, the disenfranchisement tipped the scales. Sylhet went to Pakistan, with a relatively thin majority, 239,619 to 184,041[14]. Only three thanas, namely Ratabari, Patharkandi, Badarpur and a part of Karimganj thana remained in India.

Next, the transportation system. Road transport in those days was in a state of infancy, but railways and inland water transport were both highly developed in East Bengal and Assam. Most of East Bengal and Assam were covered by the metre gauge network of Bengal Assam Railway, and there was a well-organised system of ferries where the rivers had not been bridged. For example to go to Guwahati (then Gauhati) from Calcutta one had to board a broad gauge train from Sealdah terminal, and change to a metre gauge train either at Parbatipur or at Santahar junctions. This metre gauge train would take one to Amingaon where one would have to cross the mighty Brahmaputra in a ferry to reach Guwahati on the south bank of the river. From Guwahati again another line stretched away to Upper Assam via Lumding junction to serve the extensive tea estates and India’s lone oilfield there. A branch would take off from Lumding and pass through ‘Hill section’ of the Mikir and North Cachar Hills through Badarpur, Kulaura, Akhaura and Laksam junctions on to Chittagong port. This branch, considered an engineering feat in those days, was constructed to export a part of the Assam tea through Chittagong port. The bulk of the tea and the jute grown in Assam and East Bengal was transported by inland water transport down the Brahmaputra, Jamuna and Meghna, through the distributaries in the Sundarban deltas, on to Calcutta port to be shipped abroad, or to the jute mills dotting the sides of the River Hooghly, to be processed there. It was a beautifully well-coordinated, well-orchestrated, mutually complementary system of rail and inland waterway, by which huge quantities of merchandise were transported in the most economical and environment-friendly manner, while providing employment to a large number of Indian personnel, both Hindu and Muslim.

Partition of the province undid the system in one stroke. The jute fields were left in Pakistan, the jute mills in India. A major stretch of the railway network between Calcutta and Guwahati and between Calcutta and Siliguri was intercepted in Pakistani territory, so that in order to travel or ship goods from India to India it became necessary to travel though the unfriendly country of East Pakistan. The line taking off from Lumding junction entered Pakistan at Karimganj shortly after descending from the hills, and the huge expenditure incurred in its construction became largely pointless. Chittagong port was of course in Pakistan, and so was the inland waterway route over the Jamuna and Meghna rivers and a major part of the Sundarban river system. The extent to which India continues to suffer to this day because of Bangladesh not permitting transit through their territory between Indian terminals would be clear from the following table. The pre-partition distances given are approximate.

It should however be mentioned that Bangladesh does permit inland water transport to ply between Calcutta and Guwahati and between Calcutta and Karimganj over Bangladeshi rivers. There is also considerable road traffic (involving transhipment at borders - Indian and Bangladeshi trucks are not allowed into each other's territory) as well as a small volume of rail traffic between India and Bangladesh, but no traffic from India to India through Bangladesh.

India very hurriedly put together a rail network known as the Assam Rail Link by joining up and upgrading minor metre-gauge branch lines in the Dooars area of northern West Bengal. This line was yet another engineering feat, but continued to be very unsatisfactory till the Brahmaputra was bridged across at Pandu in 1967, and the Ganga over the Farakka Barrage in 1971, and the line was converted to broad gauge eventually. In the pre-partition days rail travel from Sealdah to Guwahati took about twenty-four hours, with one ferry crossing. After partition, and over the Assam rail link this went up to about forty-two hours, including two ferry crossings. Only after the completion of the two bridges and conversion of the entire line upto Guwahati to broad gauge has it come down to its pre-partition duration. Surface travel to Silchar, and especially Agartala, from Calcutta are still extremely arduous, and even poor people are forced to travel by air paying fares which, despite subsidies, can go up per head to a man’s earnings of a fortnight.

As a result of the award of Radcliffe as many as five districts had to be partitioned. These were Nadia, Jessore, Malda, Dinajpur and Jalpaiguri. Moreover, Muslim-majority Murshidabad district was given to India in consideration of the fact that the headwaters of the Bhagirathi river (which later becomes the Hooghly as it flows by Calcutta) were in this district, and without control on these waters India would not be able to ensure the navigability of Calcutta port.

In exchange Hindu-majority Khulna district went to Pakistan. Buddhist-majority Chittagong Hill Tracts also went to Pakistan, on the grounds that access to this district was possible only through Muslim-majority Chittagong.

Mountbatten did not want the Radcliffe award to be published before India became independent, and therefore some of these districts had two independence days – one on 15th August, with the rest of the nation, and the other on 17th when the fate of the district was finally decided. Thus the Indian tricolour was hoisted at Khulna, and Rangamati (Chittagong Hill Tracts) and the Pakistani crescent-and-star at Berhampore and Krishnagore (headquarters of Murshidabad and Nadia) on 15th August, to be reversed two days later.

The enclaves of North Bengal are another strange story. As far as known to the author no such thing exists anywhere else in the world. These are basically islands of Indian territory in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) or Bangladeshi territory in India. The Indian enclaves among these were, at the time of Radcliffe, under the administration of local Sardars (Chieftains) who had been granted Jahgirs (fiefdoms) by the Maharaja of Cooch Behar. Later on, when the British annexed North Bengal but let Cooch Behar remain as a ‘Native State’, these became islands of Cooch Behar state in British India in the district of Rangpur. When Cooch Behar acceded to India the enclaves became Indian islands in Pakistan. Similarly there were islands of British India in Cooch Behar state, and wherever these were Muslim-majority they went to Pakistan, and became Pakistani enclaves or islands in independent India. There are now 111 such Indian enclaves in Bangladesh and 51 Bangladeshi enclaves in India. Because, generally speaking, Muslims had no difficulty in living in India but the same was not true of Hindus living in Pakistan or Bangladesh, as we shall see later in this book, the enclaves eventually became populated entirely by Muslims. The sensible thing under the circumstances was to have the enclaves exchanged between the two countries. There was a clause to this effect in the Indira-Mujib treaty of 1972, but to this day this has not been given effect to. This results in serious law and order problems from time to time, and gives rise to demands for providing corridors to these enclaves through foreign territory. Such a problem arose with South Berubari enclave and with providing the Teen Bigha corridor. These enclaves are now the refuge of smugglers, cattle thieves and assorted other cross-border criminals, and will continue to remain so till they are exchanged.

The Chittagong Hill Tracts are densely forested hills bordering the eastern fringe of the district of Chittagong. The hills are contiguous to the Lushai Hills (now Mizoram) of India and the Arakan hills of Burma (now Myanmar). The population was sparse and consisted largely of Buddhist Chakma tribesmen who are a Mongoloid people, and speak a dialect of the Tibeto-Burman family. It was expected that the tracts would go to India, and the Indian tricolour was hoisted at the headquarters of the tracts at Rangamati on 15th August 1947. Two days later however, the Radcliffe award was announced, and the tricolour was replaced by the crescent-and-star Pakistani flag. The only approach to the Tracts was through the coastal plains of Chittagong district, and it is on these grounds that the Tracts went to Pakistan.

Subsequently the Tracts had an interesting history. There were consistent efforts at converting the tribesmen to Islam and settling Muslims from the overpopulated plains of East Pakistan in the Tracts. This embittered relations between Bengali Muslims and the Buddhist Chakmas, to such an extent that during the Bangladesh liberation war Raja Tridib Roy, ‘king’ of the Chakmas, sided with the Pakistanis. He went over to Pakistan after their defeat, and served for some time as the Pakistani ambassador to Argentina. Meanwhile relations between the Chakmas and the Bangladeshi Muslims did not improve, and the policy of Islamisation and settling of Muslims in the Tracts continued. Bangladesh, unlike India, does not have a policy of preservation of the culture of ethnic minorities, and the Chakmas, threatened with being swamped by Bengali Muslim culture rebelled and carried on insurgency for some time.

Now on to Calcutta on the morning of 15th August 1947.

Things had not been very quiet in the weeks preceding independence in Calcutta, though it must be said that compared to Punjab it was an abode of peace. A spate of rioting had started in Calcutta from July 31, in protest of which Gandhi stated a 'fast unto death'. This, unlike the East Bengal killings, was real rioting, with both sides hurting each other. This rioting abated shortly thereafter, but continued in a sporadic manner till well after independence. As late as on 1st September, Sachindra Mitra, a Congress leader, was stabbed to death by Muslim goons in front of Nakhoda Mosque (the biggest mosque in Calcutta) while leading a procession whose slogan was Hindu-Muslim ek ho (Hindus and Muslims unite). Similarly three other Congressmen, namely Smritish Banerjee, Sushil Dasgupta, and Bireswar Ghosh were mercilessly killed by Muslims around this time while preaching Hindu-Muslim amity[15]. Anti-Hindu violence in Eastern Bengal had also started around the same time. The story of Ila Banerjee, a lonely widow of 86 now living in Vrindavan, formerly of village Barandipara, Jessore, has been described later in this chapter.

At Calcutta however, Independence Day dawned without any incidents and amid large-scale jubilation. Hindu and Muslim embraced each other on the streets, sprinkled rose water on each other. Shops were decked in flowers and festoons. A mob stormed Government House, the residence of the Governor of Bengal modeled on Keddleston Hall, the country seat of Lord Curzon. They were not exactly violent, but to them patriotism took the form of vandalism. They poked at paintings of British administrators with the pointy ends of their umbrellas and disfigured them. By then Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari had taken oath as the Governor, and Dr. P.C.Ghosh as the Chief Minister. Suhrawardy was still in his beloved Calcutta.

The person whom the independence movement made the most famous, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, should have been at New Delhi on this day, smiling benignly as the Union Jack gave way to the Indian tricolour. Yet he is not. He has been sent to Calcutta by the Governor-General, Lord Mountbatten as his ‘one-man boundary force’. In this, the Governor-General’s request has been endorsed by none other than the infamous Suhrawardy and his sidekick Usman who want Gandhi to ‘save Calcutta’s Muslims’. Suhrawardy’s claim on Gandhi is typical of the man : “After all the Muslims have as much a claim on you as the Hindus. You have always said you are as much of us as of the Hindus.” [16]

Gandhi on this day is found camping at Hydari Manzil, an abandoned mansion in Beliaghata, then a suburb of Calcutta, with Suhrawardy in tow. Suhrawardy meanwhile has been heckled a number of times, probably jostled and perhaps spat upon, but not seriously manhandled. Gandhi is fasting and holding prayer meetings, praying for the return of Hindu-Muslim amity. Mountbatten has called him the one-man boundary force. Later, in the evening he would tour the Muslim parts of the city in a car chauffeured by Suhrawardy.

The previous day Suhrawardy has expressed ‘genuine regret’ for his role in ’Direct Action’ and the Great Calcutta Killings[17], almost exactly a year after he and Nazimuddin made their rabid speeches at the Maidan that started the bloodbath. Some ten thousand people have come to see Gandhi that day at Beliaghata. Were there some in that crowd wondering whether the Indian Penal Code should now be rewritten to make an expression of ‘genuine regret’ sufficient penalty for plotting the mass murder of tens of thousands of innocent people on grounds of their religion? And that too while remaining at the head of a Government! People had been sent to the gallows for lesser crimes at Nuremberg only a year ago!

Gandhi’s magic did work wonders however, and there were no further untoward incidents in Calcutta. Yet, some questions survive. Why did he not camp at Amritsar or Ferozepore, not to speak of Lahore or Montgomery, where the situation was a million times worse than that at Calcutta? In fact in Calcutta, even before the arrival of Gandhi things had quieted down to a great extent, and only sporadic cases of stabbing or arson were heard of. On the other hand in Punjab the Pakistanis were sending down trainloads of Hindu and Sikh corpses, and the Hindus and Sikhs were retaliating with similar gestures. Did Gandhi think that he stood a much better chance of influencing the mild and sentimental Bengalis rather than the martial and hardheaded Punjabis? At any rate the ultimate reason could have been only that he knew he stood no chance of succeeding in Punjab. Therefore, like the astute politician that he was, he chose not to attempt what he could not possibly achieve. Politics, after all, is merely the art of the possible!

While in West Pakistan rivers of blood were flowing on both sides of the border, East Pakistan was still largely quiet and tranquil immediately following partition. Leela Mazumdar[18] traveled to Assam by train through East Pakistan (or East Bengal) in September 1947, entering that country at Darshana, crossing the mighty Padma over the Hardinge Bridge, changing to the metre gauge railway system at Santahar, on to Bogra, Lalmonirhat and back again into Indian territory at Gitaldaha in Assam. She observed people entraining with beaming faces at Sealdah station, leaving for their Baari (home village) in East Bengal. They had not yet realised that their Baari was in a foreign country, that in a few years they would require a passport and a visa to visit the village where their families had been living for the last, maybe, twenty generations. They also knew not what the future had in store for them, by way of persecution, ethnic cleansing and eventually losing all memory of a home village, or Baari.

Ashok Mitra sent his six-year-old only daughter with the school party to Loreto Convent, Darjeeling (a very upmarket residential school run by Irish Catholic nuns) and saw her off at Sealdah station. This was in early 1949, and she traveled by largely the same route, leaving India at Darshana, and re-entering at Haldibari. Mitra mentions the ambience then to be absolutely quiet and peaceful, and also that a number of Pakistani girls boarded the train at different places in East Pakistan to go to the same school[19]. It was obviously not all that peaceful in other parts of East Pakistan, as has been described by various people, especially Hiranmay Banerjee.

V.P.Menon’s remarks on the exodus of refugees from Pakistan are very revealing, and deserve to be quoted in full. Menon writes[20] : “It has been estimated that up to the middle of 1948 about 5,500,000 non-Muslims were brought across the border from West Punjab and other provinces of Western Pakistan. About the same number of Muslims moved into Pakistan from East Punjab (including the East Punjab states), Delhi, the United Provinces, Ajmer-Merwara, Alwar, Bharatpur, Gwalior and Indore. During the same period about 1,250,000 non-Muslims crossed the border from Eastern Pakistan into West Bengal. These figures do not of course take into account about 400,000 non-Muslims who later migrated to India from Sind. There is today hardly a Hindu or Sikh to be found in Western Pakistan. . . . . . The communal exodus from East Bengal in the early stages after partition was but a trickle. It assumed critical proportions much later, and then the Hindus from East Bengal also had to undergo severe hardships and privation. In fact it was when the West Pakistan officials had established themselves in East Bengal that the exodus of Hindus began in earnest. It has always been my belief that the East Bengal Muslims, if left to themselves, would have been content to live with their Hindu brethren as one family, and that it was the policy of the West Pakistan officials that was responsible for the mass exodus of Hindus from East Bengal. The flood of refugees had already strained the resources of the West Bengal Government, while more and more continue to come across the border (this was in 1957 - author). If this influx is not stopped and mutual goodwill and understanding are not established, this issue is bound to overshadow any other that faces the Indian and Pakistan Governments.”

Menon had always been a scrupulously honest person, and this is manifest from the passage quoted above : he has carefully separated what he knows for a fact from what he believes to be true. His belief, namely that the West Pakistanis alone, or even primarily, are responsible for the persecution of Hindus in East Bengal, is widely shared today in both West Bengal and Bangladesh, and is expressed whenever this uncomfortable subject comes up, which is not very often. The question is, is the belief correct? And the answer is no, though it contains a lot of truth. Granted that the presence of the West Pakistani officials, and more than that, of the Urdu-speaking Bihari Muslims, had a lot to do with the persecution and killing of Hindus in East Bengal, by no means can it be contended that the East Bengali Muslims themselves were free of blame, as we shall see in the course of this book. In fact what we have seen so far does not at all corroborate this belief. Neither the leaders of persecution, such as Suhrawardy, Nazimuddin or Sarwar, nor their followers, such as the marauding mobs of Noakhali in 1946, or Barisal in 1950, were anything except Bengali Muslims. At the most it can be said that there is a larger percentage of Hindu-haters among Urdu-speaking Muslims than among Bangla speaking ones.

Not only so, but there is a time-dependent and personal element as well, as has been sought to be expounded below. In order to study this aspect in some depth, it is now proposed to enter into a short discussion on the complex relationships that exist between Bengali Muslims and other communities, notably Bengali Hindus.

The root of V.P.Menon’s belief, also shared by others, probably lies, at least partly, in the following syllogism :

(i) The majority Bengali Muslims of East Bengal love their language very much, so much so that they fought against their religious compatriots from West Pakistan, all the way from the uprising of 21st February 1952 till the Bangladesh liberation war (true).
(ii) The minority Bengali Hindus of East Bengal are equally fond of their language, and supported that fight wholeheartedly (true).
(iii) It must, therefore, follow that the former must necessarily be fond of the latter, though occasionally they may get swayed otherwise.

The question now is, whether the third proposition is true or false?

The truth is that for the Bengali Muslim multitude it is sometimes partly true and sometimes false, depending on how the average Bengali Muslim is feeling at a given point of time. It is never completely true, but sometimes it is almost completely false. The relationship between the two communities, described earlier in Chapter 1, has always been rather complex, quite different from the simple, fierce hatred the average Indian Punjabi and Pakistani Punjabi have for each other even today. The Bengali Muslim has always been torn between his two identities, the Bengali one and the pan-Islamic one (see Chapter1, also Rafiuddin Ahmed’s ‘The Bengal Muslim’[21]). The more the erudition of an individual, the more has been this state of his being torn, until it reaches the stage of unbearable anguish in people like Syed Mujtabaa Ali, Dr. Muhammad Shaheedullah, S. Wajed Ali or Rezaul Karim. The Bengali Hindu has never had this problem, his loyalty was always cent per cent with Bengal ; and therefore his attitude towards the Muslim has not varied. On the other hand, in the Bengali Muslim, in times like during the Noakhali carnage the pan-Islamism completely dominated, while the Bangladesh Liberation War was fought entirely on his Bengali identity.

This state of being torn between two identities, it has to be said, is an essential feature of all peoples who have been converted to Islam, that is to say all non-Arab Muslims. This has been stated with remarkable clarity by the famous author Sir Vidia S. Naipaul in the prologue to his book 'Beyond Belief : Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples', of which a quotation is given in Chapter 11. This tearing depends not only on the erudition of the individual but also on the pre-Islamic or co-Islamic culture of the people. Here the Bengali Muslim could be termed as singularly unfortunate, burdened as he is with the wealth of literature - written mostly by Hindus - from the Chorjapod of the 11th century A.D. down to the incredible poetry of Rabindranath Tagore and the twentieth century writers, among whom there are quite a few Muslims too. This anguish of the erudite Bengali Muslim is not shared by, say, the Waziri or the Mohmand, simple, warlike, mostly illiterate mountain tribes of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province.

Then there is the personal factor. Some, like the liberal Muslim politicians such as Fazlul Haq and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (in his later years), definitely bore no animosity towards the Hindus, and helped them in whatever way they could. Others, like Abdul Monem Khan (Governor of East Pakistan, 1962-69) of the past, those of fundamentalist groups like Khaksar and Al-Badr of the liberation struggle days, and Golam Azam of the present, are quite the opposite. A very large number are ambivalent to different degrees, being just mildly disapproving of some of the habits of Hindus, such as their idol worship, or their eating of turtles. Such people would never go to the extent of actively hurting Hindus, but would not lift a finger either to protest against persecution of Hindus, nor mind enjoying the fruits of Hindu exodus. A very common method used by this ambivalent multitude for clearing their collective consciences was to tell themselves that nobody hurt the Hindus – they were leaving because they could not have their pre-independence position of pre-eminence, and they resented the fact that the Muslims were now their equals. In nurturing this belief they were helped, sadly enough, by the ‘secular’ Hindus of India – more on this subject in Chapter 10. But, even among the liberals among the Bengali Muslims, very, very few would go to the extent of publicly acknowledging the wrong done to the Hindus ; and still fewer of restoring the Hindus’ property back to them. One of these ‘still fewer’ happens to be Taslima Nasrin, which is basically why the entire fundamentalist establishment of Bangladesh has ganged up against her.

It must also be remembered that there were a substantial number of pro-Pakistan elements among the Bengali Muslims even while Bengali feelings ran the highest during the liberation war. The crimes against humanity committed by organisations like Al-Badr, Razakar and by people like the Imam of the Burra Masjid of Mymensingh (described by Taslima Nasrin in her Lojja – see chapter 9) were the handiwork of Bengali Muslims alone. The presence of the ‘Ekattorer Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee’ (Committee for the eradication of the killers and (Pakistani) stooges of 1971) in Bangladesh to this day show that they survive, and also that liberal Bangladeshi Muslims are alive to their existence and consider them a threat to their polity. This is why it has to be said that the proposition is never completely true for the multitude.

Next, there is, in the Bengali Muslim, an insatiable lust for land, which must be considered to understand the Muslim attitude towards Hindus. The bulk of the Bengali Muslims to this day are peasants, the majority of them landless agricultural labourers. In the pre-partition days a large number of Hindus in East Bengal were absentee landlords, living off a land that was tilled by his Muslim peasants. Following partition the land-hungry Muslim saw an Allah-sent opportunity to possess, legally, huge tracts of land belonging to the Hindus. Santosh Kumar Chanda[22] mentions a common method of possessing Hindu land. At a time when the Hindus were suffering from extreme insecurity, some Muslims would appear as their protectors in exchange of land, to be sold of to them for a pittance. Then after some time they would disappear, and their place would be taken by another bunch of similar protectors who would ask for some more land. It was of course known that eventually the Hindu would leave, but the idea was to take over as much of his land with proper documentation for as little money as possible.

Finally, the irresistible appeal that Bengali Hindu women have for the Muslim male is a factor that must never be overlooked. This truth received official recognition from the aforementioned Governor Burrows, when he quipped with unspeakable cynicism and callousness that it was only natural that Hindu women would naturally be raped by the hundreds in Noakhali because they were prettier than their Muslim sisters. Muslim folk music from Mymensingh expresses a prayer to Allah : may Allah be so kind that the singer could marry the two semri (or chhemri, slang for young girls) who flank the Hindus’ Durga idol – the semri being none other than Lakshmi and Saraswati, the Hindu Goddesses respectively of wealth and learning[23]. The yearning to possess a Hindu woman drove Bengali Muslims to extraordinary lengths. And the things that stood in the way of this possessing were the Hindu male and the Hindu religion. These, therefore, needed to be removed.

A real-life story would be in order at this jumcture. Nupur Saha (nee Palchaudhuri), a stunningly beautiful woman, got sent away to her aunt in India at the age of nine from her village in Bhojeswar, Madaripur, Faridpur because she was getting to be of age, and soon would become prey to Muslim males around. This, in spite of the fact that her father, Bijoy Palchaudhuri, was a 'Basic Democrat' (a kind of legislator in the constitutional system devised by Ayub Khan), and was more fortunately placed than most Hindus in regard to security of womenfolk.

This is not to say that the average Bengali Muslim was a land-grabber and a rapist. There are many examples of Hindus being saved from sure death by the efforts of Bengali Muslims from all levels of society, sometimes at the risk of their own lives. This is merely to point a finger at a relationship between two communities that is, at once, exceedingly complex and ever fluctuating. The traits mentioned above were there and are there in the Bengali Muslim. They cannot be wished away in the name of communal harmony, or by a one-sided view which only sees the good deeds that the Muslims did for the Hindus’ sake.

A few words on the group generally known as ‘Bihari Muslims’ would be in order. As the name states, they were primarily Muslims from Bihar, but also include Muslims from the Eastern parts of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (U.P., formerly United Provinces) and assorted Urdu-speaking Muslims from West Bengal. They emigrated in large numbers to East Pakistan in the days after 1947, and settled down mostly in the industrial towns such as Narayangunge and Chittagong, and the Railway towns of Santahar and Saidpur. They did not mix at all with the native Bengali Muslims, and in fact there was positive ill-feeling in certain parts of East Pakistan between the communities. Nrisingha Pati Changdar, a survivor of the Santahar train massacre (see Chapter 6) recalls that Bengali Muslims of the area around Santahar used to be quite scared of the Biharis. It is these Biharis who, rather than the West Pakistanis, committed most of the atrocities on Hindus, barring those of 1971.

When the Bangladesh liberation struggle started the Biharis, to a man, supported the Pakistanis, and became their most trusted lieutenants. After Pakistan lost the war they all wanted to get back to rump Pakistan. Now Pakistan did a neat volte-face and declared that it did not recognise any obligation to repatriate anyone of ‘East Pakistani domicile’ to West Pakistan. So the Biharis were caught neatly in a cleft stick. The Bangladeshi Muslims’ animosity towards them was really intense, and even the pro-Pakistanis among the former could not come out in the open in defence of them. The result was that they began to get a taste of what they had practising on the Hindus so far. There were pogroms against them too, and they shut themselves into ghettoes such as Mirpur and Mohammedpur in Dacca. And dreaming of escaping to Pakistan.

But Pakistan was a thousand miles away, and they had to cross that much of Indian territory to reach there. Some of them tried even that, so bad was their state in Bengali Bangladesh. A few eventually succeeded, finally getting their dream shattered from landing up in slums like Orangi in Karachi where a murderous fight raged among Pathans, Mohajirs and Sindhis – they added a fourth element there, because even the Urdu-speaking Mohajirs from western U.P. did not accept them as equals, and they continued to be called Biharis. Then they found an old refuge : India. And in particular the familiar states of Bihar and West Bengal. Thus they came full circle : having traveled from India driven by Hindu persecution or in the hope of finding an Islamic haven they settled down in East Pakistan and made room for themselves by butchering and driving out the Bengali Hindus. Then they lost their Pakistan and came back in large numbers to the state populated by the selfsame Bengali Hindus whose brethren they had once butchered and driven out.

And what did the Bengali Hindus of West Bengal do when they began to infiltrate into their state ? Very strangely, they pretended it was not happening, and looked the other way. Leftist politicos there with shady connections and Bihari Muslim roots[24], gave refuge to the infiltrators, gave them ration cards and identities and even Indian passports and settled them clandestinely on government land. Bihar itself was no different, and the same thing happened there. Then those who were secure brought in more, and with the numbers came Pakistani agents. With the result that today areas like Metiabruz and Rajabazar in Calcutta are Pakistani-Bihari ghettoes, and the demography of as many as four districts in Bihar – Purnea, Katihar, Araria and Kishanganj – has altered drastically in favour of Muslims.

How can a state suffer such a thing? It can, if it gets infected by something called Indian secularism, or more specifically the Left-Nehruvian interpretation of it, and love of the Muslim vote bank. This is developed further in Chapter10.

CHAPTER 4
[1] The Transfer of Power in India, ibid., p. 355

[2] Jinnah of Pakistan, ibid. p. 322

[3] Sir Eric Mieville, member of Lord Mountbatten’s staff, earlier Private Secretary to Lord Willingdon, Viceroy of India.

[4] Jinnah of Pakistan, ibid. p. 323

127 Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee : A great life greatly lived : Article by K.R.Malkani, Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Eminent Parliamentarians Monograph Series, Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1990, p. 32

[6] Jinnah of Pakistan, ibid. p. 332

[7] Aat Doshok, ibid. p.119

[8] Rites of Passage, by Sanjoy Hazarika, Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 1st Ed., 2000, p. 73-74

[9] India Wins Freedom, ibid. p. 184

[10] (b. 1941), Electrical Engineer, Potomac, Maryland, U.S.A., interviewed October 2000.

[11] The Transfer of Power in India, ibid., p. 388

[12] ibid.

[13] (b. 1904), Retired Cement Technologist, ex-Manager, Assam Bengal Cement Co. Chhatak, Sylhet, interviewed January 21, 2000.

[14] ibid.

[15] Deshbhag, Deshtyag, (in Bangla, meaning Partition, Exodus), by Sandip Banerjee, Anushtup, Calcutta, 1st Ed., 1994, p. 51

[16] The question may arise as to why Suhrawardy, who had gone to such lengths to achieve Pakistan, was not in Dacca but in Calcutta on this day. Several theories are advanced, many of them based on Suhrawardy's West Bengali origin and his love for the city that had given him so many pleasures. However there are strong grounds to believe that he owned a lot of Benami property in the city which he was trying to dispose of before going to Pakistan. Benami means a system of ownership of property in India whereby the real owner is different from the ostensible owner (Benamdar). The system has now been abolished.

[17]Amrita Bazar Patrika (English daily of Calcutta, now ceased publication) 17th August, 1947, quoted in Deshbhag, Deshtyag ibid. . Amrita Bazar Patrika was the premier nationalist English daily from Calcutta in those days. It has since discontinued publication.

[18] Bengali authoress of repute, famous for her children’s stories and humour, aunt of Satyajit Ray, the famous filmmaker. She also worked as a broadcaster for All India Radio for some time. The reference here is to her autobiographical sketch Pakdandi (in Bangla), Ananda Publishers, Calcutta, 1st Ed., 1986, p. 322.

[19] Tin Kuri Dosh, ibid., part III, p. 91

[20] The Transfer of Power in India, ibid., p. 431, 435

[21] The Bengal Muslims 1871-1906 : A Quest for Identity, by Rafiuddin Ahmed, ibid.

[22] Interviewed at different times, 2000-2001

[23] Lest any Indian ‘Secular’ Hindu should doubt this, the song (in local dialect) began with the words “Hindugo Dugga Puza, Balpata bhai buza buza . . . .” (The Hindus’ Durga Puja is just a lot of bael leaves) and goes on to say “Daine bae duita semri poira ase Daccai sari/ Allahe zodi doya korto Nikah kortam tare . . .” ( Right and left of her [the Durga idol] two young girls in Daccai saris are standing – if only Allah was kind to me I would have married them).

[24] Typical of such politicos is a minister in the Left Front Government in West Bengal who is suspected of having resettled thousands of such infiltrators in West Bengal