Forgotten Wars (16 page)

The British themselves were already backing down a little. Everyone was aware that a campaign of ‘mass glorification’ of the INA was going on, particularly in Bengal. The idea that the ordinary ‘white’ rankers, the INA men who had escaped British censure with no more than a dishonourable discharge, would simply be quietly absorbed into the villages was exploded. Instead, provincial Congress committees arranged receptions as the men passed through railway stations on their way home. They were garlanded, eulogized and treated like conquering heroes. One thing that particularly worried the authorities was the way in which the issue might become communal. Though Muslim soldiers had joined the INA, some soldiers from the Muslim peoples of the northwest regarded Bose and his followers as traitorous Hindus. With communal tensions beginning to build up again as the war ended, the British did not want the INA issue to feed into Hindu–Muslim disagreements.
⁶⁵
The authorities reached a consensus at a conference of provincial officers held in November 1945. They agreed that, since there was so much sympathy for the INA among army rank and file and ordinary people, the only safe policy was to confine prosecution to those INA officers specifically accused of brutality against fellow soldiers. It took a while for full import of this decision to sink in, but the fact that so many officials were prepared to overlook
the charge of rebellion against the king-emperor was a tacit admission that the imperial game was up.

The fallout from the INA and the animosities of the war’s end combined in a noxious way in populous and impoverished Bengal. Calcutta had always acted as the northern hub of the crescent just as Singapore acted as its southern hub. It remained so even when the governments of Burma and Malaya returned to their reconquered territories. Intelligence activities in Indo-China were organized in Calcutta and, however poverty stricken its inhabitants, Calcutta remained the centre of British business for the whole Bay of Bengal. In the second half of 1945 the city of more than 2 million was a place of rising tension that was soon to spill over into an almost perpetual state of violence. In Burma, conflict between the armed representatives of ethnic groups took place mainly in the peripheries of the country; in Bengal it affected the province’s heart. Calcutta began to resemble Thomas Hobbes’s nightmare vision of ‘a war of all against all’.

Bengal, unlike the Punjab, was not home to many soldiers’ families, but war and famine had brutalized a large section of its population. Since 1942 it had sheltered many of the displaced, the refugees from Burma and Malaya. Survivors of the famine of 1943 still eked out a livelihood on its streets. As the war came to its end, new dangers arose. Labour in the city was restive throughout the autumn. Business firms and state enterprises took the opportunity to reduce the ‘dearness allowance’ that they had paid during the wartime emergency. There were postal strikes, steel workers’ strikes and strikes in the Railway Press, one of the major printing houses. People went about in rags because there was a ‘cloth famine’, a consequence, it was said, of profiteering and corruption in the wartime rationing system. Worse, there were eerie echoes of 1943. Floods were afflicting large areas of northern India while other parts of the same region suffered a drought: ‘spontaneous hunger marches and the influx of rural people into the towns had started and the price of rice and paddy were steeply rising’.
⁶⁶

Since the city had been near to the fighting in Burma, a lively
trade in contraband arms, ammunition and explosives had grown up. Troops sold their weapons to Calcutta people and many were stolen. The police later indicted the military for ‘carelessness’ in allowing so much war materiel to fall into the wrong hands.
⁶⁷
These arms would be used to deadly effect over the next two years. There were also the men around keen to use these illicit weapons, not people with some military training, as was often to be the case in the Punjab, but those whom the British and the press called
goondas
. These were gang bosses and thugs who ran prostitution and drugs rackets. They had always flourished on Calcutta’s streets, but during the war many had been locked up under the Defence of India Rules. Much as they would have wished to keep them behind bars, the authorities had to let them out when wartime restrictions were lifted: ‘2,000 persons of the goonda variety’ were released between July and December 1945.
⁶⁸

Then there were the issues to stir the city’s inhabitants to political demonstration and violence. Since before the First World War there had been a tradition of anti-British terrorist violence, with sporadic assassinations of policemen and bomb attacks on symbols of British rule. Revolutionary communism was popular among the educated youth of the city and strikes at the jute mills had sometimes ended in violence and mass protests. This inheritance had been given new meaning by the events of the Second World War, and especially by the exploits of the INA, which had been watched with admiration in Bengal. A relatively small percentage of INA troops had been Bengalis. This was because of the predominance of men from the Punjab and North West Frontier Province in the Indian Army troops captured by the Japanese in 1942. The civilians who joined the INA were mostly Tamils, because they had dominated Malaya’s plantation workforce. Yet, because the INA’s revered leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, was a Bengali and his brother, Sarat Chandra, had spent much of the war in British jails, Bengalis identified strongly with the INA. Almost from the moment that the British allowed normal political life to resume there were demonstrations, public meetings and pamphlet campaigns demanding the release of the INA men. These grew to a climax in November as the British began the trials at the Red Fort. Bengal rallied to the call of K. N. Katju, one of the men’s defence team, when he declared, ‘they are the soldiers of freedom,’ and, ‘for
a subject people the law of treason has no moral sanction behind it’.
⁶⁹
The Bengal Provincial Congress Committee set up a defence fund, declaring that the men’s only crime had been to love their country. As detainees were released and soldiers returned, an old rumour that the British had summarily executed some of the INA men was given a new lease of life. Freed from a Bengal jail, the president of the UP provincial Forward Bloc, Bose’s old party, stated that he had seen Sardar Singh of Jullunder being led to execution shouting ‘Jai Hind!’ (Victory to India!) and ‘Inquilab Zindabad!’ (Long live the revolution!).
⁷⁰
Stories of the execution of the ‘soldiers of freedom’ merged with new speculation and evidence about British atrocities during the 1942 Quit India campaign. Tamluk, a subdivision of Midnapur district with a forty-year history of anti-colonial resistance, had been the scene of numerous examples of police firing on crowds, village burnings and rapes by the security forces. The victims could now come forward to tell their stories, as they were in Nuremberg. Indians did not waste the opportunity to make some inflammatory comparisons: Britain’s record in Bengal was every bit as bad as that of the Nazis at Belsen; ‘will the UN have the courage and the fairness to hold trials in India?’
⁷¹

Emerging legends about the INA were closely bound up with a fever of speculation about the fate of Subhas Bose himself. In November an ‘authoritative source’ had confirmed to a Press of America reporter that Bose had died at 9 a.m. on 18 August at Taihoku hospital, Formosa (present-day Taiwan). Bose’s staff officer had asked the Japanese to take his body to Tokyo, but the coffin was too big for the small plane available. The body had therefore been cremated and Bose’s aides had carried his ashes to members of the Indian community in Tokyo, who had performed a small ceremony in the Renkoju Temple, Suginami.
⁷²
This account seems to have been substantially true, but since the source could not be identified and none of the Tokyo Indians could be contacted, it did little more than fuel the frenzied speculation that Bose was still alive and would return to claim his legacy of freedom. It is not hard to see why this myth proved attractive in the apocalyptic conditions of Bengal in 1945 when the atomic bomb had followed the mass evacuation from Burma, cyclone, famine and cholera. As the INA trials opened on 5 November, the
press carried dozens of pictures and souvenirs of the men under trial and of various INA units, including the all-female Rani of Jhansi Regiment, parading before Subhas Bose. Sarat Bose declared ‘Azad Hind Week’ and hundreds of thousands of rupees were collected for INA defence and rehabilitation costs. Released INA men were fêted enthusiastically and, almost inevitably, many of the Calcutta demonstrations in their honour tipped over into violent protest and riots against British rule. On 7 November 1945 at least 100,000 people staged a mass rally at Shraddhananda Park in the centre of the city. Later the same month, the police fired on student demonstrators, killing sixteen and injuring 125.

Bose and the INA were not, however, the only political trigger in Bengal over these months. There was a much wider apprehension that ‘imperialism’ was rampant once again, despite people’s sacrifices during the war. The press and politicians dwelt on the deployment of British and British Indian, French and Dutch troops to suppress national movements in Indonesia and Indo-China and action against nationalists and trade unions in Burma and Malaya. American ‘commercial imperialism’ was denounced. An All-India South East Asia Day of demonstrations was declared and vigorously celebrated in Calcutta. The word went out that ‘Indians’ conditions throughout Malaya is [
sic
] helpless. Prominent lawyers, doctors, merchants and missionaries have been confined in solitary cells for over a month without trial.’
⁷³
The people on the receiving end of this wave of Bengali sympathy were members of the former Indian Independence Leagues. But brotherly solidarity with the subject peoples of Southeast Asia did not inhibit another type of agitation about the region. This was the movement for the return of Indian nationals who had fled Burma at the beginning of the war, a cause that was by no means popular among Burmese, Malays or Indo-Chinese. In October the Burma government’s Civil Supplies Board announced that, come the following March, it would begin repatriating half a million of these refugees from Calcutta, Chittagong and Vizagapatnam in the south. Moreover, it promised that: ‘all Indian merchant refugees returning to Burma would be granted retail trade licences. If their shops were occupied by Burmese or if they had been destroyed or damaged, the government would help the merchants in reoccupying or rebuilding their premises.’
⁷⁴
Calcutta
may have been pleased, but announcements such as this had the effect both of distressing many inhabitants of Southeast Asia and also of raising unrealistic hopes amongst the refugees, many of whom were desperately poor.

While economic unrest and hatred of the British surged through the cities of Bengal, a more insidious and ultimately more murderous passion was slowly gaining force: Hindu–Muslim hostility. Ironically, Hindus and Muslims in Bengal had more in common than they had in most parts of India. They all spoke Bengali and there was no superficial written-language division based on the difference between Sanskrit- and Persian-derived scripts as there was over much of the subcontinent. In the countryside, despite the efforts of preachers who tried to insist on the practice of pure Hinduism or Islam, there was still not a lot to distinguish a Hindu from a Muslim peasant, particularly if he or she was from the plebeian but hard-working Namasudra caste numerous in many of the eastern districts. Most Bengalis were followers of popular devotional sects that blurred the boundaries between Hinduism and Islam, and some of these, notably the Bauls, had both Hindu and Muslim adepts. Yet over the years economic differentials, the play of sectarian politics in British-founded institutions and the activities of unscrupulous or purblind leaders had fractured relations between members of the two religious traditions. There had been a spate of serious Hindu–Muslim riots in the 1930s when peasant protests against landlords and moneylenders had become infused with the inflammatory language of religious revivalists. Those divisions might have narrowed during the war, but with the fighting in Burma unnervingly close, the British authorities had been happy to let attempts at religious coalition fall by the wayside. Incensed by Congress’s opposition to the war effort, they preferred to keep in power a conservative Muslim ministry which had a loose alliance with Mahomed Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League in all-India politics. Muslims on the whole were more favourable to the British war effort and it was important to keep recruits flowing into the army. For their part, the Hindu leaders of Bengal, whether formally members of Congress or not, were more inclined to think in communal terms than in many other parts of India. The old gentry class, the
bhadralog
or ‘respectable people’, dominated Hindu politics. Though fiercely
anti-British, they were fearful of domination by the Muslim majority in the province. These fears were only heightened as the probability of a British withdrawal increased in the aftermath of the Labour election victory of the summer.

Meanwhile, the Bengali autumn festival of Durga Puja, celebrated in honour of the province’s great mother goddess, proceeded with much gusto as a kind of peace returned to India. A series of incidents in which Muslim bands attacked Hindu images and scuffles and retaliatory shooting by police erupted outside mosques presaged a dark future. The great crescent, so recently violently unified by the successes of the British and Indian armies, was soon to be fragmented again. Hindu would fight Muslim in Bengal. Self-selected leaderships of the Nagas and other people of Assam and the eastern hills would agitate and later fight for the autonomy which they believed they deserved because of their services during the war. To the south, in Arakan, Buddhist would fight Muslim. Christian Karen would fight Burmese Buddhist. Chinese and Malay Muslim gangs continued to skirmish in rural Malaya. The malevolent spirit of the war hovered above the crescent even as millions of soldiers returned to their homes.