Forgotten Wars (42 page)

At this point the local political leaders lost control. Over the next three days criminals turned the city into a battlefield. The governor told the viceroy that ‘it was a pogrom between two rival gangs of the Calcutta underworld’,
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with the thugs who had been released at the end of the war taking a prominent part. Bazaar toughs and gang-leaders were soon leading raids and counter-raids on Hindu and Muslim quarters, murdering whole neighbourhoods of men, women and children. Swords, iron bars and tins of kerosene were the preferred weapons. Sten guns and bombs made from chemical explosives bought or stolen from soldiers over the previous two years also came into
their own. ‘The swollen bodies – of young and old, men and women – were lying in heaps, folded in gunny bags in the middle of roads, on lorries, handcarts or floating in canals.’
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Finally prodded into action, the police – a mere 500 of them, half of whom were unarmed – were hopelessly outnumbered. They drove around in their war-surplus jeeps dispersing the crowds. As soon as they had passed, the gangs emerged from the side streets and resumed the burning and killing.

There was a tinge of class hatred to these events.
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The houses of the great Hindu Marwari merchants in the city centre proved an early target; a leading Muslim merchant was found hanging from a lamp post. But hatred of ‘the enemy’ overwhelmed any economic rationale. Women of both religions were murdered and mutilated. Hindu children were executed near mosques in a macabre mimicking of the slaughter of goats for the goddess Kali. A Muslim cleric, Akbar Ali, was attacked in the fashionable Park Circus area and thrown half dead into a sewer. He was one of the lucky ones; nine days later his battered body was fished alive from the Ballygunge sewerage station, almost a mile away.
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Much of the killing showed the hand of trained fighters. The historian Suranjan Das recounts that INA men who had come to Calcutta to celebrate Indian National Army Day on 18 August were prominent in the attacks,
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even though Sarat Bose’s wing of the Congress and the INA leadership had loudly denounced communal hatred. Bose himself backed the rescue efforts of the Indian National Ambulance Corps, newly named the Azad Hind Ambulance Corps in memory of his brother. Other men of arms also took part. Hindu
darwans
or doorkeepers from Bihar and the United Provinces who had been taken on as guards for business premises fought pitched battles with Muslim toughs. People said that some officials from Suhrawardy’s private office distributed kerosene and knives for the assailants by lorry; others claimed that local politicians directed the arson and murder by megaphone from the housetops. Yet there is plenty of evidence too of the eager participation of ordinary people – petty shopkeepers and artisans – in the attacks. Even the malnourished inhabitants of Calcutta’s huge slums or
bustees
found the energy to murder each other. By contrast, not a single European or Eurasian in the city was reported injured over these days.

Early on the morning of Sunday 17 August, after the first day’s
horrendous events, the governor exerted his authority over Suhra-wardy’s ministry and ordered in the troops. Soldiers of the Green Howards and Yorkshire and Lancashire regiments patrolled the city. Later a division of Nepalese Gurkhas was drafted in, but only one predominantly Indian unit was used for fear of sparking further conflict. By Monday evening 45,000 troops – four British, one Gurkha and one Indian division – were deployed in and around the city. Tanks patrolled the streets.
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Rescue units of soldiers and civilians were deployed to try to help groups of Hindus or Muslims stranded in areas where the rival community was dominant. Often they arrived to find these people with their throats cut or burned alive in their houses. The military instituted ‘Operation St Bernard’ to escort workers in essential services to and from their jobs, while Government House attempted to co-ordinate the rescue of endangered civilians. Arthur Dash, a senior civil servant and long-time critic of the Bengal government, enlisted as a clerk with the rescue organization. One of his duties was to stop people jumping the queue with information about families and friends who needed to be shepherded out of murderous situations. He remembered sending one distraught man back into the line. When his turn finally came he told Dash that it was too late ‘as all his family had, in the interval, been killed, and his house burnt down’.
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For Dash, it was like the famine all over again. He saw someone being stabbed in the stomach outside the Bengal Club, the same place where he had watched the bodies of the starving fall three years before.

After three days the mass destruction and killing had been suppressed, but already 30,000 people had fled the city, some of them refugees from Burma four years earlier. Nor was there any end in sight to a more insidious, sporadic type of violence. Every day for the next two years, ten, twenty or thirty people would be murdered in the city’s streets, stabbed to death in alleyways, blown to pieces in bomb attacks on shops and residential buildings or strafed in their vehicles with Sten guns. Calcutta showed how easily the fervour of anti-British demonstrations could spill over into fratricidal killings, a phenomenon that would be repeated horribly in the Punjab over the next eighteen months. As the death toll mounted, Burrows remarked sardonically that ‘it was costing more in casualties to hand over Bengal than to
conquer it’.
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Fewer than 7,000 people had died at the battle of Plassey in 1757. Perhaps he could have been forgiven for thinking that power had been handed over already. When he was touring affected areas with the local army commander, General Roy Bucher, he saw three people being beaten to death on the Lower Chitpur Road, barely a hundred yards from where he and Bucher stood. The assailants were not inhibited by the presence of these representatives of the supreme authority; only when a police sergeant fired a shot did they flee.
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Afterwards a bewildered Bucher asked Suhrawardy: ‘Why is it that you Hindus and Muslims in Bengal cannot live amicably as the Hindus and Muslims do in the Army?’ Suhrawardy’s reply seemed as much a threat as a warning: ‘General, that Hindu and Muslim amity will not last very much longer – of that I can assure you.’
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As in the ravaged cities of Southeast Asia in 1942, the problems did not cease when the fighting died down. Cholera, ever present in Calcutta, took over from human killers as sanitation collapsed and rubbish built up in the streets. Arthur Dash wrote in his diary that corpses ‘were dotted about even in the streets of the European areas. In Indian areas they were piled up and blocked them.’
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British authorities noted that Indians tended not to remove the bodies even if they lay outside their own houses for fear of pollution.
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This job had to be carried out by the troops. The city was sprayed with DDT, which helped a little, but food supplies broke down and both grain and cloth had to be rationed again. As late as 28 August there were still 307 government and private relief centres feeding 190,000 people cut off in the most seriously affected parts of the city. Worse was the lingering psychological damage. Many people never again trusted their Hindu or Muslim neighbours. It was this that lay at the heart of the massive refugee problems that were to overwhelm India and Pakistan as they attained their freedom. Indirectly, it was to propel the two dominions towards three pointless and destructive wars over the next generation.

Dacca in eastern Bengal was soon to be the capital East Pakistan, but in 1946 the city still had a large Hindu minority and it quickly fell prey to Calcutta’s infectious violence. The trouble was sporadic but vicious. Murderous gangs killed a handful of people every day with weapons of varying sophistication. The district magistrate recorded that: ‘Occasionally acid bombs (acid contained in an electric light
bulb) were used, but killing was done by knives and property was attacked with crowbars, or torches made of rags and oil helped by dry wood and straw.’
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In September the frenzy spread to the rural areas of east Bengal, especially to villages where large numbers of Muslim immigrants had moved into India from Arakan during and after the war in Burma. Prime locations were the districts of Noakhali and Tippera in the Chittagong division which had already experienced appalling suffering in 1942. A local political boss and Muslim League member, Ghulam Sarwar, stirred up the trouble by demanding revenge for the thousands of Muslims killed in Calcutta. In this part of the countryside Muslim peasants were beginning to assert themselves, resentful at what they saw as generations of exploitation by Hindu shopkeepers, moneylenders and landlords. Once again, though, it was religious difference and not economic distress that determined the course of the disturbances, which left hundreds dead and 20,000 people homeless. Here, however, the terror hardly deserves categorization as rioting; it took the form of a highly organized programme of forced conversions of Hindus to Islam. A Muslim gang would come to a Hindu house and give its occupants twenty-four hours to convert to Islam or die. Returning at the appointed time, the gang members would force the ‘converts’ to eat beef, recite the Muslim confession of faith and quit their homes. These were then burnt out because, the Muslims explained, the end of the world was imminent and shelter would be unnecessary in paradise. These events were meticulously organized by local politicians and their supporters; the British district magistrate observed that ‘large stocks of Muslim prayer caps had been made ready for the converts’.
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But there is no question that many ordinary people were living in daily expectation of the apocalypse. This was a common perception up and down the crescent in Burma and Malaya where similar millenarian movements were giving legitimacy to intercommunal clashes and anti-colonial upsurges.

Help was a long time in coming; the government machine was virtually shut down for a time. Muslim clerks in the local telegraph office intercepted and destroyed messages from Hindu inhabitants of Noakhali and Tippera begging for help. When the security forces arrived, as one British subaltern remembered, it was often too late.
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Whole villages had been plundered and dozens of people killed. In
order to suppress the disturbances, the authorities eventually had to deploy 1,800 troops, 600 armed police, 130 unarmed police and even the Royal Air Force. By then the damage had been done; 50,000 people in the two districts were homeless. Thousands of Hindus from the surrounding villages fled into Dacca city, making its neighbourhoods yet more tense.
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Another 25,000 sought shelter in Calcutta. Hindus elsewhere sought revenge. From late October into November, Hindus to the west, in Bihar, slaughtered 25,000 of their Muslim neighbours, sparking a massive migration of Muslims towards the east. By December a single abandoned USairbase in Burdwan was playing home to more than 30,000 refugees from Bihar.
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Over the next decade as many as 4 million people would move from their ancestral homes, pursued by fear of their erstwhile neighbours. At first it was the more prosperous Hindus of east Bengal who moved off to Chandpur or Calcutta, never to return. Many had relatives and property in Calcutta and decided to cut their losses in the east. Later, poor Hindus followed them. Noakhali, even more than Calcutta, destroyed the ancient co-existence between Hindus and Muslims that had characterized much of rural Bengal. One refugee remembered: ‘The change was so sudden, you see. Even a year ago we had played Holi [a Hindu festival] together with Muslim girls. But Noakhali changed everything. As young girls we began to feel insecure.’
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The alternating waves of refugees from east and west further spread fear and hostility in the province. Hindus in the western parts of Bengal worried about the influx of Muslims fleeing from Bihar and were only too happy to see them decamp further to the east along with local Muslims.
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His perpetual gloom now deepening to despair, Wavell wrote home that British rule was on the point of dissolution. He was not getting much help from Indian politicians. During the Calcutta massacres Gandhi, refusing further concessions to Muslim League politicians, had thumped the table in front of the viceroy shouting, ‘If India wants her bloodbath, she shall have it!’
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Gandhi was in fact appalled by the violence and spent much of October and November touring affected villages in Bengal trying to encourage dialogue between Hindus and Muslims. But he could not help but compare the vigorous action of the British to suppress the Quit India movement of 1942 with their
slowness and inaction now. In this he had neatly caught the viceroy’s mood. All that could be managed, Wavell concluded, was to preserve the lives of British civilians and get the army out in some kind of order. His officials agreed. After Noakhali, John Tyson, a senior official in Bengal, recorded simply: ‘I think the sooner we clear out the better.’
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At one time Wavell contemplated a ‘breakdown plan’, whereby the British would roll back from one province after another, retreating to the northeast and the northwest of the country. Privately, he called this ‘Operation Madhouse’. If order could not even be preserved in Bengal, the ancient core of the British Empire in the East, where could it be preserved? This thought was particularly sombre since the only force capable of pacifying the fractious colonies of the crescent was the Indian Army. But that army was now no more than a withered limb of the British state. Its regiments were worried, decimated by demobilization and made uneasy by the rise of Hindu–Muslim tension, as Suhrawardy had predicted. More seriously, the new quasi-independent Indian government had made it clear that Indian troops should not be used in Burma or Malaya, let alone farther afield. Congress was infuriated that Indian soldiers had died the previous winter in Indo-China and Indonesia putting down what its leaders regarded as fraternal national liberation movements. British rule seemed as precarious as it had done in the spring of 1942. Yet this time there was little to fight back with.