The Great Partition (14 page)

To add to the complexities, many Sikhs felt that they had been entirely overlooked. The proposed settlement threatened to put their own regional interests in the hands of the Muslim League. The president of the Sikh Party, the Akali Dal, said the plan was adding insult to injury and appealed for a united Panth and for Sikhs to prepare to ‘stake their all’; the Sikh Panthic Conference resolved that the mission's recommendations ‘liquidated the position of the Sikhs in their homeland’; while Sardar Sarmukh Singh Chamak told worshippers at the shimmering Golden Temple, the holiest place for the community, that the British were ‘trying to atom bomb the Sikhs’.
⁴⁸

In short, there were doves and hawks in all communities. Needless to say, in the end, the plan failed. It became obvious by June that both the plans for a federal solution and even attempts to put into place some form of provisional, interim government had come to nothing. The Cabinet Mission represents a galling missed opportunity and exactly
why
the Cabinet Mission failed so spectacularly has long been the stuff of nuanced debate about the intentions and motives at the top level of negotiations. The bottom line was a failure of trust, with both Congress and the League unwilling to take the leap into an unknown future without cast-iron guarantees that the plan would be interpreted in precisely the same way by all parties once the British had departed.

Very many Indians across the social spectrum were deeply disappointed by the failure. But it was a boon for the most vocal, well-organised nationalist hardliners. The uncertainties and hesitancies in the politicised grassroots of the League and Congress about the meanings of
swaraj
and Pakistan, and about how these hopes were going to be fulfilled, played a supporting role. ‘There was absolutely nothing settled about what would be the shape of things in India once Independence was achieved,’ reflected the writer Nasim Ansari, still casting his mind back four decades later and trying to unravel what had gone wrong in the build-up to Partition. ‘The urge for freedom was common to both Hindus and Muslims but no one had any clear idea of what should follow independence. So misunderstandings grew, and developed to such an extent that such fraternal unity, as existed earlier, was never seen again.’
⁴⁹
It was an onward march towards an uncertain destination. Old ways of life were crumbling, and the nervous anticipation of a settlement ratcheted up a sense of both insecurity and exhilaration.

By the time the dejected Cabinet Mission boarded their aeroplane for their return to Britain on 29 June the power that they thought they were trying to broker had already slipped out of British hands in the towns and cities of provincial India. Partition was closely entwined with this slow, protracted passage of decolonisation, which has been masked by the pedantic language of the transfer of power. Cumulative, minor cracks were building all over the Indian urban landscape. Even more ominously, the loud, omnipresent calls for Pakistan or for
swaraj
had been taken up by militias and strongmen, middle-class students and their urban supporters. These calls were being made more urgently and repeatedly than ever, and were shattering the peace of the cities where smaller groups were being pushed to the political margins. British responsibility for control, at the provincial level, already seemed to have been abandoned. As one governor reported: ‘I spoke to Pant [the Congress premier of United Provinces] sometime back about communal organisations, the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh [RSS] and the Muslim National Guard. I told him that there was a whirlwind coming which somebody would have to reap. It probably wouldn't be me, for I would be gone.’
⁵⁰
In the logistical calculations of British withdrawal, armed groups which posed no direct challenge to British interests proved neither especially interesting nor especially threatening to the government.

‘In Karachi the other day the accidental dropping of an onion from a verandah by a child nearly started a communal fracas.’
⁵¹
An exaggeration, perhaps. But by the second half of 1946, the British administration knew, after the failure of the Cabinet Mission's attempt to forge a settlement, that the state was cracking. Wavell's personal diary, in which the Viceroy scribbled his musings, was verging on the apocalyptic. There had been tension in the past and this had sometimes resulted in major riots between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. Small riots when they occurred had caused deaths in the tens, though rarely in the hundreds and never in the thousands. They had tended to be set pieces, predictably coinciding with religious festivals. Now the violence, when it broke out, seemed stranger and less manageable. In July 1946 there was rioting in the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad and random stabbing attacks started to occur in the city. From the middle of the year, urban riots between bands of political activists broke out in city streets, as processions clashed and men fought pitched battles, throwing stones and brickbats. As soon as the Cabinet Mission plan failed, urban scraps and stabbings intensified in frequency.

The big names at the top of the party hierarchies were finding it harder and harder to intervene and to control events. Vallabhbhai Patel, second in command to Nehru in the Congress, didn't go and visit Ahmedabad, a city of fellow Gujaratis, when riots and sporadic stabbings started there in July as his offer to visit was rejected by local leaders. Party activists started snubbing leaders who urged quiescence and calm. That month, two Gandhian workers who tried to intervene to halt riots there succumbed to the knives of rioters. Near to the very place where Gandhi had grown up and had started his experiments in non-violence, Gandhian workers were being murdered: the despair of peace workers and faithful followers of Gandhi is visceral. They appealed to Gandhi for help: ‘Two of our Congress workers, Shri Vasant Rao and Shri Raja Bali, went out in such a quest and fell a prey to the
goonda's
knife,’ wrote their co-workers. ‘They laid down their lives in pursuit of an ideal and they deserve all praise. But no one else had the courage to follow in their footsteps. They have not the same self-confidence. If they had it, there would be no riots, and even if riots broke out, they would never assume the proportions and the form that the present day riots do.’
⁵²
As old certainties broke down, Gandhian workers – and even Gandhi himself – seemed to be losing moral authority.

The impartiality of Indian policemen, administrators and politicians was also coming under public suspicion and intense scrutiny. Militias snowballed in size as news of the rejection of the Cabinet Mission plan spread. This paved the way for the breaking of trust which was already well under way, but reached a crisis with the events which took place in Calcutta in August 1946. This would be swiftly followed by devastating attacks in Noakhali in East Bengal and in Bihar from October, followed by Garhmukhteshwar in the United Provinces in November. All occurred outside Punjab, where worse was yet to come. In all these places, the nature of the killing would become brutal, sadistic and grisly; women and children were attacked, and rapists worked alongside the killers. Everywhere, there was an element of planning and organisation involved and a sense of immunity from the governing provincial party – whether League or Congress. By the end of 1946, there was a collapse of faith between the parties, largely because of the graphic news of these attacks. Most ominously of all, when people asked for, or resisted, the idea of Pakistan, or clamoured for
swaraj
, it was without any clear idea at all of what the real costs of this were going to be for the Indian state and its people.

The streets of Calcutta were eerily empty on the morning of 16 August 1946. The Muslim League provincial government had called a public holiday to mark Direct Action day. Three days later at least 4,000 of Calcutta's residents lay dead and over 10,000 were injured. The streets were deserted once again. Now the scene was one of carnage, buildings reduced to rubble, rubbish uncollected from the streets, telephone and power lines severed. Schools, courts, mills and shops stayed closed. A British official groped for an analogy, describing the landscape as a cross between the worst of London air raids and the Great Plague.
¹
In the intervening days, the worst riots between Hindus and Muslims ever remembered in India broke out. What had once been violent, but almost theatrical, encounters between politicised militias and activists, had burst their limits and had become targeted attacks on innocent civilians, including women, children and the elderly.

Although there had been riots in Calcutta in the past, the violence of August 1946 was distinctive in its scale and intensity. Vastly different social groups and sections of the city amassed along religious lines. Jinnah's call for a day of direct action on which a complete
hartal
would be utilised to demonstrate support for Pakistan undoubtedly triggered the violence. Jinnah ratcheted up the oratory, speaking of Congress as a ‘Fascist Grand Council’. The day of direct action was clearly a strategic manoeuvre. Jinnah needed to strengthen his own hand of cards in the unfolding dispute over the membership of the interim government which was taking place in New Delhi, and to show just how ardent the demand for Muslim representation really was. Jinnah called on his followers ‘to conduct themselves peacefully and in a disciplined manner’ although his own usually precise and legalistic prose was vague enough to allow for violent reinterpretation.
²

A few days before Direct Action day, the Calcutta district League set out its own plans; there would be a complete strike of Muslim workers in shops and factories, then numerous processions accompanied by musical bands and drums would converge from all over greater Calcutta – from Howrah, Hooghly, Matiaburz and elsewhere – ending in a mass rally. Leaguers were told to go out to the mosques, where they should tell people about the plans, hand out pamphlets and say special prayers for ‘the freedom of Muslim India, the Islamic world and the peoples of India and the East in general’. Older networks of mullahs, mosques and
pirs
were put to work, to spread the call for direct action in Bengal.

On the morning of 16 August League supporters opened their newspapers to find large printed advertisements inside them:

Today is Direct Action Day

Today Muslims of India dedicate their lives and all they possess to the cause of freedom

Today let every Muslim swear in the name of Allah to resist aggression

Direct action is now their only course

Because they offered peace but peace was spurned

They honoured their word but they were betrayed

They claimed Liberty but were offered Thraldom

Now Might alone can secure their Right

What ‘direct action’ meant, though, was wide open to speculation and distortion. During the build-up, handbills and fly posters using religious language urged Muslims to act and linked the earliest Muslims with the contemporary situation, announcing that, ‘In this holy month of Ramzan, Mecca was conquered from the infidels and in this month again a Jehad for the establishment of Pakistan has been declared.’
⁴
This kind of Islamic populism drew on older myths and stories, reworking history and compressing time. The Mayor of Calcutta himself commanded: ‘We Muslims have had the crown and have ruled. Do not lose heart, be ready and take swords. Oh Kafir! Your doom is not far and the greater massacre will come.’
⁵

On the morning of the 16th, thousands of Muslims, many of them armed with
lathis
and brickbats, processed to a mammoth meeting at the Ochterlony Monument in Calcutta to hear speeches made by Husseyn Suhrawardy, the Provincial League Chief Minister, who, if he did not explicitly incite violence, certainly gave the crowds the impression that they could act with impunity, that neither the police nor the military would be called out and that the ministry would turn a blind eye to any action that they unleashed in the city. Whether he anticipated the carnage that followed is a different matter, and whether the Calcutta riots were a product of questionable political naïvety or a calculated pogrom is still a moot point.

Eyewitness accounts of what took place in the aftermath of the dispersal of the mass meeting are chilling. Jugal Chandra Ghosh was running an
akhara
at the time, a gymnasium which also served to drill squads of young men. He later admitted his own role in organising retaliation on the streets of Calcutta, remembering ‘a place where four trucks were standing, all with dead bodies, at least three feet high; like molasses in sacks, they were stacked on the trucks, and blood and brain was oozing out … the whole sight of it, it had a tremendous effect on me.’
⁶
It was no longer warring political groups who were involved in the battle over India's future. Ordinary people going about their daily business were targeted, from tea-shop owners and rickshaw drivers to stallholders who had been dragged out, beaten and burned or had their property looted. Hindu-owned shops and homes were looted and smashed by those in cahoots with League activists. In Calcutta, people were outraged not just by the events themselves, but also by the way in which political leaders, especially Suhrawardy, failed to deploy the military and police quickly. A definite impression was gaining ground that the state's resources had been exploited by the murderers with the League's blessing; rioters used state-owned trucks and had mysteriously accessed extra petrol coupons.

‘People showed signs of being intoxicated, whether with alcohol or with enthusiasm,’ remembered Syed Nazimuddin Hashim, a student at Presidency College at the time, and in this strange, nationalistic euphoria Leaguers went off as if into battle. Huge portraits of Jinnah riding on a white horse and brandishing a scimitar were carried through the city.
⁷
The involvement of politicians granted the violence legitimacy in the eyes of the rioters who believed that they fought for ill-formed and simplistic notions of ‘freedom’ ‘space’ and ‘history’ which hardly tallied with demanding the territorial nation state that came into being.