8

The Great Calcutta Killings and the Noakhali Carnage, 1946

Meanwhile, another game was afoot in Bengal, the only province in India where the Muslim League held sway. Suhrawardy was made Premier of Bengal in 1946, having won an internal power struggle within the Muslim League, replacing Sir Nazimuddin. India was soon to see bestiality at a different level—called ‘Direct Action’ by Jinnah and his League, and the ‘Great Calcutta Killings’ by the rest of the world. Casey, the Australian Governor of Bengal, was replaced by Frederick Burrows, an ex-railway guard of the British Railways and a trade union leader, and he and Suhrawardy developed a very close relationship.

Although the programme of Direct Action was announced by Jinnah only in July 1946, he must have been planning it for a long time, because the run-up for this started much earlier, possibly sometime in late 1945, when Suhrawardy had proceeded to change the complexion of the Calcutta Police. Several posts were created in the police headquarters at Lalbazar, and Hindu officers-in-charge of the thanas (regional police stations) were transferred there, to be replaced by Muslim officers. The constables of the Calcutta Police were, as a rule, recruited according to what was known as the ABCD rule—which meant that they were all drawn from the districts of Arrah, Balia, Chhapra and Deoria of the Bhojpur region of UP and Bihar. They were all Hindus. Suhrawardy, with the help of Niaz Mohammed Khan, proceeded to Muslimize the Calcutta Police by importing ex-servicemen from western Punjab and the North Western Frontier Province. Why the Calcutta Police in particular? Because Calcutta must have already been secretly chosen by the Muslim League as the theatre of the bloodbath that had been scheduled for 16 August 1946, called Direct Action or the Great Calcutta Killings.

At the level of senior officers also, a significant change was made. A Muslim Imperial Police officer, and said to be a very communally partisan one at that, was posted as deputy commissioner (headquarters) of the Calcutta Police, a pivotal post that had hitherto been manned only by Britishers. Calcutta Police has two separate cadres of field-level police officers—investigative and non-investigative. The former, comprising sub-inspectors and inspectors, largely Bengali Hindu so far, had been systematically infiltrated by Muslim officers who were thereafter placed in charge of police stations. The non-investigative posts, mainly sergeants, were manned mostly by Anglo-Indians, and continued to be so.

Dr Mookerjee, though acutely aware of what was happening, was quite helpless in the matter. To begin with, he just did not have the support of most of the Hindus. His ignominious defeat by a nonentity of the Congress in the December 1945 elections to the Central Assembly has already been mentioned. He subsequently ran from the University constituency in 1946 and entered the Provincial Legislative Assembly. Unlike the Muslims who were solidly behind the Muslim League (113 out of 119 Muslim seats), the bulk of the Hindus supported the Congress which would never and did never take their side, even in the face of the grossest injustices perpetrated by the League government. A much smaller number supported the Mahasabha which was politically quite weak despite Dr Mookerjee’s leadership. The Hindus, thus, as if by a collective suicidal will, short-changed themselves and the Muslims got the best of both worlds. Remember Dr Mookerjee’s words of frustration, recorded in his diary and mentioned in the last chapter: ‘How could the Congress, an organization which was built on Hindu support, yet considered it a sin to uphold Hindu interests, fight another organization like the League which was dedicated to establishing Muslim dominance?’

Cut to faraway London from Calcutta. In the first post-war British election, the Conservatives lost and Labourite Clement Attlee became the Prime Minister. Unlike his predecessor and successor Churchill, granting independence to India was very much on his mind—Churchill on the other hand had declared that he had not become His Majesty’s Prime Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. One of Attlee’s first steps regarding India was to send, early in 1946, an all-party parliamentary delegation to India led by professor Robert Richards, a member of the Labour Party and at one time (in 1924) undersecretary of state for India, to meet Indian leaders and convince them of the British desire for an early settlement of the Indian constitutional issue. It was this delegation that Dr Mookerjee hurried to meet when he left Madhupur on 27 January 1946, cutting short his restful stay which had given him a new lease of life.

Attlee followed this with dispatching a very high-ranking Cabinet Mission to India to negotiate the terms with the Congress and the Muslim League. The delegation consisted of Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the secretary of state for India, Sir Stafford Cripps of the 1942 Cripps Mission fame and then the chairman of the Board of Trade, and Viscount A.V. Alexander, the first lord of the admiralty. The Mission arrived in India on 23 March 1946 and held a number of meetings with different political parties, other organizations and selected individuals till May.

The discussions were principally with the Congress and the Muslim League, but they held discussions with the Hindu Mahasabha also, in which Dr Mookerjee was accompanied by L.B. Bhopatkar. They handed in a memorandum which urged that His Majesty’s Government should immediately declare India free and independent, that the integrity and the indivisibility of the country should be maintained at any cost, and that partition would be economically unsound, disastrous, politically unwise and suicidal. The Mahasabha would not agree to any suggestion that Hindus and Muslims would be represented in the central government on the basis of equality. Dr Mookerjee stressed that the Mahasabha could not compromise on the Pakistan issue. His own idea, which he had put to Jinnah in 1943, was that representatives of the two communities should meet and that each should explain in what respect it expects protection from the other. The Mahasabha would be willing to concede the fullest measure of autonomy to the provinces and would give the minorities the maximum protection in respect of their religion, language and customs.

After hearing out all concerned parties, the Mission put forth a set of proposals, commonly known as the ‘Grouping Plan’, which fell short of partition of the country. The substance of the proposals was that the country would be constituted as a loose federal polity with residuary powers to the provinces, and the provinces would be classified into three groups, depending on their geographical location and the religious complexion of the population.

The Congress, somewhat readily, and the Muslim League, somewhat reluctantly, accepted the proposals. However, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was the president of the Congress at the time, in a press conference, held on 10 July 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, would not work. When further questioned as to whether this meant that the Cabinet Mission Plan could be modified, he replied emphatically that the Congress had agreed only to participate in the Constituent Assembly and regarded itself free to change or modify the Cabinet Mission Plan as it thought best. Consequent upon this, the Muslim League on 29 July withdrew their acceptance of the Cabinet Mission proposals and went back to their demand for Pakistan. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, in his autobiography India Wins Freedom, has termed this act of Jawaharlal Nehru an ‘astonishing statement’ and one of those unfortunate events that changed the course of history.

Together with withdrawal of acceptance of the Cabinet Mission proposals, on 29 July the Muslim League adopted a resolution that 16 August 1946 will be a day of ‘Direct Action’ by the ‘Muslim Nation’ in support of Pakistan. No explanation was forthcoming as to what would constitute such ‘Direct Action’. Jinnah declared, ‘Today we bid goodbye to constitutional methods . . . today we have forged a pistol, and are in a position to use it.’ When Jinnah was asked whether this ‘Direct Action’ was going to be violent or non-violent, his terse reply was, ‘I am not going to discuss ethics.’ In villages and towns across the country Muslim League volunteers raised the war cry, ‘Ladke lenge Pakistan, lekar rahenge Pakistan (We shall wrest Pakistan by force, we must get Pakistan).’ Meanwhile, Jawaharlal Nehru tried to eat his words and work out a solution with Jinnah by presenting him with a fresh resolution of the Congress, reiterating its acceptance of the Cabinet Mission proposals. This time, however, Jinnah would not budge, and said that Nehru’s statement on 10 July showed the ‘real mind of the Congress’. Viceroy Wavell too asked Jawaharlal to call upon Jinnah at his house in Bombay and try to prevail upon him. Jawaharlal did so, and ran against a brick wall. In fact, while on 15 August Jawaharlal was sitting with Jinnah at his house in Bombay, trying vainly to persuade him to withdraw the threat of Direct Action, Suhrawardy, the Muslim League premier of Bengal was applying the finishing touches to the plans for the morrow in Calcutta.

Meanwhile, Dr Mookerjee and his party, decimated in the 1945 elections, could do very little except watch this diabolical game from the wings. The party which had stolen the affection of the public from them, namely the Congress, was in an even worse predicament, helplessly watching the so-called nationalist Muslim support base wither away. A prominent Bengal Congress Muslim, Syed Nausher Ali, was subjected to considerable mental torture, with a demonstration in front of his house in the Park Circus area (an upper-class Muslim-majority area of Calcutta) every morning chanting, ‘Down with Nausher Ali, enemy of Muslims.’ One day, he was summarily driven out of the house with his family, and a signboard was hung in front of his house which said, ‘Muslim League Party Office’. His peers could give him no protection and Nausher Ali had to withdraw from politics for all practical purposes. But the Congress, forever scared of hurting minority sentiments and with a view not to alienate their ‘nationalist Muslim’ support base (which by then had almost ceased to exist), kept silent.

Suhrawardy, meanwhile, was busy with the preparation of the killings. He declared a public holiday on Friday, 16 August. The Congress staged a walk out in the Bengal Legislative Assembly on 12 August in protest against declaring a public holiday in response to a call by a particular political party for hartal (general strike) without taking the assembly into confidence. On 15 August an adjournment motion demanding a debate on the same question was defeated in the Bengal Legislative Council (upper house of the provincial legislature).

Meanwhile, the broad game plan for that day had been carefully prepared and 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 16 August published an advertisement which gave a call to use of force as being the only way to achieve what the Muslims wanted. S.M. Usman, the mayor of Calcutta and the secretary of the Calcutta Muslim League, circulated a leaflet in Bangla which read,¹ ‘Kafer! Toder dhongsher aar deri nei! Sarbik hotyakando ghotbe! (Infidels! Your end is not far off! There will be a total 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 suggesting to its readers that hurting Hindus was quite permissible.

There were open and direct incitements to rioting by top Muslim League leaders. Liaquat Ali Khan told the Associated Press of America that Direct Action meant ‘resorting to non-constitutional methods, and that can take any form and whatever form may suit the conditions under which we live . . . We cannot eliminate any method. Direct Action means any action against the law.’ The supposedly gentle Nazimuddin made an announcement on 11 August, saying, ‘Our plans have not yet been finalized. There are one hundred ways in which we can create difficulties, especially when we are not restricted to non-violence. The Muslim population of Bengal know very well what “Direct Action” would mean, and so we do not need to bother to give them any lead’ (see below Dr Mookerjee’s remarks on the subject in the Bengal Legislative Assembly after the riots). A pamphlet² circulated by S.M. Usman was, however, totally forthright, and read as follows, ‘The call to the revolt comes to us from the Qaid-e-Azam. 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.’

The Communist Party of India openly supported this call to ‘Direct Action’. In their seminal work on the collaboration of the communists with the Muslim League in pre-independence India, titled ‘The Sickle and the Crescent’, Sunanda Sanyal and Soumya Basu have shown the extent to which this collaboration went. Several people, Hindu, Muslim and British, have given detailed, partly eyewitness, accounts of the shape ‘Direct Action’ took. Among them, in the opinion of this biographer, those of Ashok Mitra, ICS and Lieutenant General Sir Francis Tuker are particularly deserving of note and belief, principally because they were both high-ranking government officers, one civil and the other military, and had no reason to be biased. Ashok Mitra, despite being a Hindu, had taken extraordinary risks to drive through the city himself in order to take a Muslim colleague of his to the Medical College Hospital where the wife of the colleague was an inpatient. Apart from Mitra and Tuker, an American scholar called Richard D. Lambert of the University of Pennsylvania had extensively researched the riots and wrote one of the most credible accounts of it, which was made use of by Stanley Wolpert, the biographer of Jinnah, and Leonard Gordon, biographer of the Bose brothers, among others.

Among Muslim chroniclers, this author has come across the account given by Mizanur Rahaman, a literary person and a magazine editor from Dacca, Bangladesh, where the complicity of the League government was considerably watered down³—which is surprising, since Rahaman was anything but a supporter of the League. A contemporary historian, Joya Chatterji, has given a similar explanation, in which she has roundly placed the blame of the riots on Marwari businessmen of Calcutta. However, this view has been rubbished by three of her contemporaries, Amales Tripathi,⁴ Bidyut Chakrabarty⁵ and Partha Chatterjee,⁶ the last of whom has remarked on her ‘astonishingly naïve view’ of things. Abul Mansur Ahmad, on the other hand, gives a different account altogether. He also says that the murder hysteria had been taken to such a pitch by the League leaders that he was once asked by a friend (ordinarily a sensible, humane person), ‘How many . . . have you killed? All your love for Muslims seems to be just lip service’!⁷

Suhrawardy is quoted by Stanley Wolpert as having said that he would see how the British could make Nehru rule Bengal. Direct Action Day would prove to be 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. The last bit was ominous.

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, Long Live the Muslim League)’, ‘Lekar Rahenge Pakistan, Ladke Lenge Pakistan (We shall surely take Pakistan, we shall take Pakistan by force)’.

The army boss of Calcutta, Lieutenant General Sir Francis Tuker, general officer commanding-in-chief of India’s Eastern Army, and Mackinlay’s superior, observed that Suhrawardy had been ‘more critical than helpful during the riots’. Tuker also termed 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 civilization 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 firebugs, on Harrison Road the cries of wounded and terrorized residents.

The tide of the riots turned the next day, that is 18 August, and Suhrawardy’s goons and compatriots (some of whom had nothing to do with the riots) began to get a taste of their own medicine. The lead was taken by the Hindu kalwars (ironmongers and scrap dealers) from Bihar and UP, who were then joined by Sikhs and Hindu Bengalis. 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. It was 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 19 August. A senior Imperial Police officer told Ashok Mitra that on 18 August, Suhrawardy was found sitting forlornly at the Lalbazar control room table, mumbling to himself, ‘My poor, innocent Muslims!’

No official estimate is available of how many people died in the killings. The number of dead is normally determined by a body count, and this would have been not only impossible but also misleading, 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. It could be anything between 5000–25,000, with probably four times that number grievously injured.

Maulana Azad remarks⁸ 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 [Nehru].

Interestingly, he does not put the primary blame on Jinnah or Suhrawardy.

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. 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 decision of Burrows that there was no need to bring in the army, or 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, and of unspeakable cynicism. The British, as the sovereign power, were certainly guilty of standing by and amusing themselves while Suhrawardy’s goons stabbed and torched.

Noakhali followed Calcutta in short order. The population of the district in the British days was overwhelmingly—more than 80 per cent—Muslim. Now it is around 95 per cent or 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, most 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 to 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.⁹

Just as Suhrawardy was the brain behind the Great Calcutta Killings, it was a Muslim League leader called Ghulam Sarwar who plotted the carnage at Noakhali and parts of the adjoining district of Tipperah. Unlike in Calcutta, there was no fear in Noakhali of the tide of rioting turning against the Muslims. The overwhelming numerical majority of Muslims and the remoteness of the area would ensure that there would be no retaliation, nor any swift official action.

Just how provocative Ghulam Sarwar’s speeches and exhortations to attack the Hindus were can be made out only by a person who understands the Noakhali dialect (a lot of Bengalis, even East Bengalis, do not). An English translation is given below, with the caveat that it can never capture the explosive potential and sheer poison of the words.

Brothers, all the fine rice that you grow—who eats it?—Hindus!

Brothers, all the fat bananas that you grow—who eats them?—Hindus!

Brothers, when our women fall ill who paws and feels them all over?—Hindu doctors!

Brothers, why are we Muslims thin and underfed?––because we do not get enough to eat!

Brothers, why are the Hindus fat and greasy?––because they get all the best things to eat!¹⁰

These are lies of course, however much one might want to see the struggle between the haves and have-nots in them. The 20 per cent Hindus of Noakhali could never eat up even a quarter of the rice and bananas that the 80 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.

The full moon night of Kojagari Lokkhi (Lakshmi) Puja is the first full moon after Durga Puja, usually in October. On this night, Bengali Hindus traditionally worship Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. Sarwar and other League leaders chose this day to start their pogrom. They 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. 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 be to kill selectively, but mainly to rape and convert forcibly and to desecrate Hindu places of worship.

The Noakhali Carnage came to be widely known because of Mahatma Gandhi’s famous visit to the district. Gandhi arrived at Choumuhani on 7 November 1946, almost a month after the carnage began and stayed in Noakhali till February 1947. A number of leaders accompanied Gandhi, others came along to join him. Among the prominent people who congregated in remote Noakhali were Acharya J.B. Kripalani and his wife (and a prominent member of Congress in her own right) Sucheta, Sarat Chandra Bose, Surendra Mohan Ghosh, Muriel Lister, A.V. Thakkar Bapa, Ashoka Gupta, Nellie Sengupta and others. Jawaharlal Nehru and Ram Manohar Lohia had also visited the district and rendered themselves memorable by certain utterances that Nehru made and Lohia quoted. That comes a little later.

Another person who accompanied Gandhiji was Louis Fischer, an American journalist who wrote a biography of Gandhi. He describes the Noakhali Carnage thus:

Mr Arthur Henderson told the House of Commons on Nov 4, 1946 that the dead in Noakhali and contiguous Tipperah districts had not yet been counted, but will, according to estimates, be low in the three figures category. The Bengal government put the number of casualties at 218 . . . In Tipperah 9,895 persons were forcibly converted to Islam; in Noakhali inexact data suggested that the number of converts was greater.¹¹

What did Dr Mookerjee do to prevent this holocaust, and what did he do during the holocaust? To answer the last question first, while the riots were raging, human beings had lowered themselves to such a level of bestiality that there was nothing to do except shoot at the marauders—and this is precisely what the British had refused to do, and the Muslim League had disabled the state machinery from doing. Dr Anil Chandra Banerjee, an eminent historian, has remarked in a short monograph titled, ‘A Phase in the Life of Dr Mookerjee, 1937–46’, that: ‘It was not possible for an individual, however able and eminent, to fight effectively against an organization (namely the Muslim League) which controlled the Ministry and was supported by the Governor and the British Civilians . . . It is impossible to recall now the atmosphere of mistrust, neurosis and threats of inter-racial and inter-communal strife which enveloped the country in those days.’ This is pretty much in line with the utterance of Abul Mansur Ahmad’s friend who asked him how many Hindus he had killed.

The situation the country was facing, in short, was like this: on the one hand, the party representing practically all the Muslims of the country was resolutely bent on achieving Pakistan by bloodshed and mayhem. On the other hand, the party representing almost all the Hindus of the country was caught in its own web of delusion, equivocation and fear of losing the support (which did not exist) of Muslims. In such circumstances, Dr Mookerjee, belonging to a fringe party such as the Hindu Mahasabha, could do nothing to prevent or stop the holocaust, for the simple reason that the bulk of the Hindus of Bengal had chosen not to vote for his party—and thereby brought disaster on themselves. All that he could do was to provide relief to the victims and lambast the perpetrators of the holocaust with words. And he did both in ample measure.

A no-confidence motion was moved (and duly defeated) 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-centredness exhibited by the resident whites (then called Europeans) of the city. Excerpts from his speech:¹²

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 Day¹³ 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 . . . 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 a 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. 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 Dr Mookerjee had wanted. Muslim-majority East Bengal, however, was a different story altogether.

Dr Mookerjee’s role in Noakhali was, however, qualitatively different, principally because of the huge number of rapes, molestations and other forms of brutalization committed by the local Muslim men on Hindu women. This was one time when Dr Mookerjee came out not as an educationist, nor as a politician, but as a social reformer. The social custom of Bengali Hindus of the times had it that anyone who had been forced to eat beef would cease to be a Hindu. Of the various suicidal traits that Hindu society has had over the ages, this was one of the worst, and one that caused the thinning of its ranks. Likewise, any Hindu woman, who had been so much as touched by a Muslim, quite against her will, would lose her position in Hindu society, and either would have to become a Muslim or go into prostitution or commit suicide. It is this trait that was taken advantage of by Sarwar’s goons. This is the state in which their rescuers, such as Sucheta Kripalani and Ashoka Gupta found them. When told that they had come to protect them, the Hindus would say with immeasurable sadness and resignation that it was no use, they were no longer Hindus, no Hindu would drink water touched by them.

It is this state of affairs that Dr Mookerjee set about to correct, by radically altering the dicta by which society had run its suicidal course so far. He approached the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, established by Swami Vivekananda, who were already doing relief work in the area and proposed that as one of the guardians of the Hindu religion they ought to come forward in this regard. The Ramakrishna Mission readily agreed and a booklet was published under their auspices under the signature of Swami Madhavananda, general secretary of the Mission. The booklet also contained endorsements by pandits of leading Hindu religious schools, such as those of the Nabadwip Samaj, Bhattapalli Samaj, Bakla Samaj, Kotalipara Samaj, Bikrampur Samaj and other religious luminaries such as Mahamahopadhyay Vidhushekhar Shastri and Bijan Kumar Mukherjea, a judge of the Calcutta High Court and president of the Sanskrit Samaj.

Dr Mookerjee also got leading Sanskrit scholars and religious gurus from all over India to issue dicta to the effect that none of these Hindus should consider themselves converted, nor should the women consider themselves violated. Among these scholars and gurus were the Shankaracharya of Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, Jagadguru Swami Yogeshwar Ananda Tirtha of Goverdhan Math, Puri, Kashi (Benares), Pandit Sabha and the like. All these dicta were appended to the discourse by Swami Madhavananda and included in the booklet.

Dr Mookerjee also toured the affected areas of Noakhali and Tipperah districts and made a statement¹⁴ in Bangla which is demonstrative of the pain he felt. 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’]. 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 . . . It is not a fact that this pogrom was the act of a few hoodlums or that they had all come 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 . . . 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 instruction at home by the Islamic religious leaders. 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 willingly embraced Islam. They are being forced to write to the subdivisional 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 . . .

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)¹⁵ for them to come back to the Hindu fold. There shall be absolutely 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 . . .

In this hour of its peril Hindu society will have to realize 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 organize 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.

After returning to Calcutta from Noakhali, Dr Mookerjee formed a volunteer group called the Hindusthan National Guard. At this time, a similar group called the Muslim National Guards was already in existence, and among its tasks was to threaten anti-League Muslims into capitulation. Today the ‘secular’ brigade would lose no time in dubbing the setting up of such a group as sheer fascism, or worse, but in the embattled, League-ruled, riot-stricken Calcutta of 1946 this worked wonders in instilling confidence among Hindus. Also, apart from touring the districts of Noakhali and Tipperah, restoring the confidence and morale of the Hindus, and embarking on his memorable task of social reform, Dr Mookerjee did the only other thing he could do and he was good at: he horsewhipped Suhrawardy’s government on the floor of the council. Parts of the speech:¹⁶

What has happened in Noakhali and Chandpur is without a parallel in the history of any civilised Government. My charge, Sir, is that not only have the people of Noakhali and Chandpur who belong to the majority community failed to give the protection that was due from them to the minority community and oppressed it . . . all this could have been stopped . . . my demand before the Government is that the Government should follow strictly the principles which have been laid down by the All-India Working Committee of the Muslim League with regard to the protection of the Muslim minority . . .

While discussing Noakhali it might be of profit to compare Gandhi and Dr Mookerjee’s response to the carnage. Gandhi stayed away from Calcutta after Direct Action, but visited Noakhali shortly afterwards, in November 1946, and stayed there till February 1947. He did not make public statements condemning either holocaust, as Dr Mookerjee did. Gandhi’s trip to Noakhali brought the obscure area to the front page of every newspaper of the country, and indeed to the attention of the world. Gandhi’s mission apparently was to restore confidence in the Hindus so that they could come back to their villages and his method 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, one of the people who had come forward to assist him, 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.’

According to Louis Fischer, the American journalist who accompanied Gandhi in Noakhali, his journey was a pilgrimage of penance, in which the pilgrim wears no shoes. 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.¹⁷

Gandhi, it must be acknowledged, had totally failed to achieve his central purpose of getting the Hindus back to their villages where they would live happily ever after in perfect harmony with the majority community, the Muslims. This just did not happen, the good intentions and deeds of a number, not very large, of sensible Muslims notwithstanding. The historian Mushirul Hasan has remarked, ‘Never before did so earnest an effort achieve so little.’ Today, in 2010, sixty-three years after Partition, and thirty-nine years after the formation of independent Bangladesh, there are very few Hindus (around 3 per cent, down from 18 per cent in 1946) in what used to be the district of Noakhali in British India. The proportion of Hindus in the whole of Bangladesh is currently around 9 per cent, down from 29 per cent in 1947.

An interesting sidelight of Noakhali was something Nehru said to Ram Manohar Lohia by way of a private conversation while visiting the place during Gandhi’s stay there. To quote Lohia,¹⁸ ‘Mr Nehru spoke of the water, slime, bush and tree that he found everywhere in East Bengal. He said that that was not the India he or I knew and wanted with some vehemence to cut East Bengal away from the mainland of India. That was an extraordinary observation.’ As for Lohia’s own view, he has said,¹⁹ ‘I found the gay laughter of East Bengal women unparalleled in all the world.’

Did Gandhi understand what people like Jinnah, Suhrawardy and Sarwar were trying to do through the Great Calcutta Killings and the Noakhali Carnage? It is difficult to imagine that a person like Gandhi, with his razor-sharp intelligence and after a lifetime in politics, did not—but if he did, he never gave anyone any indication. What they were trying to do was to wage a civil war. And it did not end with Calcutta and Noakhali. What happened in Punjab in the wake of Partition and later in erstwhile East Pakistan in 1950, 1964 and 1971 were nothing less than a civil war. Worse still, an inconclusive variant of a civil war is still in progress in Kashmir, and continually spills over to mainstream India in the form of terrorism, like 26/11 in Mumbai.

As the succeeding seventy years would show, 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. India has somehow muddled through these problems, remained one, and prospered, but Pakistan has broken up. It is today acknowledged to be a failed state, and Bangladesh used to be called an international basket case, though lately it has shown some encouraging signs of recovery. In fact, Mountbatten knew beforehand that it was going to be a disaster. He wrote in his diary,²⁰ ‘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.’

A look at the dramatis personae on the two sides in this civil war and another one that happened nearly a century earlier between the American north and south, also on the question of partition, reveals interesting facts. Gandhi conceded partition, Jinnah emerged victorious with his Pakistan. Lincoln resisted partition, went to civil war and emerged victorious too, with his United States intact. Jinnah was suffering from incurable tuberculosis at the time of Partition and died a natural death about a year later, but his second-in-command Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated. So was Gandhi, so was Lincoln. And so, in all probability, was Dr Mookerjee, however much his death is sought to be passed off as natural (see Chapter 15).

Now as to the civil war: recall what Dr Mookerjee had written in his diary (in Bengali), on 10 January 1946 while convalescing at Madhupur (see Chapter 15):

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 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 [emphasis added]. 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.

Earlier, on 4 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.’

The sheer sagacity, the outstanding perspicacity of the man shines through. These words, it must be remembered, were written when no Hindu believed that the country would be partitioned, when neither the Great Calcutta Killings nor the Noakhali Carnage had taken place. Nobody listened to him. His own party, the Hindu Mahasabha, had been decimated in the elections, and Hindu consciousness in the country was dominated by the Congress led by Gandhi. The Hindus listened to what the Congress told them and the result is today well known. According to a saying attributed to John Maynard Keynes, human beings will do the sensible thing, but only after all alternatives have been exhausted.