My people, uprooted a saga of the hindus of eastern bengal_ by tathagata roy

12/20/13 "My People, Uprooted: A Saga of the Hindus of Eastern Bengal" by Tathagata Roy

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Chapter 2

THE COUNTDOWN : POLITICS OF BENGALBETWEEN THE TWO PARTITIONS, 1905-1947

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

It is neither possible nor intended to give even an overview ofthe politics of Bengal during this very eventful half-century.Volumes have been written on this period, and further volumeswill continue to be written. However, it is impossible tounderstand the Hindu exodus from East Bengal without bearingin mind the political framework of the times and the major

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political events that took place during the period precedingpartition of the province. After all, the exodus was a purelypolitical phenomenon – neither religious nor economic.Religion was merely the human attribute exploited in this caseby the relevant politicians, and the economic disaster thatfollowed was the result, not the cause of the exodus. In facteconomic factors had nothing whatsoever to do with thisparticular brand of persecution --- Muslim Ashraf and Atrapcombined without qualms to drive out Hindu zamindar, pleader,artisan, fisherman and cultivator.

First of all, an explanation as to why the period 1905-1947 hasbeen chosen is called for. 1905 was the year of the firstpartition of Bengal, an event of very far-reaching politicalsignificance. In between there was the politically watershedyear of 1920. This was about the time when problems betweenHindu and Muslim in undivided India began to take on seriousproportions. This was also, coincidentally, the year whenMohandas Karamchand Gandhi made a serious entry into thepolitics of India with his non-cooperation movement. This wasalso the year Lokamanya Balgangadhar Tilak died. The‘problems between Hindu and Muslim’ referred to are basicallycommunal riots between Hindu and Muslim, of which Bengalhad more than its fair share. 1947, on the other hand was theyear of India’s independence and Bengal’s second partition, theyear in which atrocities against Hindus in erstwhile EastPakistan began with overt or covert state sponsorship, andgradually took on the form of another holocaust.

Such state-sponsored atrocities against Hindus have notstopped even after the independence of Bangladesh in 1971.They have merely taken on a much more covert form, which isreally a case of bad habits dying hard. The year 1992 had seenunspeakable horrors against Hindus once again, in the wake ofdemolition of a disused mosque built on the birthplace of thelegendary Lord Rama at Ayodhya in India. It was this particularset of atrocities that prompted the tigress from Mymensingh, afrail Muslim woman doctor called Taslima Nasrin, to come outwith her unforgettable volume Lojja (Shame) that truly markeda watershed in this otherwise drab landscape. More on Taslimaand Lojja later.

To start, take a brief look at 1905. Lord Curzon had beenappointed the Governor-General and Viceroy of India inDecember 1898, and served in that post till 1905. He was notknown for his fondness of Indians, and was even less fond ofBengali Hindus in particular. Before leaving he delivered a



parting kick to the province in the form of the first partition ofBengal. According to his scheme the existing BengalPresidency (which at that time included the present states ofBihar and Orissa) was divided into two parts. The western part,comprising the Presidency and Burdwan divisions togetherwith Bihar, Chhota Nagpur and Orissa would form the rumpBengal. The eastern part would be joined with Assam, to beknown as the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. Thisscheme was hatched by him much earlier, and he toured theprovince to garner support for the same, helped by his ablelieutenant Sir Bamfylde Fuller. Sir Bamfylde then became thegovernor of the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam,with its capital at Dacca. Their main selling point for thescheme was that it would fetch for the Muslims a province inwhich they would be in majority and would not have to playsecond fiddle to the Hindus. Predictably, they got the supportof a number of Muslim landowners of East Bengal, amongthem Salimullah, the influential Nawab of Dacca. Sir Bamfyldehad gone one step ahead of his boss in his salesmanship.Bengali folklore is replete with stories of a king who had twoqueens – Suo Rani, the great favourite, on whom the kinglavished love and gifts, and Duo Rani, the neglected, cast-asideone. Sir Bamfylde used to publicly proclaim[1] that for him theHindu was the Duo Rani, and the Muslim Suo Rani.

The partition had been done with the clear objective ofbreaking the back of the Bengali Hindu, and currying favourwith the Muslims. There was widespread opposition to it fromall Hindus and a significant number of Muslims, but LordCurzon remained stuck to it saying that it was a ‘settled fact’.Among the prominent people who publicly opposed thepartition were the poets Rabindra Nath Tagore, Rajani KantaSen, Kaliprosonno Kavyavisharad, Dwijendra Lal Roy ;assorted public men and men of letters such as Surendra NathBanerjea, Ramendra Sundar Tribedi, Bipin Chandra Paul,Suresh Chandra Samajpati, Monoranjan Guha Thakurta, andmany others. However the number of prominent BengaliMuslims who opposed the partition was very heartening. Theyincluded the Barrister Abdul Rasul, Moulavi Abul Qasem, AbulHossain, Dedar Bux, Deen Mohammed, Abdul GhafoorSiddiqui, Liaqat Hossain, Ismail Shirazi, Abdul Halim Ghaznavi,and others. Aqatullah, younger brother of Salimullah, theNawab of Dacca, was a very prominent protester. This list ofprominent Muslims is quite interesting, because never again inthe politics of Bengal – divided or undivided – would Hindusand Muslims join hands in such large numbers on any issue.

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The period between 1905 and 1920 was a period of disquiet forthe whole of the subcontinent. There were the Morley-Mintoadministrative reforms in 1910, the repeal of the partition ofBengal in 1911, and moving the capital of British India fromCalcutta to Delhi with the inauguration of New Delhi in thesame year with a royal visit. Meanwhile armed rebellion as anexpression of nationalism gained ground in Bengal. The firstman to be sent to the gallows in 1909, a young man calledKhudiram Bose, was followed by countless others. The firstworld war was waged in 1914, and continued upto 1918. Twoyoung Bengali Hindu revolutionaries, Jatindra Nath Mukherjeeand Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya collaborated with the Germanconsul at Shanghai, and planned to import two shiploads ofarmaments and land them at Raimangal in the Sundarbans and atBalasore in Orissa. The plan did not work out. Jatindra NathMukherjee, also known as Bagha (Tiger) Jatin, was killed in agun battle with the police at Balasore. Bhattacharyya escapedabroad, changed his name to Manabendra Nath Roy (betterknown as M.N. Roy) and became an associate of Lenin duringand after the Russian revolution. A British army officer calledDyer in 1919 opened fire upon a peaceful gathering in a squareat Amritsar in Punjab and killed 1516 people in cold blood.Rabindra Nath Tagore renounced his Knighthood in protest.

Meanwhile the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms were introducedin India in 1919 and ushered in a period of Dyarchy. In thissystem the total range of activities of the government wasdivided into two groups. One group was called ‘Reserved’ andcontained the more important and critical departments, such asRevenue, Police and the Judiciary. These were kept exclusivelyin British hands. The other group, called ‘Transferred’comprising the less critical departments, such as Health, LocalGovernment, Education, etc. were put to a limited extent inIndian hands, but with such safeguards that the British retainedthe power of ultimate decision even on these subjects.

It was around this time that the country started gettingpolarised around the two principal parties of the country, theCongress and the Muslim League. The Congress, founded in1885 by a retired British ICS man Allan Octavian Hume as aplatform for dialogue between the elite among the Indians andthe British quickly changed itself into a forum of anti-BritishIndians of differing intensities. Although there was no religiousbias to the party to begin with, Muslims were lukewarm aboutthe party from day one. Vincent Smith, an eminent historianwrites[2] : “The Muslims in general watched the growth of theCongress from a distance and stood aloof from its




controversies with Lord Curzon. But having allowed it tobecome dominantly Hindu in character through theirabstention, they took alarm at the first sign of concessions toits demands. From this sprang the deputation to Lord Minto in1906, led by the Agha Khan, which demanded separateelectorates for Muslims in any representative system thatmight be introduced.”

The Muslim League, founded in 1906 by Nawab Salimullah ofDacca, also changed its character. It was originally conceivedas a political organ of the Muslim landowning class. Howeverin 1913 a very urbane, very anglicised, and anything-but-a-devout-Muslim barrister from Bombay called M. A. Jinnahjoined the League. He had joined the Congress in 1906, andjoined the League while still with the Congress. He was born inKarachi in 1876 as Mahomet Ali Jheenabhai among a Shi’iteMuslim sect called Khoja Ismaili who, curiously enough, aregoverned by Hindu personal laws. Under his leadership theLeague gradually became the rallying point of all IndianMuslims who wanted to be different from Hindus in as manyways as possible. The Congress however continued to persist inthe illusion that it was for Hindus and Muslims alike. Thisillusion, as we shall see, persists to this day, and was one of thefactors 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.Jinnahwould be in order. What sort of a person was this M.A.Jinnahwho, as we all know now, brought about the political division ofthe subcontinent, the creation of a state called Pakistan, thegreatest migration in history, the great Calcutta killings, andneedless misery to countless people of India, largely becauseof, and by the force of his enormous ego? A man who isworshipped as the Qaid-e-Azam, and hated for the vivisectionof the country, depending on which side of the political andreligious divide one is on, could not have been an ordinaryperson. Some of the best insights into his character areavailable from the autobiography of his onetime junior in thelegal profession, M.C.Chagla[3].

According to Chagla, Jinnah around 1920 was a completelyirreligious person who never prayed, never visited a mosque,and was very fond of ham sandwiches and pork sausages, foodabsolutely prohibited by his religion Islam. Chagla describeshim as the uncrowned king of Bombay, idolized by the youthfor his sturdy nationalism. How did such a person become thenarrow 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 theCongress being in the total grip of Gandhi[4]. Second, hispersonal life : he had married Ruttie, a Parsee Zoroastrian girlmany years his junior, daughter of his friend Sir Dinshaw Petit.It was an incompatible match, and had resulted in an unhappymarriage, but Jinnah truly loved her. Ruttie was an avidnationalist, and a good influence on Jinnah, politicallyspeaking. Ruttie died early, and after that Jinnah's onlycompanion at home was his unmarried sister Fatima who was ascommunal-minded as Ruttie was liberal. Chagla hasspecifically remarked that she enjoyed Jinnah's diatribesagainst the Hindus, and if anything, injected an extra dose ofvenom into them[5]. What followed, of course, is history.

Now to return to the state of the country : the times around1920 was extremely eventful in many other ways, such asGandhi’s protest against the exploitation of indigo farmers inChamparan, Bihar, followed by the same against the infamousRowlatt Act, and finally the launch of his non-cooperationmovement ; the end to transportation of Indian ‘indenturedlabour’ to Mauritius, the West Indies, Fiji, and South Africa ;and many others. However, two events particularly relevant tothe subject of this book took place at this time. The first wasJinnah’s severing ties with the Congress following seriousdifferences between him and Gandhi with regard to the latter’snon-cooperation movement. The second took place not inIndia, but in faraway Sevres in France on 14th May, 1920. Itwas the publication of the terms of a treaty proposed by theBritish with the Turkish Sultan. His Ottoman empire had foughton the side of the Germans in the war, and was thereforedismembered. The European part of the empire came under theadministration of a commission. The Arab Asian part –comprising the Arabian peninsula, Palestine, Syria andMesopotamia (later Iraq) went to Britain and France, under thegarb of League of Nations mandates. Only Asia Minor (presentTurkey) remained directly with the Sultan. Till the Sultanacceded to these terms his empire would remain under thedirect control of the allies.

Now apart from being the ruler of Turkey the Sultan, having hadtemporal jurisdiction over Mecca, was also, ex officio theCaliph or Khalifa, the temporal head of pan-Islam. TheMuslims of India, or the fundamentalists among them at anyrate, were therefore quite agitated over this politicalemasculation of the Sultan and started a political movementwhich came to be known as the Khilafat movement. The Indian





National Congress under Gandhi allied itself completely andwholeheartedly to this movement.

Gandhi’s intention behind doing this was obviously to involvethe Muslims in the struggle for independence and therebyforge some kind of a united front against the British. Gandhi,unlike his successor Jawaharlal Nehru, was deeply aware of thebasic religiosity of Indians[6] and therefore consideredKhilafat to be an ideal channel for reaching his objectives. TheBritish, on the other hand, were counting on the deep schismbetween the two communities and were quite disturbed aboutthe designs of Gandhi. Lord Reading, the Viceroy of India,wrote to Lord Montagu, the Secretary of State for Indiapressing him to alter the terms of the Sevres treaty, with a viewto placate the Muslims of India. Meanwhile Mustapha KemalPasha came to power in Turkey. He was wedded to the idea ofmodernising and secularising Turkey. He replaced Arabicalphabets by Roman ones in writing the Turkish language,abolished the purdah (wearing a veil) system for women andmade it illegal to wear the Fez, the red conical tasseled cap thathad become the hallmark of the Muslim in the early part of thetwentieth century. As one of the first steps towards thismodernisation and secularisation he abolished the Caliphate,and the Khilafat movement in India died out.

In the wake of the Khilafat movement, however, other thingswere happening in India. On the Malabar coast,[7] thenorthernmost part of the present-day state of Kerala, in August1921, a group of Muslims of Arab descent known as theMoplahs started agitating against the British. Their rebellion,however, quickly took an abject anti-Hindu turn. The officialestimate of deaths, practically all Hindus in this Muslim-majority area, was as much as 2,339. There was widespreadforcible conversion of Hindus and desecration as well asdestruction of Hindu temples. Some three years later, inSeptember 1924, terrible anti-Hindu riots broke out at Kohatin the North-West Frontier Province. Desecration anddestruction of Hindu temples also took place in Amethi in theUnited Provinces and Gulbarga in Bombay Presidency. Theyear 1926 saw as many as thirty-five Hindu-Muslim riots in thecountry. In the riots in Bombay city that took place in 1929several hundreds died. Out of these the Moplah massacre andthe Kohat riots were total anti-Hindu pogroms. The Congress,however, made only a few feeble noises against the Moplahmassacre. In respect of the Kohat riots Gandhi started a fast – ahunger-strike actually – at the residence of MoulanaMohammed Ali[8] in Delhi in order to foster goodwill between






the two communities and continued for twenty-one days. Theseriots marked the beginning of the communal rioting that wouldplague the subcontinent for the remainder of the century.

Gandhi’s unstinted support for the Khilafat movement, howeverwell-intentioned it might have been, together with the feeblereaction of the Congress to the anti-Hindu pogroms of Malabarand Kohat, were terrible mistakes, because they sent all kindsof wrong (and presumably unintended) signals to past andpotential anti-Hindu rioters. The first and most importantsignal received by the Muslims was that the Hindu-dominatedCongress would henceforth, so long as Gandhi was in charge,bend over backwards in any given situation to please theMuslims. That trait had already been shown in Gandhi’sparticipating in a sectarian, retrogressive movement like theKhilafat to reinstall a temporal religious leader manythousands of miles away with whom no Indian Muslim shouldhave had any reason to have any business.

M.C.Chagla, who has been mentioned earlier in connectionwith the personality of Jinnah, has roundly criticised Gandhi'sparticipation in the Khilafat movement. In his autobiography hewrites "I have always felt that Gandhiji was wrong in trying tobring about Hindu-Muslim unity by supporting the cause of theKhilafat. Such unity was built on shifting sands. So long as thereligious cause survived, the unity was there; but once thatcause was removed the unity showed its weakness. All theKhilafatis who had been attracted to the Congress came out intheir true colours, that is as more devoted to their religion thanto their country". In Chagla's view it was the Muslim Leagueunder the leadership of Jinnah which was then the party ofpatriotic, secular, modernised Muslims, and the Congressshould have allied itself with the League[9].

The second unfortunate signal sent by Gandhi's alliance withthe Khilafatis was that, provided a sufficiently large numbercould be incited to participate in an anti-Hindu riot, nothingmuch would happen either to the riot inciters or to a mob.Most certainly the Congress would not, repeat not, ask forpunishment for the guilty, because that would amount tocommitting two sins : first, showing that they were prepared totake up cudgels on behalf of Hindus, and therefore could not besaid to be equitable towards Muslims ; and second, obliquelyadmitting that the British alone could keep peace amongHindus and Muslims.

The Congress’s usual reaction to any anti-Hindu riot




henceforth would be a mild and inane statement, calling forcessation of all hostilities and restoration of peace andgoodwill between the two communities. The worst that couldhappen following an anti-Hindu riot was that Gandhi himselfwould come down to the spot of the riot, and appeal foruniversal peace, hold prayer meetings, or go on fast. Not abreath about bringing the guilty to book. Then some Muslimleader somewhere would make some gesture to make Gandhibreak his fast, such as by promising that they would henceforthuse their good offices to prevent further rioting. Then Gandhiwould break his fast, and the next few days would be all Bhai-Bhai (we are all brothers), until the next riot. Meanwhile therioters would have had their fun of torching, looting, killing andof course, raping. All in the name of a holy war upon infidels.

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

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

These signals had a profound influence on the turn of events inthe province of Bengal. Here, first, the Muslims were in themajority. Secondly, they could be inflamed much more easily





in the name of waging a Jihad, holy war. Thirdly the logistics ofinflaming passions among Muslims existed in the form of theirprayer meetings five times a day. And now they were being toldthat an occasional deviation would result, at worst, in yetanother fast by Gandhi. The inevitable result followed. Theincreasing number of Muslims flocking to the Muslim Leaguefelt emboldened beyond belief. With one party among the twoprincipal ones in the country being their very own, and theother trying to placate and appease them in every conceivableway, the future was surely theirs.

In the midst of all these the communities were fast becomingso clearly divided as to make any talk about ‘common interest’increasingly an absurdity. The fringe of Muslims with theCongress, who were called ‘Nationalist Muslims’ at that time,was constantly dwindling. Meanwhile M.A.Jinnah had returnedto India from Britain to be elected the ‘Permanent President’of the Muslim League and the Muslim League had becomesynonymous with this one man. By and large the Hindus andMuslims looked up respectively to the Congress and theMuslim League as their own parties, and to Gandhi and Jinnahas their supreme leaders. There were a few exceptions to thisrule. 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 AbdulGhaffar Khan of the North-West Frontier, also known as theFrontier 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 theUnionist Party in Punjab, and the Krishak Proja Party in Bengalheld out as strong, self-willed, mainstream Muslim politicalparties distinct from the League. The former was a party whichrepresented rural, as opposed to urban, interests in Punjab, andwas led by Mian (later Sir) Fazli Hussain, followed by SirSikandar Hyat Khan, and Khizr Hyat Tiwana. This party cutacross religious lines, and had among its leaders Lala (laterSir) Chotu Ram, representing Hindu Jat agricultural interestsand a number of leaders from among Sikh agriculturists. Thelatter was led by A. K. Fazlul Haq and represented Muslimagriculturists while the Muslim League in Bengal belonged tothe Muslim elite, namely the Zamindar class. More about thisparty later in this chapter.

The sensible thing under such circumstances for the Congresswould have been to ally with these parties, who had credibleand sober Muslim leaders, so as to draw Muslims away fromthe rabidly communal Muslim League. Yet the Congress



continued to persist in the illusion that they alone representedHindus and Muslims alike, and in order to reinforce their ownfaith in it were prepared to do anything – anything at all - toplease the Muslims. This did not hurt Hindus from theprovinces where they were in an overwhelming majority, suchas Bombay Presidency, Madras Presidency or the CentralProvinces and Berar. This did not hurt the Punjabi Hindus orSikhs either, because of the presence of the Unionist Partydescribed above ; nor the Hindus in the North-West FrontierProvince because Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, very close to theCongress, held sway there. This did not even hurt the Hindus inthe United Provinces or Bihar because, in spite of thesubstantial Muslim minority being solidly behind the League,the majority was still with the Hindus. On the other hand it hurtthe Bengali Hindus like none else, because there was no onehere to save them from the tyranny of the Muslim Leagueexcept the Congress, and that party would do nothing to helpthe Hindus for fear of being dubbed communal. The one slimray of hope that existed with Fazlul Haq’s Krishak Proja Partywas adequately taken care of by the Congress’s remainingequidistant from them and the League, followed by a mostregrettable and pigheaded refusal in 1937 to make a coalitionwith them.

In such a state Round Table Conferences – some three roundsof them – were held in London among the various concernedparties, namely the British, the Congress the Muslim Leagueand diverse other groups. Nothing much came out of them. In1932 Ramsay Macdonald, the Labourite Prime Ministerannounced his 'Communal Award'. This award fixed communalrepresentations in the provinces and was given its final shapeby the Poona Pact of 4th September 1932 which securedgeneral as well as special representations for the scheduled ordepressed classes. This was followed finally by a mammothpiece of legislation known as the Government of India Act1935, which received royal assent on 4th August 1935. VincentSmith describes it as “the last major constructive achievementof the British in India”.

What did the 1935 act do? In short, it enlarged the scope ofpopular representation subject to the paramountcy of theBritish. It put an end to the Dyarchy of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms and introduced the federal principle withthe corollary of provincial autonomy and the principle ofpopular responsible government in the provinces. Muslim-majority Sind was separated from Bombay Presidency (whichhad an overall Hindu majority) to form a separate province. A



new province of Orissa was formed from the Orissa Divisionof the former province of Bihar and Orissa and the adjacentportions of Madras Presidency and Central Provinces. Burmawas completely separated from India, and a separate act calledthe Government of Burma Act was re-enacted in the very nextsession of the British Parliament.

Provincial elections took place in February 1937 and resultedin striking Congress successes in the Hindu-majorityprovinces. The Muslim League did well only among Muslimsin 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 as715 ; but of the 485 Muslim seats they contested 85 and wononly 26. The Muslim League won only two out of the 86Muslim seats in the Punjab, 40 out of 119 in Bengal, and noneat all in Sind and the North-West Frontier. Thus, veryironically, the Muslim League made a very poor showing in theland mass that is today known as Pakistan.

Two things happened in these elections which made riftbetween 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 Congressand Muslim League had contested the seats on anunderstanding that there would be a coalition if they won. Thiswas termed ‘independent cooperation’ by Jinnah and wasadopted not just in U.P. but also in all Hindu-majorityprovinces. Jinnah went on to declare “There is really nosubstantial difference between the League and the Congress . . .. we shall always be glad to cooperate with the Congress intheir constructive programmes”.

When the results came out it was found that the Congress hadwon 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, thateverybody else will have to ‘simply fall in line’ with theCongress. This actually reinforced Jinnah’s oft-taken positionthat however much they talked about cutting across religiouslines, the Congress could not be trusted to look after theinterests of the Muslims. Maulana Azad has termed this actionof Jawaharlal a blunder equal to the one he made nine yearslater on July 10, 1946 when, by a thoughtless remark at a pressconference, he gave an opportunity to Jinnah to wriggle out ofthe League’s reluctant acceptance of the Cabinet Missionproposals (see later in the chapter).



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

the Congress obliged the League byaccommodating them in the United Provinces,the Hindus would surely have accused them ofappeasing the League[13]. It is difficult toaccept this position. Chatterjee has notmentioned who among the Hindus would havemade this accusation. Only the HinduMahasabha would have done it, and they did iteven otherwise, not without any justification. Intruth the reason lay in the Congress’s eternalgrand delusion : that they, and they alone,represented all castes and communities throughthe length and breadth of India.

The second incident took place in Bengal. Here,three parties emerged, with none being able tosecure a majority. Fazlul Haq’s Krishak ProjaParty, representing the interests of Muslimagriculturists secured most of the seats reservedfor the Muslims, but that was not sufficient forhim to form a ministry. Haq himself was deeplysuspicious of the Muslim League, and wanted tohave no truck with them. A number of prominentmembers of the party, though devout Muslims,were nationalistically inclined, and wanted acoalition with the Hindu-dominated Congress.The Congress however remained stuck in atotally inflexible position, which later proveddisastrous, that they would rather sit in theopposition but would not enter into anycoalition. Fazlul Haq thus was driven into acoalition with the Muslim League and is said to





have remarked, in so many words, that he hadbeen thrown to the wolves. An understandingwas reached between him and the MuslimLeague leaders Suhrawardy[14] and Nazimuddinthrough the good offices of a Bengali HinduIndustrialist called Nalini Ranjan Sarker[15] andthe Coalition Ministry took office in late 1937.Suhrawardy and Nazimuddin had, until theprevious year, belonged to a party known as theUnited Muslim Party which merged with Jinnah’sMuslim League through the efforts of Ispahaniand a few others[16].

This refusal of the Congress to form a coalitionwith Fazlul Haq has already been termedpigheaded, and was the result of a decision ofthe All-India Congress Committee (AICC) whorefused to make an exception in the case ofBengal. This was probably the first nail to bedriven 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 inflexibleprinciple, because the selfsame AICC permittedsuch a coalition in Assam. Now why did theAICC do it? Was it an act of simple politicalstupidity that occasionally occurs in the life ofevery nation and moulds the destiny of millions?Or was it something deeper, an act ofspitefulness? And if the AICC did it why didn’tthe Bengal Congress raise their voice againstsuch a decision, and in favour of coalition withHaq? Perhaps we shall never know. However wecan look at observations of contemporarywatchers 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 atvery close range. It is generally acknowledgedthat his objectivity, astuteness, and power ofobservation could not be seriously faulted if theBritish were not concerned. He has said[17] : “Iam unable to say whether the treatment ofBengal by the Congress was deliberate. Butthere is no doubt that there was indifference toBengal in the Congress, if not some realantipathy, which, in spite of being only latent,influenced policies. . . . . Here I have only toadd that at that early stage even Sarat Boseshowed lack of foresight by being opposed tooffice acceptance”.

These were all momentous events, theCommunal Award of 1932, the Government ofIndia Act 1935 and the taking office of FazlulHaq’s coalition ministry in 1937. What did theymean for Bengal, or more precisely, BengaliHindus and Bengali Muslims ?

Again, Nirad C. Chaudhuri had spoken aboutthese with remarkable clarity. He has this tosay[18] : “Let me begin with the politicalsituation in the strict sense. The starkly obviousfeature was that, under the provincialconstitution imposed on Bengal by theGovernment of India Act 1935, Bengali Hinduswere permanently debarred (italics his) fromexercising any political power in their province .. . . . . except through the charity of the Muslimswhich was not likely to be bestowed. . . . . theywere reduced to a permanent statutory minority,disenfranchised as to power, although given the





franchise to elect members to the legislature”. Itought to be mentioned that this situationcontinued till the partition of the province(except for the brief interregnum of Fazlul Haq’sministry, 1941-43) till the province waspartitioned and Hindu-majority West Bengalcame into being. Chaudhuri also wrote[19] in thethen popular Bengali monthly Sanibarer Chithi inSeptember 1936 “ Today, as a result of theCommunal Award of 1932, there is going to be adominance of Muslims, as against the Hindus,over the governance of Bengal. . . . . They (theBengali Hindus) are apprehensive that as soon asthe Muslims get political power they would, ineducation as in literature, undermine the veryculture based on ancient Indian ideals which wasthe pride of the Bengali Hindu. The fear isneither baseless nor unjustified. . . .”(Translation his).

Meanwhile there were legislative and economicchanges which bettered the lot of the Muslimpeasant. The Bengal Tenancy Act, the legislationforming the framework of the Zamindari system,underwent two amendments, all in favour of theryot, the tenant peasant, most of whom in EasternBengal were Muslim. Jute prices also registereda steep upward movement around this time, andjute cultivators were almost all Muslim. Thiseconomic empowerment had an immediatepolitical fallout. Muslims began to increasinglyoccupy posts of Presidents (who were hithertomostly Hindu) of Union Boards, the lowest rungin the system then prevalent of Local Self-Government.




In the meantime, while the Congress wasproceeding on the Gandhian path, and theMuslim League was busy trying to wrest asmuch as possible for the Muslims, a differentkind of movement was in full swing in Bengal.This was the movement of those who had chosenthe path of violence to freedom. They wereconfined largely to Bengal, and to some extent toPunjab and the Maharashtra region of theBombay Presidency. The British used to callthem terrorists, but in Bengal they were knownas Biplobi or Revolutionaries. Their epoch wasBengal’s Ognijug or Agniyuga, the era of fire.

Normally when one talks of Revolutionaries onealmost automatically thinks of Marxists orCommunists, but these people had nothing to dowith Marxism. In fact the Marxists orCommunists had played a very underhand andnefarious role in India’s freedom movement –more on this subject later. The inspiration for themovement came from a variety of sources –mainly from the patriotic song Vande Mataramcomposed by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, theteachings of Swami Vivekananda, and to the partof the Hindu scriptures known as Bhagavad Gita,which is actually a collection of the counsel thatLord Shri Krishna gave to the warrior Arjuna onthe battlefield of Kurukshetra.

This phase of India’s struggle for freedomactually began in the early years of the century,led by a brilliant person called Aurobindo Ghoshwho had qualified for the ICS, but failed the testof riding a horse. He eventually left themovement for a life of spiritualism, and came to



be known as Sri Aurobindo of Pondicherry. Themovement did not have any central control, as aresult of which it ebbed and flowed with varyingstrength at various points of time. KhudiramBose and Prafulla Chaki were among the first totake shots at the British. Khudiram’s death byhanging and Prafulla’s in a gunfight providedinspiration for hundreds of others. During theFirst World War some of the revolutionariestried to collaborate with the Germans – theefforts of Bagha Jatin in this regard have alsobeen referred to earlier.

It is not that the Revolutionaries did not haveany organisation at all, merely that they had nocentral organisation, planning, coordination orcontrol. In fact they used to operate under theloose control of a number of organisationsspread throughout the province, especially EastBengal. One very important such organisationwas the Anushilan Samiti which had more thanfive hundred branches in East Bengal. Amongthe others were Jugantar Dal, Attonnati Samiti,Sri Sangha, Prabartak Sangha and others. A highpoint in the Revolutionary movement wasreached on 18th April 1930 when a group ofvery ordinary middle-class Bengali HinduBhadralok, having formed themselves into anorganisation called the Indian Republican Army(doubtless under inspiration from their Irishcounterparts), led by a schoolteacher calledShurjo Sen, also known as Masterda, raided thedistrict armoury at Chittagong and cut offChittagong from the rest of the world bysimultaneously ransacking the telegraph office.Most of the group perished in the gunfights that



followed, but Masterda, with his associateTarakeshwar Dastidar were captured, tried andhanged. Their bodies were not allowed to becremated for fear of unrest. Instead they weresecretly thrown into the sea. Some others, suchas a young intrepid woman called PritilataOhdedar, chose to commit suicide. Meanwhile anumber of Indian and British police officers,such as Ellison of Comilla, Asatullah and TariniMukherjee were shot dead by otherrevolutionaries. The same year saw a gun-battleon the corridors of Writers’ Buildings inCalcutta, the seat of the Bengal Government,where three young men called Binoy Basu,Badal Gupta and Dinesh Gupta shot deadSimpson and Craig, two very senior policeofficers, and were themselves killed orsubsequently hanged.

There were similar revolutionaries following thepath of armed insurrection in other provincestoo, notably in Punjab and in the Maharashtrapart of Bombay Presidency. In fact the firstamong such revolutionaries to go to the gallowswere the Chapekar brothers of Poona (nowPune). However, the preponderance of Bengal inthis phase of the struggle for freedom is broughtout by nothing else as clearly as the walls of thecellular jail at Port Blair, Andaman Islands. Inthe British days the Indian Penal Codeprescribed the punishment of ‘transportation forlife’ for certain offences, and that meant movingto the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal,which were penal colonies just as French Guianaand Devil’s Island were to the French. Thispractice was abolished after independence, and



the cellular jail today stands as a nationalmonument. Now, the cellular jail has the namesof its inmates inscribed on the walls, and hasthem classified province-wise – and out of thethirty-two walls where such names appear, asmany as twenty-three carry those from Bengal.

Two points are to be noted. First, theserevolutionaries were, to a man, all Hindus.Secondly, barring those from the district ofMidnapore, practically all the rest were fromEast Bengal, many of them from the districts ofBarisal, Dacca, Faridpur, Chittagong andTipperah.

Because of the lack of a central control, of anydefinite gameplan, and more than anything elseof leadership, the revolutionary movementpetered out. But it had put the fear of God in theBritish and had mobilised a lot of fence-sitters tocommit themselves totally to independence ofthe country. While popular perception has it thatthe mainstream Congress movement, followingthe path of non-violence under Gandhi, wasprimarily responsible for bringing independenceto the country, this is not accepted by all. In factit remains an enigma to this day as to whatprecisely prompted the Imperial British to giveup the first slice, the brightest jewel, of theirempire, and go home without a serious fight. It iswidely believed that Netaji Subhas ChandraBose’s Azad Hind Fauj or Indian National Army,and the Naval Mutiny of 1946 had played atleast as important a part as Gandhi’s non-violentmovements ; because these two caused theBritish to start doubting, for the second time



since the War of Independence of 1857 (wronglytermed by some as the Sepoy Mutiny), theloyalty of their Indian troops. Along with these,the revolutionaries of Bengal and Punjab musthave played a very important role too!

But that is not the end of the enigma. Whathappened to those among the fearlessrevolutionaries who survived, the majority ofwhom were Hindus from East Bengal? Verystrangely, practically all of them left East Bengalafter partition, hounded out by Muslims, withoutso much as a whimper. The enigma is, why didpeople, who had braved the imperial power ofthe British, succumb so meekly when challengedby the might of the much less powerful Pakistanistate and their rag-tag Lungi-clad Muslimrioters? Why did such people run away fromplaces that were their homes for hundreds ofyears? This question has been rarely, if ever,asked. An answer to this question, and also whyit is not asked, has been attempted in chapter 10of this book.

All these surviving East Bengali Hindurevolutionaries lived on to become embittered,frustrated, disgruntled old men in the refugeecolonies of post-partition West Bengal. Theirexploits were largely forgotten in the mediablitzkrieg launched by the Congressites in theirself-praise and in praise of Gandhi and Nehruand their non-violent struggle. Theirgrandchildren born in post-partition West Bengalrefused to believe that they did the kind of thingsthey claimed they did. All that they got (inmaterial terms) for risking their lives and then



being hounded out of their homes, werecommemorative copper plaques, pensions, somefranchises from state-owned companies, andrailway travel concessions. Quite a few amongthem became Communists. One or two took tocrime, and one became an expert bank robber, ofcourse with a revolutionary objective. Not oneof them ever opened his mouth against theirbeing ousted from East Bengal.

We can now return to the mainstreamindependence movement. The next milestone inBengal politics was the exit of Subhas ChandraBose from the Congress in 1939, followed by hisexit from the country in 1941.

It happened this way : In 1938 Subhas ChandraBose was a brilliant young man of only forty,with great personal charm and magnetism. Hewas the younger brother of Sarat Chandra Bose,President of the Congress in Bengal, which gavehim considerable political pedigree as well asclout. He had just come back from a longsojourn in Europe where he had gone for medicaltreatment. He was a powerful speaker, of a verypresentable appearance, a confirmed bachelor, ofunimpeachable personal integrity and was totallyuntainted by any scandal. With all these he hadacquired an irresistible appeal to theintelligentsia, and it was only natural that heshould be considered for the highest politicaloffice that a Hindu in British India could aspireto – namely the presidency of the IndianNational Congress. At that time the hold ofGandhi on the Congress was so complete that noone could think of reaching that office without



his endorsement, and no one could think ofcontinuing in that office without his support.Gandhi endorsed Subhas’s candidature for theCongress to be held at Haripura in 1938, andSubhas was elected president.

The next three years in his life after this was ananticlimax. Immediately following his electionproblems started between the two of them.Unfortunately Subhas’s skill at politicking wasnext to nothing compared to Gandhi’s. Gandhimanaged to get practically all the first-rungleaders of the Congress, such as Patel, Nehru,Kripalani, Bhulabhai Desai, Sarojini Naidu,Azad and others leagued up against Subhas. Thetime for electing the president for the nextsession, to be held at Tripuri, near Jabalpur,came, and Gandhi endorsed a quiet, ifcolourless, person called Pattabhi Sitaramayyafor the post. An election was held. Such wasSubhas’s appeal that he got elected in spite ofGandhi’s active opposition, and Gandhipromptly went on record saying that Pattabhi’sdefeat was his defeat. After this his camp madelife miserable for Subhas, with the result that hewas forced to resign in exasperation, alsoleaving the Congress in the same motion, tofound a new party called the Forward Bloc. Thisproved to be great political mistake on Subhas’spart. In one stroke he had thrown himself out ofthe political mainstream of the nation. Even hisbrother Sarat Bose did not follow him, andremained with the Congress. After this, inJanuary 1941, despite being under policesurveillance, he escaped from his house andwent to Nazi Germany, and thence by submarine



to Japan. His greatest exploits all relate to theperiod after this exit, but the fact remains thatwith this he was lost to Bengal.

Subhas Chandra Bose was a natural, charismaticleader, and his exit from Bengal robbed theprovince of a person who could hold a brief forthe province before any forum in the world. Hisappeal also ran across communal lines, and hehad the capacity to persuade the Muslimmajority of Bengal to take a rational line vis-avis 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 ofHindus for fear of losing a Muslim support thatwasn’t there. Fortunately for the Hindus ofBengal, there rose above the political horizon, atthis juncture, a leader of unmatched clarity ofthinking, fearlessness and integrity. His namewas Syama Prasad Mookerjee[20], and for theBengali Hindus he was to prove to be their lasthope in politics – although they did not realise itthen, and have only begun to realise it after allthese years.

Syama Prasad entered politics at the instanceand insistence of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar,the president of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha,who had then just been released from prison andhad come to visit Bengal in August 1939. TheCongress’s pandering to Muslim interests inorder to garner their votes, at the cost of Hinduswho had kept the party in business, hadthoroughly revolted Syama Prasad. He heardSavarkar’s speech at the Hindu Mahasabha




conference at Khulna and came in contact withhim. Meanwhile other Mahasabha leaders, suchas Ashutosh Lahiri, N.C.Chatterjee (father ofSomnath Chatterjee, parliamentary leader of theCommunist Party of India (Marxist) in the 1980sand 90s) had perceived the great promise of theman and were pressing him to join. Anotherperson who was instrumental in finallypersuading him to join the Mahasabha wasSwami Pranavananda, founder of the BharatSevashram Sangha.

Another very important thing happened onSeptember 1, 1939 in faraway Europe. Hitler’sWehrmacht invaded Poland, and NevilleChamberlain, the British Prime Minister rose inthe Parliament at Westminster to say,“Gentlemen, we are at war with Germany”. As aBritish colony India was dragged into the warwhich was, till then, a purely European affair –even the United States of America had notjoined it then. The Congress wanted anassurance from the British regarding India’sindependence after the war as a quid pro quo forIndia’s joining the war, and the Britishgovernment flatly refused. The Congress thenresigned their ministries in all the sevenprovinces where they were in power. The Britishwere not terribly hurt. But the happiest personwas Muhammad Ali Jinnah who termed the dayof such resignation as the ‘day of deliverance forthe Muslims’.

Meanwhile Fazlul Haq was having a very hardtime with the Muslim League diehards. It was hisdream to educate the illiterate masses of Bengal,



and in spite of having been Premier he hadselected for himself the portfolio of Educationrather than the much more politically importantHome or Finance portfolios, leaving these to theMuslim League. His politics was sofundamentally different from that of thecommunal zealots of the League that nobodyexpected them to stick together for any length oftime. He had been more pressured thanpersuaded to support the Pakistan Resolution of1940 at the Muslim League session at Lahore,much against his wishes as it turned out later.Finally in 1941, he decided that enough wasenough, and after having a word with SyamaPrasad, left the ministry which then collapsed.He then formed, in December 1941, theProgressive Coalition ministry with the HinduMahasabha, in which Syama Prasad became theFinance Minister. This was popularly known asthe Syama-Haq ministry, and this was the lasttime over a long period that Bengali Hindus weregoing to get some justice from their government.

Despite the fact that the cabinet enjoyed theconfidence of the Provincial LegislativeAssembly, the Governor waited for a full week,from the 3rd to the 11th of December, beforeswearing the cabinet in. And before he did so, hedealt it a terrible blow. On the 11th, a few hoursbefore the swearing-in, he got Sarat ChandraBose arrested under the Defence of IndiaRegulations, and incarcerated him in thePresidency Jail. The supporters of the Coalitionwere all aghast and advised Fazlul Haq not toswear the cabinet in. However this would havemeant playing right into the hands of the British,



and Haq did not do it. Instead he decided to gethis cabinet in first, and then apply pressure onthe Governor to release Bose. However, thisdesign also failed. The Governor told Haq thatthis was a decision of the Central Government,and there was nothing he could do about Bose'sarrest[21].

The real reason for such conduct was that theBritish hated the ministry. First, they were rightthrough clearly partial to the Muslims, thoughnot all of them were as brazen as Sir BamfyldeFuller (see Chapter 1) about it. Secondly, theirentire administrative strategy at the time rested,to a large extent, on quietly fomenting andexacerbating Hindu-Muslim tension, and theProgressive Coalition ministry was literally amonkey wrench into their works. This element intheir administrative strategy was so basic thateven Annada Sankar Ray, who is otherwiseunduly mild towards the British even whilecriticising them in his Jukto Bonger Sriti, is veryexplicit on this score. He mentions a case wherea Brahmin and a Muslim were arrested duringthe Civil Disobedience movement. The BritishDistrict Magistrate released the Muslimimmediately, telling him repeatedly that theBritish had no quarrel with the Muslims, but keptthe Brahmin in lock-up for a week. Thus, Rayobserves, it was rubbed into him that theGovernment does not desire amity betweenHindu and Muslim[22]. Thirdly they were evenmore partial to the Muslim League than theywere to the Muslims, and could not take kindlyto a ministry that had deposed them. The hatredwas manifest from a telegram sent by Lord





Linlithgow, the Viceroy, to Amery, the Secretaryof State for India on the subject of unleashingrepressive measures on the populace who hadparticipated in the ‘Quit India’ movement (seebelow) : “Herbert (Sir John, the Governor ofBengal) is not very certain of the attitude of Haq,who, under Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s influenceshows signs of wobbling, with the result that theBengal Government may be reluctant to takenecessary action”. So they looked foropportunities to dethrone this ministry andreinstall the Leaguers. Such opportunity was notlate in coming, and the occasion was providedby the Congress’s ‘Quit India’ call.

In fact the Hon’ble Sir John Arthur Herbert,Governor of Bengal, was a very complexcharacter whose ideas nevertheless felladmirably in line with the Imperial designs of theBritish. He was known as ‘Herbert the pervert’in intimate circles for some of his strangeproclivities. He had also inherited the love ofMuslims and hatred of Hindus from hispredecessor of an earlier generation, SirBamfylde Fuller (q.v.). He set for himself a taskof Muslimizing the Police forces and went aboutthis in a very Machiavellian way.

For their own reasons the British had decided tohave two parallel Police departments in theirPresidencies. Thus, for Bengal there wasCalcutta Police, with jurisdiction over Calcutta,and Bengal Police for the rest of Bengal. Theywere not just separate and independentdepartments but had totally different cultures.Calcutta Police was much more the glamorous



of the two, with their smart white uniforms (asopposed to drab khaki of the moffusil), and theresplendent red turbans of their constables. Theirheadquarters, Lalbazar, was modeled after theScotland Yard of London. The sergeant cadre ofCalcutta Police in those days was mannedalmost exclusively by Anglo-Indians, generallyknown as Lalmukho (Red-faced) sergeants.However the sub-inspectors’ cadre was mannedlargely by Indians, mostly Bengalis. Because ofthe glamour of the Calcutta Police and the factthat its officers were subject to transfer onlywithin the city, a number of young men fromgood, aristocratic families of Calcutta wereattracted to this cadre, and as a result most ofthe Officers-in-Charge of the Police Stations,who were of Inspectors’ rank in the force, wereBengali Hindus.

Herbert created a number of functionaldepartments in the Calcutta Police Headquarters,such as Criminal Records, Cheating, Murder andso on. He then imperceptibly drew away theHindu Inspectors from the posts of Officers-in-Charge to head these departments and had themreplaced by Muslims. As a result, by the timeSuhrawardy was in position for the run-up to theGreat Calcutta Killings (see Chapter 3), what arecalled ‘Line Functions’ in Management Sciencetoday, or ‘Command postings’ in the Army wereentirely in the hands of Muslim officers. Quite alot of Suhrawardy’s work thus had already beendone in advance by Herbert[23].

In August 1942, in its Bombay session, theCongress 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 nota well-planned or coordinated one. However, itwas enough for the panic-stricken British topromptly put all the Congress leaders in jail. Asa result the movement became a loose cannonand at places, one hell of a cannon. One suchplace was the Midnapore district of Bengal, thehome of such dissimilar characters as Khudiramand Suhrawardy. The district had earned greatnotoriety after the assassination of three of itsDistrict Magistrates – Douglas, Burge andPeddie – so much so that thereafter thegovernment stopped sending Britishers to thedistrict to become its magistrate.

In certain parts of the district, notably in theTamluk and Contai subdivisions, totalindependence was proclaimed. The areas werecut off from the rest of India by uprootingrailway lines and severing telegraph connections.The British retaliated with brutally repressivemeasures, deploying both the police and themilitary who absolutely took the law in their ownhands. They made few arrests. Instead theykilled, burnt, tortured, maimed and raped, allwith a carte blanche issued by governor Herbert.

At this juncture a terrible cyclone, accompaniedby tidal waves, hit the Midnapore coast in thevery same Tamluk and Contai subdivisions.This was on October 16, on Ashtami day of theDurga Puja, the biggest festival of BengaliHindus, and the streets were full of people inContai town. In no time the town went under five



feet of water. This was a time of the year whenno cyclone is normally expected, and thepopulation was taken totally unawares. AshokMitra[24] writes that some thirty thousandpeople lost their lives in the first fifteen minutes.It is still believed by many that the DistrictMagistrate of Midnapore, Niaz MohammedKhan, an ICS officer who later opted forPakistan and became an important civil servantthere deliberately withheld a cyclone warning onthe grounds that ‘disloyal people had no right tolive’. At any rate, according to Ashok Mitra[25]he recommended to the government in his reportthat, in consideration of the political mischiefwrought by people from the district, neithershould the government take any relief measuresfor at least one month, nor permit any non-governmental organisation to do so. Was thisbeing more loyal than the king – or moremalevolent than the devil?

The conduct of Niaz must have been observedwith considerable approval by Suhrawardy,although the latter was not in power at this time.For later, when Suhrawardy returned to power bythe grace of Governor Herbert, he put Niaz togood use in the run-up to ‘Direct Action’, alsoknown as the Great Calcutta Killings. This isdescribed in the next chapter. Niaz is creditedwith various other feats, such as an attempt toIslamise the Arakan coast of Burma (laterMyanmar) by settling Muslims from Chittagongthere. He succeeded in this, but onlytemporarily, because later, in the 1990s theBuddhist Myanmarese government drove out allthese Muslims, known as Rohingiyas, back into





Bangladesh. We need only remind ourselves atthis stage that it was under administrators likeNiaz a few years later that the Hindus of EastBengal had to live.

The unbelievable hardship to which thepopulation of the area were subjected to by thiscombination of human repression and the naturalcalamity was carefully hidden by the Britishadministration from the public at large, evenfrom the provincial cabinet. When Syama Prasadcame to know of this, entirely through unofficialchannels, he was incensed. He rushed toMidnapore, and upon observing the deliberateand inhuman official callousness, took up thematter with the Governor Sir John Herbert who,quite predictably, did exactly nothing. SyamaPrasad, in protest resigned from the cabinet onNovember 20, 1942. Sir John was waiting forsuch opportunities. Around this time hesomehow (possibly by hinting that he wouldform an all-party government of which Haqwould be the Premier) had persuaded Fazlul Haqto sign a resignation of his cabinet, but he keptthis up his sleeve for a while. A few monthslater, when Haq said in the Provincial Assemblythat he would have a Judicial Inquiry institutedto determine the cause of the disaster and therelief measures[26] he sacked the Haq cabineton March 28, 1943 with this resignation.Thereafter, using his extraordinary powers heinstalled a Muslim League cabinet led byNazimuddin, with Suhrawardy as the Minister incharge of Civil Supplies. Nazimuddin flatlyrefused to take any non-League Muslim into hiscabinet, and Haq was out. Herbert also got what




he wanted : a rubber-stamp provincial cabinet,with no voice of conscience like Syama Prasador Haq.

At this point it is necessary to take a look at therole played by the Communist Party of India atthis juncture and later. This is because, as willbe seen, the Indian Communists, in order tosecure political gains, wholeheartedly supportedthe demand for Pakistan voiced by the MuslimLeague, and eventually played a pivotal role inpreventing proper rehabilitation of the refugeesfrom East Bengal. In order to understand theirbehaviour during these epoch-making years it isalso necessary to briefly digress into the originand development of Indian Communists.

Around the middle years of the twentieth centuryit used to be said about Indian Communists injest, “ Who is that man sweating away in anovercoat on this steamy afternoon ? Oh, that isComrade so-and-so. But why the overcoat?Because it is snowing in Moscow.” There wasconsiderable truth in the joke, because in thosedays the Indian Communists were blindfollowers of the Soviet political line, regardlessof its applicability to Indian conditions or of thenational interests of India. Just how blind, andwhere this landed them and all those that listenedto them can and ought to form the subject of adistinct line of study. For the purposes of thisbook the discussion will have to be limited tothe bare mentioning of three aspects, namely :first, their position during India’s freedomstruggle ; second, their collaboration with theBritish Government during the war, and



especially their depiction of Subhas ChandraBose as a Japanese stooge ; and third, their rolein and following the partition of the country andof Bengal.

The Communist Party of India (CPI) wasfounded, not in India, but at Tashkent in theerstwhile Soviet Union (now Uzbekistan) onOctober 17, 1920. This was very symbolic ofthe fact, observed throughout the life ofcommunism in India, that the Indian communistswere always far away from the aspirations of thepeople – in fact there was always a lack of basicunderstanding of Indianness among them. One ofthe founder-members was Manabendra NathRoy, better known as M.N.Roy, who has beenmentioned earlier in this chapter in connectionwith revolutionary activities in Bengal during theFirst World War. Roy very soon fell out withDange, another founder-member, and theComintern appointed a British communist withBengali roots, Rajani Palme Dutt, to lead theparty. Thereafter Zinoviev, a member of thethen-ruling ‘Troika’ of the Soviet Union (ofwhich the other members were Stalin andKamenev), ordered the fledgling CPI to becomean appendage of the Communist Party of GreatBritain (CPGB).

The CPI was opposed to the independencemovement from day one. In the first worldCongress of the Communist International held inMoscow in 1920 the Programme of theInternational called Gandhiism a philosophy thatwas fast emerging as a stumbling block in theway 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 allcommunists in India to expose the Congress inIndia, and to resist the efforts of Swarajists,Gandhians and Congressmen of all hues.

Rabindra Nath Datta remembers how theCommunists in Noakhali formed small groups toguard Police Stations, Bridges and Telegraphlines from possible attacks by Congressitesduring the 'Quit India' movement of August1942.

Their treatment of Netaji Subhas Chandra Boseduring the war (which they used to call‘Imperialist War’ until Germany attackedRussia, and ‘Peoples’ War’ thereafter) causesthem no end of embarrassment today. Especiallyin West Bengal where Netaji Subhas is reveredas the greatest national hero of the freedomstruggle, and where, coincidentally, theCommunists have been in power since 1977. Infact Jyoti Basu, the Communist Chief Ministerof West Bengal had said in a speech on Subhas’sbirthday that they had made a mistake in regardto Netaji. He did not elaborate how he, or hisparty, proposed to make amends for this‘mistake’. Probably his condescending to admitthe mistake was enough. At any rate, thedepiction of Netaji during the war is, at once,interesting and instructive.

The ‘People’s War’, the organ of the CommunistParty of India at that time, printed a series ofcartoons of Subhas at that time. One of them,published in the November 21, 1943 issue



showed Subhas Chandra Bose as a midgetdressed in military tunic, guiding the ImperialJapanese Army into India. In the August 8, 1943issue Subhas’s face was shown as mask hiding avile and cruel Japanese face. One of the slogansin Bangla that they coined, calling all comradesto arms, ran as follows:

“Comrade, dhoro hatiyar – dhoro hatiyarSwadhinata shongrame nohi aaj aklaBiplobi Soviet, durjoy MohachinShathey aachhey Ingrej, nirbheek Markin.”

which, freely translated, means as follows:

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

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

After the ban was lifted on the Communist Partyof India, Secretary Puran Chand Joshi sent atelegram to Harry Pollitt, Secretary of theCommunist Party of Great Britain. In thetelegram, apart from mouthing the usual inanitiesabout the ‘Anti-Fascist Solidarity of the IndianPeople’, he also mentioned that his co-



revolutionaries had taken a suicidal path,referring of course to the Congress’s Quit Indiamovement. To Ashok Mitra this seemed to bevery clever-clever. Everyone knew that thetelegram would be censored, and the idea was tolet the Government know, without seeming tointend to do so, that the CPI was completely ontheir side[27].

And finally, the matter of East Bengal refugees,which is the reason why the conduct of theCommunists in India is very important for thepurposes of this book. When the clamour forPakistan by the Muslim League, on the basis ofJinnah’s two-nation theory was warming up, andCongress leaders were in jail following theuprising of August 1942, the CPI released a‘thesis’, drafted by one Gangadhar Adhikari.The substance of the thesis was that there wasno such nation as India, that India was really aconglomeration of as many as eighteen different‘nationalities’ and that each one of thesenationalities had the right to secede from theconglomeration. Now the fact was that neitherthe Parsees of Bombay (now Mumbai), nor theChristians of Mangalore, nor the Jews of Cochinhad shown the slightest inclination to secedefrom India, nor to declare themselves as aseparate ‘nationality’. It was only Jinnah’sMuslim League, representing the opinion of thevast majority of the Muslims in India, whoclaimed that they were a different nation andwanted to secede ; and they loved the Adhikarithesis. However, the CPI’s espousal of Pakistandid not stop here. CPI leaders, such as SajjadZaheer, B.T.Ranadive, P.C.Joshi and others,




actively wrote and otherwise propagandized infavour of the ‘right of secession of the Muslimsof India’.

This was all before the partition actually tookplace. Probably the Communists expected that inthe fledgling state of Pakistan they would bemuch better off as a party than they were inundivided India. Alas, this was not to be. Theatheist Communists with Hindu names weretreated no differently from their God-fearingHindu brethren, and with the exception of veryfew like Moni Singh they had all to leave theirbeloved Pakistan for which they had done somuch clamouring.

Dhananjoy Basak[28], formerly of Nawabpur,Dacca City, recalls that his cousin Gopal Basakwas an important organiser of the CommunistParty of India, and had been named in theMeerut Conspiracy Case. People like P.C.Joshiand Muzaffar Ahmed were regular visitors totheir house at Nawabpur. He had, however,taken fright at the look of the Muslim majorityafter the riots of 1946. He was one of the firstamong their clan to flee to India after the countryas partitioned.

Prafulla Kumar Chakrabarti, one of the very fewserious researchers on the subject of East Bengalrefugees generally agrees with thisconclusion[29], and provides further insight intothe blundering ways of the CPI. According toChakrabarti the Communist party initially“simply refused to accept the existence of theluckless victims of communal hatred . . . . . the





party felt that once the panacea of partition wasimplemented the communal virus would becompletely eradicated from the Indian bodypolitic. The party directed its Pakistan cadresnot to migrate to India . . . . even (front rankingleaders such as) Sajjad Zaheer, KrishnabinodeRoy and Mansur Habibullah were expelled fromthe party when they came back to India aftertheir release from Pakistan jail”.

What happened after partition in West Bengal isrelevant to this book only so far as the sameinfluenced events in East Bengal. The conduct ofCommunists had such an influence only to amarginal extent, and therefore will be mentionedonly in passing. There were a number of ex-revolutionaries among the refugees who hadturned Communist after their revolutionaryfervour had died out. They were joined in WestBengal by the local Communists, and togetherthey formed a Communist core among therefugees. This formation of a core has beenmasterfully dealt with in Prafulla Chakrabarti’sbook mentioned above, and the serious reader isreferred to that book for a fuller treatment of thesubject. The refugee problem in Bengal wasmismanaged to an extent beyond belief by theNehru government, as will be seen later in thisbook. It is this that helped the Communists growin the state, something that did not happen inmost other parts of India. And it is that growth inthe refugee camps of those days that culminatedin the unbroken rule by the party in the statesince 1977.

The Communists taught the refugees to fight for



their rights. So far so good. However the formsof fight were such as would in later years brandBengali refugees, without justification, as afeckless, lazy, unreasonable, undisciplinedconstantly agitating bunch of people. Therefugees were taught to demand cash doles, notjobs, to travel in trains without tickets, to holdup road traffic as a form of protest and to squaton other peoples’ land. The government obliged,spoiling the habits of an entire generation andmaking heroes out of the Communists. Thegovernment made plans to resettle the refugeesin the Andaman Islands. This was a very goodidea, because the islands had a climate and soilvery similar to that of East Bengal. They weremoreover totally virgin, with no possibilities ofany clash with the local population, somethingthat happened later in parts of Dandakaranya.The Communists persuaded the refugees torefuse rehabilitation in the Andamans, anddemanded resettlement only in West Bengal.There was opposition in powerful quartersagainst the East Bengal refugees going to theAndamans, and those quarters could not be morethankful.

Ironically, after the Communists were voted topower in 1977, and some of the later refugeeswere under resettlement in Dandakaranya (arocky and semi-arid tract of land at the tri-junction of the states of Orissa, Andhra andMadhya Pradesh) some misguided non-politicalelements among them led them to return to WestBengal. The refugees sold, literally for a song,whatever they had been given by the governmentfor setting up a new life there, as also what they



had earned for themselves. They then trooped toWest Bengal in the hope that the newly installedCommunists would help them[30].

Here they met a different lot of BengaliCommunists who did not need their support anymore. They were summarily told to return toDandakaranya. These refugees had burnt theirboats and were not to be persuaded so easily toreturn. They defied the government and sailed, inmakeshift country boats, to a remote uninhabitedisland called Marichjhaanpi in the Sundarbandelta and tried to set up a settlement without anyhelp from the government. The governmentretaliated by sending the police on the one handand Communist goons on the other. Some of therefugees were killed by these goons. Some, intrying to escape from them by swimming acrossthe estuary, were eaten by crocodiles. The restwere packed off in special trains toDandakaranya where they went, made refugees asecond time, by a set of politicians who came topower by dangling before their compatriots theprospect of rehabilitation in West Bengal. SunilGanguly[31] has described poignant scenes ofthis period in his immensely popular novel inBangla, Purba-Pashchim (East-West)[32].

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






the Premier replacing Nazimuddin. During thisperiod most important posts at the cutting edgeof the government, such as the Officers-in-chargeof the police stations, came to be manned byMuslims, pushing Hindu officers to ineffectualposts. The government was unabashedlypartisan, and said so in so many words. It was agovernment from which a Hindu could expect nojustice.

What the situation was like in those times hasbeen described by in his inimitable style byRajshekhar Bose in one of his short stories,Goopee Shaheb. Goopee Shaheb (real nameGopinath Ghosh, a Hindu) was an eccentric whoused to keep scorpions as pets in his pockets.One day a pickpocket called Chottu Mian (aMuslim) tried to practise his profession onGoopee, and was promptly delivered severalnear-fatal stings by Goopee’s pets. The author,who was a roommate of Goopee in his 'mess'(bachelor accommodation), was called to furnishbail for Goopee. For it was Goopee, and notChottu, who had been prosecuted by GulzarHussain, the Muslim Officer-in-charge,Muchipara police station, on the charge ofattempted homicide of Chottu by getting himstung by scorpions. The author protested meeklywhile furnishing bail. Gulzar Hussain roaredback, telling the author not to try to teach himthe law ; for, according to him, even if povertysometimes drove Chottu to pick pockets, it fellon Gulzar, Mr. Suhrawardy and the Governor totake care of the matter. Goopee had no right totake the law in his own hands.



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

That is what those days were like. It was afterpassing through days for more than four yearsthat the country and Bengal got independenceand partition on 15th August 1947. That washowever not to be before the province alsopassed through the unbelievable trauma of threemacro-horrors in the space of these four years.These horrors were : first, the Bengal Famine of1943 ; second, the Calcutta Killings of August1946 ; and the third, the Noakhali Carnage ofOctober in the same year. These three eventssaw the death of so many people on such amassive scale in so little time, and suchunspeakably nefarious and unconscionableconduct on the part of the Muslim League aswell as of the British governments, that theydeserve at least a full chapter to be devoted tothem. 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 ; byM.C.Chagla ; Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Mumbai, 10th Ed., 1994.Chagla (1900-1981), a Bombay Muslim barrister just likeJinnah, was in many ways Jinnah's exact antithesis. WhileJinnah after the 1920's became a totally communal Muslimpolitician, Chagla remained in the profession and entered thejudiciary to become a puisne judge at the Bombay High Courtin 1941. Later he became Chief Justice, and after retirement, ajudge in the International Court of Justice at The Hague, Indianambassador to the U.S, U.K., and finally, Union EducationMinister in Nehru's cabinet.. All his life he was a strictlysecular person -- secular in the true sense, for he staunchlybelieved in concepts such as the Uniform Civil Code, and was astrong critic of minority appeasement policies followed bysuccessive governments in India. See pages 84-85, 160-161 ofthe autobiography for this aspect.

[4] ibid., p.78-79

[5] ibid., p. 119

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

[7] Forty years later this Malabar coast again became famous inthe same context when E.M.S.Namboodiripad, the firstcommunist Chief Minister of India, in order to appease theMoplah Muslims, carved out a Muslim-majority district calledMalappuram in this area. Namboodiripad was one of thestrongest adherents of the theory that a ‘little bit’ of Muslimcommunalism was to be tolerated, even welcomed, butanything remotely resembling Hindu communalism was to benipped in the bud.

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

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

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

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

[12] “Deshbibhag : Poshchat o Nepottho Kahini” (in Bangla) byBhabani 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-dayWest Bengal, Civil Supplies Minister and later Premier ofBengal in the Muslim League ministry, 1943-47, PrimeMinister of Pakistan, 1956-57 Suhrawardy was guilty of manymisdeeds in his political life, including black marketoperations in the great Bengal famine of 1943, and inciting andactively promoting the notorious great Calcutta killings. In1947 he tried to form, with Sarat Chandra Bose, an independentBengal instead of accepting partition. A very flamboyantperson in his personal life, Suhrawardy while still Premier,used to frequent a nightclub called the ‘Golden Slipper’ inCalcutta, and used to drive his own Packard. Larry Collins andDominique Lapierre in their ‘Freedom at Midnight’ havedescribed him as setting himself the prodigious task of beddingevery cabaret dancer and high-class whore in Calcutta (p. 255).

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

[16] Jinnah of Pakistan, Stanley Wolpert, Oxford UniversityPress, 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 calledBharat Kesri (Lion of India), the second son of Sir AshutoshMookerjee, (known popularly as Banglar Bagh, the tiger ofBengal). Syama Prasad, in his young days was an educationist,














having become the Vice-Chancellor of the venerable CalcuttaUniversity at the very young age of 33. He entered politics atthe instance of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the president of theAll-India Hindu Mahasabha, and began political life as theVice-President of that party. He was the first significantBengal politician to see clearly what fate the Hindu minority inBengal was suffering and would suffer, and also to speak outopenly against it. In 1941 he formed a coalition Governmentwith A.K.Fazlul Haq which gave Bengal a just and equitableadministration. He left this cabinet in protest against theBritish treatment of the victims of the Midnapore cyclone. In1947 he became the Industries Minister in Jawaharlal Nehru’scabinet, but left it in 1950 in protest against Nehru’s treatmentof the Hindu refugees from East Bengal. He became thefounder-President of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (predecessor ofthe present-day Bharatiya Janata Party) in 1951. He forciblyentered Kashmir against the policy of the Nehru government toallow Indians to enter the state only with a permit. He wastaken prisoner and died in captivity under very questionablecircumstances in Srinagar jail.

[21] Amar Dekha Rajneetir Ponchas Bochhor (Fifty years ofPolitics as I saw it) in Bangla, pub. Dacca 1970, by AbulMansur Ahmed (1898-1979). Abul Mansur Ahmed was ajournalist, editor of Krishak, and later Nobojug, the officialorgan 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 arebased on an interview of Nirupom Som (b. 1930), an officer ofthe Indian Police Service who had served as bothCommissioner of Police, Calcutta and Director-General ofPolice, West Bengal. Som’s father was a judicial officer in theBengal District Judiciary having retired as a District andSessions Judge, and therefore he had lived all his life amidstGovernment folklore. Some of what he said is undoubtedlyfrom the police grapevine, but nevertheless cannot besummarily dismissed.

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

[25] ibid. p. 147

[26] ibid. p. 147

[27] ibid. p. 120










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[28] Interviewed June 2001

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

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

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

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

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

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My people, uprooted a saga of the hindus of eastern bengal_ by tathagata roy

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