West Bengal is an enigma in itself; it is the only Indian state which has The Himalayas, The
Duars Forests, the vast beaches of The Bay of Bengal, and innumerable rivers. This is called
“Accident of Geography”. Undivided Bengal was the first place in India where Sati,
polygamy and child-marriage were abolished and widow-remarriage was established by the
British laws. The National Song of India, “Vande Mataram”, was even written by Bankim
Chandra Chattopadhyay, a Bengali.
Despite all its greatness and rich cultural history, it has also been a witness to some of the
most harrowing human rights violations in Indian History. This is not something that is quite
extraordinary in the context of West Bengal; in fact it has been a part of its history right from
the inception of the state itself. The Bengal famine of 1943 would be the right place to start
from. According to Rabindra Nath Datta, in the rural areas of Noakhali district during the
height of the famine, the affected people used to roam around during the day in search of
something to eat, and at night used to come and lie down in the grounds of the Haat (weekly
market). Every morning around half-a-dozen of them would be found dead. The bulk of these
people were cultivators and Muslims. The local Muslims formed parties to identify the
Muslims among the dead (by checking whether the males were circumcised or not), and
buried them in a mass grave after reading their Namaaz-e-Janaaza (funereal rites). The few
Hindu corpses among them would be thrown into rivers or canals. The shrimp and the crabs
in these canals would then feast on the dead bodies. The famine-affected people would then
catch and eat such shrimp and crabs, and would promptly die from Gastro-Enteritis.
According to Syama Prasad Mookerjee, in Midnapore he saw a starving man fell unconscious from sheer excitement at the sight of food in a Langarkhana before he could put any in his mouth. He died shortly afterwards.
People often do remember the role of Winston Churchill, deliberately diverting food grains
from Kolkata to have additional buffers to aid the allied troops in the world war. The famine
of 1943 was in-fact made even worse by that in-charge of Calcutta. So much for what the
British did. Now to the deeds of the Muslim League cabinet that the British so lovingly
installed in April 1943, and very specially of the Minister in charge of Civil Supplies,
Husseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. Suhrawardy, as we shall see, first tried to cover up the tragedy at hand by absurd remarks about the famine, and then attempted to 'do his bit' in the
most questionable manner possible. True, the famine was not his creation, but he did
whatever was possible under the circumstances to make things worse.
In a hard-hitting speech made in the Bengal Legislative Assembly on July 14, 1943, Shyama
Prasad Mookerjee lambasted Suhrawardy and his performance. Certain parts of the speech
were so telling that they deserve to be quoted: ". . . . Now, Sir, in one of the statements issued
by Mr. Suhrawardy it was said that the worst feature of the last Ministry's food policy
(meaning Fazlul Haq's Ministry) was its insistence on shortage. That was on 17th May
(1943). Then again, he said 'There is, in fact a sufficiency of foodgrains for the people of
Bengal'. I ask specially the members who are sitting opposite, anxious to give their support to
the Ministry, to demand an explanation from Mr. Suhrawardy. What were the data before
him that justified him to make that remark that there was in fact a sufficiency of foodgrains
for the people of Bengal? Not satisfied with this bare statement, he proceeded to remark 'Full
statistical details, which will clearly demonstrate that there is a sufficiency, will soon be
published'. Where are those statistics? Have they been collected, or are they being
manufactured?"
Ashok Mitra; a Sub-Divisional Officer (SDO) at that time and a self-confessed Communist
sympathiser, is full of regret when he tries to describe the role of the Communist Party of
India in the famine. Front-ranking leaders of the Party, such as S.A. Dange and P.C. Joshi
made long speeches in the first Congress of the Communist Party at Bombay held on May
23-26, 1943. The famine was a reality then, and the worst was yet to come. The entire content of their speeches was full of exhortations to the people of India to strengthen the war effort.
Not once did they mention that the famine was a result of the misdeeds of the British, not
even that in order to win the war it was necessary that the people should be fed. There were
no calls of revolution, no calls for mass protests; their speeches appeared to Ashok Mitra to
be directed mainly at pleasing Linlithgow and Maxwell who had lifted the ban on the party a
short while ago.
Husseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, in reward of is appeasement to the British during the famine,
was made Premier of Bengal in 1946 replacing Sir Nazimuddin. But this bungling was
nothing compared to what he did on August 16, 1946, which is remembered to this day as the Great Calcutta Killings. The run-up for this started much earlier sometime in 1945, when he proceeded to change the complexion of the Calcutta Police bringing Niaz Mohammed Khan, the ICS officer who, while District Magistrate of Midnapore, had carried out the
British nefarious designs of crackdown on the participants in the Quit India movement.
Jinnah gave a call for ‘Direct Action Day’ on 16 August 1946, where Muslims would observe
a hartal (general strike) to demonstrate to the British their resolve for the creation of
Pakistan. He further declared that he was going to “create trouble” and pledged “I will have
India divided or India burned”. Suhrawardy and his Muslim League colleagues delivered
fiery speeches reminding Muslims of Bengal of the victory of Badr and exhorting on them to
follow in the footsteps of the Prophet and wrest a victory for Islam on 16 August. Devendra
Panigrahi, in his seminal work India’s Partition: The Story of Imperialism in Retreat, quotes
the 13 August 1946 issue of Muslim league mouthpiece, The Star of India, which gave
detailed instructions on how to observe ‘Direct Action Day’. The newspaper wrote:
Muslims must remember that it was in Ramzan that permission for jehad was granted by
Allah. It was in Ramzan that the Battle of Badr, the first open conflict between Islam and
heathens, was fought and won by 313 Muslims and again it was in Ramzan that 10,000
Muslims under the Holy Prophet conquered Mecca and established the Kingdom of Heaven
and the commonwealth of Islam in Arabia. The Muslim League is fortunate that it is starting
its action on this Holy month and day.
A Demi Official letter written to a senior British officer based at Fort William after the ‘Great
Calcutta Killings’ by a senior intelligence operative (the latter is in the National Archives in
the United Kingdom) is indeed revealing. The intelligence officer writes:
“There is hardly a person in Calcutta who has a good word for Suhrawardy, respectable
Muslims included. For years he has been known as “The king of the goondas” and my own
private opinion is that he fully anticipated what was going to happen, and allowed it to work
itself up, and probably organised the disturbance with his goonda gangs as this type of
individual has to receive compensation every now and again.”
The black day began with a large public meeting of the Muslim League in the Calcutta
Maidan. According to Mitra, the gathering was peaceful to begin with. A little later,
however, some skirmish was noted at one end of the Maidan abutting Chowringhee,
Calcutta’s main thoroughfare. Then the real bedlam started. 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. At about 10 A.M. a gun shop on Chowringhee was looted. The mob
fanned out and started setting upon Hindus all over the city. In the South Port Police area
there was a small Oriya Hindu pocket in a Muslim majority area. Some three hundred of the
Oriyas were butchered in fifteen minutes. Not a single policeman was in sight anywhere.
Then the torching began. Hindu-inhabited areas such as the southern part of Amherst Street,
Bortola, Jorasanko were in flames in no time. The fires burnt right through the night,
punctuated by the war-cries of “Allaho Akbar, Ladke Lenge Pakistan”. The only exception
was in the Northern part of Amherst Street where people from both communities got together
and stayed unmoved by the mayhem all around them.
How many people died in the killings? No official estimate is available, the reason for which
is probably that the killings were started by none other than officialdom. Bhabani Prosad
Chatterjee puts the figure at about five thousand, with another fifty thousand or so grievously
injured. The damage to property, of course, was beyond estimation.
Lord Wavell had remarked that more people lost their lives in the Calcutta Killings than in
the Battle of Plassey and had informed Pethick-Lawrence that the toll was 3,000 dead and
17,000 injured.
Now, let’s move to Noakhali from Calcutta, for the next horror. The population in the British
days was overwhelmingly – more than eighty per cent – Muslim. 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, the
majority 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 for the carnage. There was another disparity – not economic, not political, and not social. It was the perception 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.
The carnage at Noakhali was begun by a Muslim League leader called Ghulam Sarwar
assisted by a Moulvi (Muslim Priest) Rashid Ahmed and a Mukhtar (Lawyer) Majibar
Rahman on October 10, 1946, the full moon night of Kojagari Lokkhi (Lakshmi) Puja when Bengali Hindus traditionally worship Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth. Sarwar and other
League leaders 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. Just like the Calcutta Killings, elaborate arrangements had been made beforehand to ensure the success of the operation. The hinterland was cut off from Noakhali town by breaking the Sanko-s (one-pole bamboo bridges crossing canals). The boatmen in country boats were all Muslim. There was no way a Hindu could get away once the killings started. Still, to make doubly sure, Muslim League volunteers guarded all routes leading to railway stations. It is estimated that 5,000 were killed, hundreds of Hindu women were raped and thousands of Hindu men and women were forcibly converted to Islam. Descriptions of atrocities fell into a similar pattern: pillage, rape, forcible conversion, occasional killings.
The Noakhali carnage came to be widely known because of Gandhi’s famous visit to the
district. Gandhi arrived at Choumuhani on November 7, 1946; almost a month after the
carnage began and stayed in Noakhali till February 1947.
Then came the 3rd of July 1947; the Indian Independence act was tabled in the parliament of
Britain. A man stood against this proposal vehemently arguing that-"Power will go into the
hands of rascals, rogues, and freebooters. Not a bottle of water or loaf of bread shall escape
taxation; only the air will be free and the blood of these hungry millions will be on the head
of Attlee." A few months later, in the midnight of 14th august 1947, another man stands in
front of a parliament asking the constituent members to take the pledge of dedication to the
service of the nation and her people. The lines remembered by everyone are- “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” Whose
words would come true? Only time would tell.
3rd of May 2021; various reports of post election violence come out of West Bengal. BJP
worker Abhijit Sarkar, from Beliaghata in north Kolkata, was killed allegedly by TMC
hoodlums, as per a Times of India report. Shovarani Mandal, an elderly woman from Jagatdal in North 24 Parganas, was allegedly killed when she tried to protect her son, a cornered BJP worker. Uttam Ghosh, a BJP worker from Ranaghat, was also allegedly killed by rival party workers. Even the newly formed Indian Secular Front (ISF) also claimed that one of its workers, Hasanur Jaman, was killed in North 24 Parganas. A report also claimed that that CPI(M)’s mahila samiti leader was killed in the Murshidabad district. Four people were allegedly killed in clashes between the TMC and the BJP in Purba Bardhaman district after the election results were announced, according to PTI. Other than these, there are several reports claiming that TMC workers allegedly attacked opposition party workers and
ransacked party offices in various parts of Bengal.
We find that the pledge that had been taken in the midnight of 14th August 1947 has long
been forgotten in the mists of time. Only chapters of betrayal of the trust of the Indic
community have been added to the History of Bharata. The latest chapter is now that of
Bengal where amidst rampant violence against opposition, more than 8000 people have been forced to flee from the state and have become refugees in their own country. Strangely enough, the words spoken on the 3rd of July 1947 seem to ring truer by the moment.
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