Some Aspects of the Bengal Partition

Tathagata Roy has very poetically named his book My People Uprooted, trying to capture the sorrow of the homeless millions who were cut off from their roots through a series of anti-Hindu pogroms beginning with the Great Calcutta Killing followed by the Noakhali and Tipperah riots of 1946 and continuing unabated after the partition with periodic intermissions right up to the recent advent of the Awami League rule in present-day Bangladesh. He writes with the poignance of an actual victim having left his own homeland in East Bengal behind, about the landscape which comes back to his mind again and again.

With its indescribably verdant paddy and jute fields and its wide, wide rivers, beels and haors (depressions in which huge water bodies were created by the monsoon rains) stretching away to the horizons, the beat of the dhak at Durga Puja time, the lilting tunes of Bhaoaiya and jaari gaan (folk music) had been indelibly etched into the hearts of the East Bengal Hindu. This was his desh, his baari, his own native land. ²

It was this desh that 8 million of the 11.4 million people still left in East Bengal after the partition were forced to leave by the prevalent atmosphere of insecurity, attacks on Hindu properties and temples and crimes against women. Slogans in favour of an Islamic state and administration based on the shariat alarmed them. They thought their ‘honour, culture and religion’ was threatened.

Of these, 344,000 entered West Bengal in 1947; 786,000 people crossed border in the following year and 213,000 came in 1949. ³ Surprisingly enough, this large movement of population was not taken into account by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) due to the unwillingness of India to participate in the UN General Assembly Resolution of 1949. These happenings thus escaped the attention of the world.

Thereafter, in February and March 1950, there was a series of Hindu pogroms in places such as Digharkul in Gopalganj, Gournadi in Barisal, Habibgarh in Sylhet, Nachole in Rajshahi and Kalshira (P.S. Mollarhat) on the plea of suppression of communists. Military pickets placed in these areas had already been harassing the local people by picking up young women to satisfy their lusts. Communists from Jhalardanga had been hiding in a house in Kalshira in Khulna and had killed a constable during a raid. Reprisals followed in the form of plunder in the village, the breaking of household deities, rape and forcible conversions with the full connivance of the police. Of a total number of 350 households, only three were spared. Congress members in the East Bengal Assembly wanted to move two adjournment motions but were disallowed. Dacca and East Bengal riots followed soon after. While the Chief Secretary of East Bengal was holding a meeting with the Chief Secretary of West Bengal in the East Bengal Secretariat at Dacca, one woman was painted red and taken around the Secretariat to show that her breasts had been cut off in the Calcutta riots. Immediately, government servants struck work, took out a procession and a meeting was held at the Victoria Park at 12 pm. The crowd swelled and riots started from 1 pm with arson, looting of Hindu shops and houses and the killing of Hindus. Innocent Hindus in trains between Dacca and Narayanganj and Dacca and Chittagong were killed. 300 persons were killed in Muladi Badar, 2,500 in Barisal and 63 in Kaibartakhali. Hindu houses were looted and burnt, young girls were distributed among ringleaders and all adult males were killed. Dead bodies lay unattended and vultures were feeding on them. The total number of casualties in the Dacca riots is placed at 10,000.

The resignation of the eminent Scheduled Caste (SC) leader Jogendranath Mandal from the Ministry of Law and Labour, Government of Pakistan came soon after on 8 October 1950. Mandal had been cooperating with the Muslim League since February 1943 with his large flock of 21 SC members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs). ⁴ He thought that Muslims and SCs were equally oppressed by the caste Hindus and had chosen to ignore the Great Calcutta Killing as trouble between the Congress and the Muslim League. He had clinched on Jinnah’s promise on 11 August 1947 for equal treatment of all Pakistanis, Muslim or Hindu. He wanted three SC ministers in the cabinet, a grant of 5 lakhs for the education of SCs and unqualified application of communal ratio rules in the matter of appointment to civil service. But Mandal discovered to his dismay that the new government of Khwaja Nazimuddin and Nurul Amin was not at all inclined to fulfil these promises. The February–March riots proved to be the last straw on the camel’s back, and Mandal resigned forthwith to register his protest. His last days were spent in Calcutta in total disillusionment. ⁵

The missing of the holy relic from the Hazratbal Mosque in Kashmir was made an excuse for another spate of butchery on the Hindus of East Pakistan although Srinagar was many thousand miles away from Bengal, and it was impossible for Hindu Bengalis to have the remotest connection with the matter.

Hindu–Muslim antagonism was a handy tool for the central government in West Pakistan to counter the upsurge of Bengali Muslims against the imposition of Urdu on East Bengal as the state language. Jinnah had been ready to concede religious tolerance but he would not allow Bengali intellectuals to develop a distinct identity around the Bengali language. Support for Bengali as state language came from Bengali civil servants, academics, students and various groups of the middle class. On 23 February 1948, Dhirendranath Datta, a member of the Congress Opposition in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, moved a resolution for recognising Bengali as a state language along with Urdu and English. Begum Ikramullah alleged that East Bengal was being treated as a colony by West Pakistan. ⁶ Agitation for national status for Bengali was started by the East Pakistan Muslim Students’ League founded by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on 4 January 1948. The central government suspected that the movement was deriving strength from the Hindu population who formed 30 per cent of East Bengal’s total population even after the partition. They wanted to get rid of the Hindu intelligentsia so that they would not be able to cast their spell on the political, economic and social life of Pakistan. ⁷ That might explain the urge of the ruling elite in throwing out or converting the minority. The Awami League of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had a landslide victory taking advantage of Field Marshall Ayub’s ‘Basic Democracy’. But Ayub’s successor Yahya Khan clamped Martial Law on East Bengal. General Niazi cracked down on Dacca on 25–26 March 1971. The Jagannath Hall of Dacca University was machine gunned to flush out and kill middle-class students and teachers.

However, 1971 did not bring an end to state-sponsored atrocities against Hindus. Liberal Muslims like Syed Mujtaba Ali, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Alauddin Khan, Kazi Abdul Wadud and Rezaul Karim were not the rule but the exception. ‘A hundred of these well-meaning Muslim intellectuals were not equal to one fire-breathing Muslim Leaguer or Maulavi’, as Roy suggested, ‘who could inflame passions among the faithful against the infidels.’ Mujib’s assassination in 1975 spelt the end of the secular experiment. Violence followed with General Ershad’s declaration of Pakistan as an Islamic state in 1988. 1992 saw unspeakable horrors against Hindus in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The ouster of Hasina Wazed’s Awami League in September 2001 was a signal for another spell of an anti-Hindu pogrom. The Chakmas of Chittagong hill tracts were forcibly converted during the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)–Jamaat coalition.

Throughout his book, Roy was at pains to trace the twists and turns of events leading to the eventual partition of the country and the much more pathetic disintegration of his own province, which forced millions of his fellow Bengalis to leave their cherished homes in East Bengal and spend a life of uncertainty and indignity in the numerous refugee camps in West Bengal. Roy goes back in history to expose some of the ill-judged steps by the then national leadership which had gradually forced the subcontinent towards partition.

During the elections in 1937, the Indian National Congress had entered into an electoral understanding with the Muslim League for ‘independent co-operation’ in all the Hindu majority provinces and promise to form a coalition if they won. Jinnah had trusted the Congress and had championed the cause of the party during his pre-election speeches. For instance, he had declared:

There is really no substantial difference between the League and the Congress …. We shall always be glad to co-operate with the Congress in their constructive programmes. ⁸

The election results brought an overwhelming victory for the Congress in all the Hindu-majority provinces and Congress could easily form government on its own in six of these provinces. The Muslim League’s score in the Muslim-majority provinces was abominable. They had failed to create a League Parliamentary Board in Sind or the North-West Frontier Province. Even in Punjab, the Muslim League lost to the Punjab National Unionist Party. In Bengal, the Congress had won 54 seats which made it the single largest party. ⁹ However, the League had done well in the Muslim minority provinces in Muslim seats. It had bagged 87 per cent of the total Muslim vote and won 442 of the 509 Muslim seats in the provincial assemblies as a whole. It had thus established its claim as a party representing the Muslims. ¹⁰ But the Congress leadership failed to comprehend the significance of this success and launched the Muslim mass contact programme to woo the Muslim voters in the Muslim constituencies. This was interpreted in Muslim circles as a majoritarian attempt to subvert the cultural distinctiveness of the Muslims and swamp their independent existence. ¹¹ In Roy’s opinion, the Congress leadership had thus, through their high-handedness, forfeited an important opportunity to come to an understanding with the Muslim League. ‘If in 1937 they had only allowed coalition ministries with the League’, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee ruefully noted in his Diary, ‘India’s political history would have been different.’ ¹²

Yet more high-handed was the Congress’s refusal to form a coalition government with Fazlul Haq, the leader of the Krishak Praja Party, which had been disparagingly dubbed by Nazimuddin (who subsequently became the Premier of Bengal) as ‘not a pure Muslim organization’. ‘You have thrown me to the wolves’, Haq complained to the Congress leadership and was forced into a coalition with the Muslim League. ¹³ With Congress backing, Haq could have kept the Muslim hardliners at bay and Bengal would not have to see the rise of leaders like Suhrawardy or Nazimuddin, who had such a sinister role to play during the unfortunate days of 1946. ‘This was probably the first nail to be driven in the coffin of the East Bengali Hindus’, remarked Roy, ‘though very few realized it as such at that time.’

Being firmly entrenched in the Muslim majority province of Bengal, Jinnah could then pressurise Haq into proposing the Pakistan Resolution in the Lahore Congress of 1940. Many, however, believe it to be a bargain counter with the Congress. ¹⁴ What Jinnah had aimed at was a loose federation, where power at the federal centre would be equally shared by the Congress and the Muslim League. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad had persuaded the Cabinet Mission to propose something approximating this, when the Mission suggested the three-tier group system for the distribution of power among the provinces and the formation of an interim government at the centre preparing the stage for a Constituent Assembly. Jinnah had found it acceptable and the League had communicated its consent. But then Nehru, the blue-eyed boy of Gandhi (who had in 1938 put a tragic end to the very popular presidency of Subhas Chandra Bose through his intransigence and left him no better option than to leave the country for an unknown future and thus deprived the Indian National Congress of a very sincere and dedicated worker), succeeded Azad as the Congress President and decided to explode the bomb on 10 July, which decisively shattered all hopes of the subcontinent continuing under a single regime. When asked whether the Cabinet Mission Proposals had been accepted by the Congress, he declared in a press interview in Bombay that the Congress considered itself ‘completely unfettered by any agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise’. ¹⁵ The unwillingness of the Congress to yield anything to its rivals also became pronounced by Nehru’s open admission that although the Congress had accepted the three-tier formula, the Congress was ‘not bound by a single thing except that we have decided to go into the Constituent Assembly’. ¹⁶ Jinnah took it as a nullification of the entire course of negotiations to share power in a single centre without jeopardising the unity of the subcontinent. The result was the call for ‘Direct Action’, which assumed such a ghastly shape in Calcutta on 16 August and in Noakhali and Tipperah on 10 October 1946.

Roy found it surprising that neither Nehru nor Gandhi considered it necessary to visit Calcutta after the bloodbath of 16 August 1946 since that would have required them to condemn the action of the Muslims. In Noakhali, Nehru meekly followed Gandhi after the brutal massacre, rape and forced conversions without saying much. But when the Hindus tried to retaliate in Bihar, Nehru as prime minister of the interim government threatened aerial bombing and the military was deployed immediately to quell the riots.

Nehru’s partisan attitude continued even after the partition. Even the massacres of the 1950s in East Pakistan, which compelled Jogendranath Mandal to resign his ministerial office in the Pakistan government, failed to shake Prime Minister Nehru out of his euphoria. An exchange of population and property under the circumstances would have been a sensible solution. But Nehru had other ideas. In April 1948, an Inter-dominion Conference in Calcutta had already taken place, where the Rehabilitation Ministers of two states, K.C. Neogy and Ghulam Muhammad, made a joint declaration that they wanted to prevent mass exodus and create conditions of security. They proposed to establish minority boards at the provincial and local levels in both countries. This was followed up by the signing of the Nehru–Liaqat Pact in April 1950. The insensitivity of the Indian government to the plight of the Bengalis was demonstrated in the way the union minister for refugee and rehabilitation, Mohan Lal Saxena, was expecting that the Pact would create conditions to enable the post-1950 refugees to go back to their native places in East Bengal. Even when the Pact was being discussed in the floors of the Parliament, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee argued against trusting the culprits of the Great Calcutta Killing, the Noakhali carnage, the Meghna Bridge, Muladi and Madhavpasha massacres and demanded an exchange of population and property. Nehru dismissed their claims pointing out that such ideas were not compatible with India’s political, economic, social and spiritual principles. Frustrated with Nehru’s arrogance, S.P. Mookerjee and K.C. Neogy resigned from the Cabinet. N.C. Chatterjee of Hindu Mahasabha called it ‘the hour of national humiliation’ and ‘surrender to the dark, dismal forces of aggressive anti-Indian and anti-Hindu communalism’. The Bengal Rehabilitation Organization of Radha Kamal Mukherjee and Meghnad Saha also criticised the Pact for being totally incapable of creating confidence or a sense of security in the minds of the Hindus. The plight of the refugees of Bengal remained little known outside the province and the Nehru–Liaqat Pact was celebrated in other provinces as a ‘masterstroke of Panditji’.

The Nehru–Liaqat Pact had somewhat eased the transfer of movable assets by the refugees from East Pakistan by reducing harassment by enforcement officials. But exchange of property was gradually made more difficult by new legislation. Grabbing of Hindu property had started with the East Bengal (Emergency) Requisition of Property Act 1948 (Act XIII) and the East Bengal Evacuees (Administration of Property) Act 1949 (Act VIII), the East Bengal Evacuees (Administration of Immovable Property) Act of 1951 (Act XXIV). No Hindu property was to be restored if it had been acquired by government for public purpose. The missing of the holy relic from the Hazratbal Mosque in Kashmir was also the occasion for the East Pakistan Disturbed Persons (Rehablitation) Ordinance 1964 (Ordinance I), which took away the Hindu’s right to sell his own property. Henceforth, the property was to be placed under Evacuee Property Management Board under Section 3 of East Bengal Evacuees Act of 1951. After the 1965 war, several new acts like the Defence of Pakistan Ordinance 1965, the Enemy Property Order 1965, the East Pakistan Enemy Property (Land and Buildings) Administration and Disposal Order 1966, etc. deprived Hindus even of legal equality in the eyes of law. Property jointly owned by an Indian Muslim and a Pakistani citizen was not enemy property. But that owned by a Muslim and an East Pakistani Hindu, who had gone to India before September 1965, was to be considered Enemy Property. Roy quotes the historian Jayanta Kumar Ray’s citation of the British journalist Taya Zinkin’s comment in the Manchester Guardian after the 1956 constitution came into vogue that ‘In India Muslims are citizens like the rest. In Pakistan Hindus are second class citizens not entitled to the same justice as other people.’

Roy considered it his ardent duty to draw popular attention to the ‘major case of violation of human rights that has so far escaped the attention of the world’. Volumes have been written on slavery in America, the German pogrom of the Jews or the Palestine–Israel conflict, but Roy found it intriguing that not much has been written about the persecution of the Hindus in former East Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh. Roy is surprised by the attempt of Bengali intellectuals to keep the goings on in East Pakistan and later-day Bangladesh under cover. He wondered why Bengal did not utter a single word of protest against atrocities against Hindus comparable to the public outcry against American bombing of Vietnam, imprisonment of Nelson Mandela by the South African White government, American embargo of Cuba or British and French bombing of Egypt during the Suez Crisis of 1956. He would like to create public awareness of the matter through documentation of its history, observing special days to remember the sufferings of Hindu martyrs, movies based on these happenings and rewards for the creation of public awareness of such events comparable to the honours conferred on Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela.

The book is certainly successful in exposing the ‘Indian Holy Ghost of communal harmony and secularism’ as literature on this topic is really few and far between. Roy has deprecated the attempt of leftist leaders like Biman Bose to whitewash the unabated anti-Hindu pogroms even after the creation of Bangladesh as purges of the supporters of the Awami League (which included both Hindus as well as Muslims) by its opponents. Similarly silent was the Pakistan Papers of Mani Shankar Aiyar, who had been the Consul General in Karachi and had assignments in Dacca during the Bangladesh war. These were instances of Left–Nehruvian secularism, which Roy intended to unmask. Roy quoted the American Nobel Laureate Tony Morrison as having once said that if someone would like to read a book, which has as yet not been written, then he himself might attempt to write it. Roy has attempted such a task with the declared aim to bring about an end to the perpetration of such wrongs, which everyone had always been aware of and yet no one could freely discuss for fear of reviving memories which were too bitter.