(In order to terrorise the opponents of partition of India and creation of the Islamic state of Pakistan, the Muslim League lead by Mohammed Ali Jinnah gave a call to Muslims of India to take to "Direct Action" from the 16th of August 1946. On that one day in the Muslim League-ruled state of undivided Bengal, in Calcutta, its capital, 10,000 Hindus were slaughtered and then the communal civil war erupted. This frightened the Congress and Hindus led by it, to submit to the demand for division of this country. The Calcutta killings were the first state-sponsored pogrom in India. The killings of about 4000 Sikhs in Delhi, the capital of India in Oct-Nov 1984 is a comparable misdeed. What happened in the aftermath of the burning of Hindu pilgrims in rail bogies in Godhra, Gujarat pales into insignificance in comparison to the Calcutta and Delhi killings. We reproduce below an extract referring to the Calcutta killing from "The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan" by the historian Yasmin Khan.)
"The streets of Calcutta were verily empty on the morning of 16 August 1946. The Muslim League provincial government had called a public holiday to mark Direct Action Day. Three days later at least 4,000 of Calcutta's residents lay dead and over 10,000 were injured. The streets were deserted once again. Now the scene was one of carnage, buildings reduced to rubble, rubbish uncollected from the streets, telephone and power lines severed. Schools, courts, mills and shops stayed closed. A British official groped for an analogy, describing the landscape as across between the worst of London air raids and the Great plague In the intervening days, the worst riots between Hindus and Muslims ever remembered in India broke out. What had once been violent, but almost theatrical encounters between politicised militias and activists, had burst their limits and had become targeted attacks on innocent civilians, including women, children and the elderly.
Although there had been riots in Calcutta in the past, the violence of August 1946 was distinctive in its scale and intensity. Vastly different social groups and sections of the city amassed along religious lines. Jinnah's call for a day of direct action on which a complete hartal would be utilized to demonstrate support for Pakistan undoubtedly triggered the violence. Jinnah ratcheted, the oratory, speaking of Congress as a 'Fascist Grand Council'. The day of direct action was clearly a strategic manoeuvre. Jinnah needed to strength his own hand of Cartesian, the unfolding dispute over the membership of the interim government which was taking place in New Delhi, and to show just how ardent the demand for Muslims representation really was. Jinnah called on his followers 'to conduct' themselves peacefully and in a 'disciplined manner' although his own usually precise and legalistic prose was vague enough to allow for violent reinterpretation.
A few days before Direct Action Day, the Calcutta district League set out its own plans; there would be a complete strike of Muslims workers in shops and factories, then numerous processions accompanied by musical bands and drums would converge from all over greater Calcutta— from Howrah, Hooghly, Matiaburz and elsewhere — ending in a mass rally. Leaguers were told to go out to the mosques,where they should tell people about the plans, hand out pamphlets and say special prayers for the freedom of m India, the Islamic world and the peoples of India and the east in general. Older networks of mullahs, mosques and pires were put to work, to spread the call for Direct Action in Bengal.
On the morning of 16 August, League supporters opened their Newspapers to find large printed advertisements inside them:
Today is Direct Action Day
Today Muslims of India dedicate their lives and all they possess to the cause of freedom
Today let every Muslim swear in the name of Allah to resist aggression
Direct Action is now their only course
Because they offered peace but they were betrayed
They claimed Liberty but were offered Thraldom
Now Might alone can secure the Right
What 'Direct Action' meant, though, was wide open to speculation and distortion. During the build—up, handbills and fly posters using religious language urged Muslims to act and linked the earliest Muslims with the contemporary situation announcing that, in this holy month of Ramzan, Mecca was conquered from the infidels and in this month again a Jehad for the establishment of Pakistan has been declared. This kind of Islamic populism drew on older myths and stories, reworking history and have the Mayor of Calcutta himself (a Muslim) commanded. 'We Muslims have had the crown and have ruled. Do not lose heart, be ready and take swords. Oh Kafir Your doom is not far and the greater massacre will come."
Author: Yasmin Khan - An excerpt from his book, "The Great Partition : The Making of India and Pakistan"
Source: Secularism Combat 2009 December
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