Indian Independence History - Direct action and horrors of partition !

We are all set to celebrate 78th Independence Day of this Great land – in our school History books, we read a terse statement – India obtained freedom without fight and without shedding drop of blood.  How wrong it was and why was such a picturisation not properly showing the pain, sacrifices, fights and the blood that ran in the streets in the freedom struggle !!

 

Our Mahan Bharat now is a Free Independent Nation.  After the recent reorganistaions,  India is a federal union comprising 28 states and 8 union territories, for a total of 36 entities.  The states and union territories are further subdivided into 806 districts and smaller administrative divisions.

 

Reading of its past history, the ‘Indian Independence Act 1947’  was as an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that partitioned British India into the two new independent dominions of India and Pakistan. The Act received the royal assent on 18 July 1947, and Pakistan came into being on August 14, and India on August 15, as two new countries.  The legislation was formulated by the government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee and the Governor General of India Lord Mountbatten, after representatives of the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, and the Sikh community - came to an agreement with the Viceroy of India, on what has come to be known as the 3 June Plan or Mountbatten Plan.  Constitution of India. 

In the 1940s, just prior to India becoming free, 565 princely states existed in India during the period of British rule. These were not parts of British India proper, having never become possessions of the British Crown, but were tied to it in a system of subsidiary alliances. The Government of India Act 1935 introduced the concept of the Instrument of Accession, wherein a ruler of a princely state could accede his kingdom into the 'Federation of India'. The federation concept was initially opposed by the Indian princes, but ascension of all the princely states was almost complete when World War II occurred. In 1947 the British finalized their plans for quitting India, and the question of the future of the princely states was a conundrum for them. While much has been talked about the accession executed by Maharaja Hari Singh, ruler of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, there were hundreds of others, some of whom fell in line and many others brought together by Sardar Vallabhai Patel and other tall leaders. 

The demand for Pakistan, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah of the All-India Muslim League, contributed to one of the biggest killings of innocent people of India in August 1946, when at least 2,000 people were killed over five days in Calcutta, then the capital of the province of Bengal.   

Between dawn on the morning of 16 August 1946 and dusk three days later, the hindu population of Calcutta hacked, battered, burned, stabbed or shot 6,000  to death, and raped and  maimed another 20,000.  Yes, India let down so much of blood and the filthy and dreadful slaughter which turned Calcutta into a charnel house for seventy-two hours in August 1946 is  important because it did more than murder innocent people. It murdered hopes too. It changed the shape of India and the course of history. The corpses of men, women and children lay stinking  in the gutters of Chowringhee Square until the only reliable gatbage collectors of India, the vultures, picked them clean; and with every mouthful, they picked away the fabric of a unitary India, which had been torn into two by the British. 

The tragedy of the Calcutta massacre is not simply an occurrence of bloody riots but the one that exposed the leaders of those times as incapable of protecting their own people !!!  India at the end of the WW II was a country divided not into two parts but into two factions. Its 350,000,000 people, approximately one-fifth of the population of the world, spoke many languages  and subscribed to every kind of religion, principally Hinduism and Mohammedanism, but also everything from Christianity to animism; but so far as politics were concerned, the country was run (always under the control of the British, of course) by two main parties -  the Congress Party, which claimed to be a secular party speaking for the whole of the people no matter what their religion or class; and  the Muslim League, which made no bones about representing the interests of none but those of Mohammedan belief. To attempt to equate  Congress and the Muslim League with, say, the Tory and  Labour Parties in Britain or the Democrats and Republicans in the United States is, the way things were after the war, impossible and absolutely improper. The situation between the two factions was not that of two parties fighting each other for political supremacy at the polls.  By 1946, it could be said that something over ninety percent of India’s Muslims supported the Muslim League and its all-powerful leader, Mohammed Ali Jinnah.  But that perhaps was not acknowledged nor understood by the Congress leaders.

 

The Viceroy in 1946 was Field Marshal Lord Wavell.  At first sight, the appointment of Field Marshal Lord Wavell as Viceroy of India had been a strange one indeed. His record as  a commander in the field, brilliant, distinguished though he might be, had been one of disappointment and setback; he had seen the armies under his command driven back in both Africa and Asia, and though no soldier could possibly have done better with the resources at his disposal, he had inevitably been saddled with the responsibility for defeat.   

In a land filled with politicians, who often did not know when to keep their mouths shut, he found it almost impossible to open his. The Indian leaders, Hindu and Muslim alike, were loquacious. Words fell like drops of saliva from their tongues. They spoke  like poets at their best and like Welsh Baptists at their worst; but one thing was certain, they were never at a loss for words or quotations. One by one, they would troop in to see him, Gandhi,  Jinnah, Nehru, Azad and Liaquat and they would spray him with jets of eloquent argument.  

It so happened that every single one of the Indian leaders, of both sides, was a lawyer. As a soldier, Wavell had been trained to suspect all lawyers. His particular béve noire was Gandhi. To India At the end of the first forty-eight hours, an air of death and desolation hung over Calcutta. It was muggily hot and raining slightly. The smoke from fires hung heavy on the air. Only an  occasional cycle (usually ridden by an Englishman) or a military jeep, canopied in wire netting, rushed by. The city had come to a standstill. No more trains were coming into Howrah  or Sealdah from the country. The sewers overflowed; and in the foetid gutters the bodies of dead men and women and dead cows lay side by side, being picked over by the vultures. 

But though he may have condemned the orgy of violence, Mr Jinnah cannot have been anything but satisfied by the lessons that were inevitably drawn from it. Could anything prove more ruthlessly the validity of his claim that, in an independent India,  Hindus and Muslims could no longer live together; that civil  war would be the result ? One might have thought that the Indian leaders, Nehru of Congress and Jinnah of the League, would have come to Calcutta immediately and possibly shown themselves together to demonstrate their common abhorrence of violence and bloodshed for political purposes. But both of them were too busy for that.  Mr Jinnah was in conference with the working committee of  the Muslim League, planning new tactics in his fight with  Congress. Pandit Nehru was holding the first meetings to pick the Cabinet   of the new interim Government.!  

Only the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, came to Calcutta to mourn with its citizens and grieve at what he saw. It was he who listened to stories of how, in the midst of the carnage, when Muslim was killing Hindu, and some retaliation, there had still been a gleam of light in the midst of the gloom.  IF IT COMES to a question of pinning down the exact day the , Congress Party decided that they must get rid of Lord Wavell as Viceroy of India, a serious student would probably choose 27 August 1946, for Wavell was exactly doing what Congress should have been doing !!!!!!! 

That evening, Wavell called Gandhi and Nehru and spoke at what, for him, was considerable length. ‘I have just come back from Calcutta,’ he said, ‘and I am appalled at what I have seen.’ He described to the two Hindu leaders the enormity of the crime against humanity  and civilization which had been committed  in Calcutta during recent days. He admitted that, as an Englishman, he had no right to judge the actions of the Indian political parties, even though he condemned and was cast down by the barbarities which had been committed in their name. But so long as he was Viceroy of India, he went on, he felt it  necessary to do all in his power to prevent any more massacres of this kind. Neither as an Englishman nor as a human being could he stomach such savagery and bestiality. He would be abdicating his responsibilities if he did not make a supreme effort to bring the two communities, together. 

History for sure needs to be read and understood in its proper perspective, lest one might end up falling in the same pitfalls.  Today our Honble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modiji has tweeted ‘We reiterate our commitment to always protect the bonds of unity and brotherhood in our nation’.  Modiji  has paid his tributes to those impacted during the Partition of the country. Marking the Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, in a post on X, Shri Modi has recalled the severe impact and suffering that partition caused to numerous people.

 

Long live Bharat Mata – long live the Citizens of our Maha Barath.

 
With love to the Nation – S Sampathkumar
14.8.2024

 

The pain and sordid story of Bengal killings excerpted from the book ‘The last days of British Raj’ written and published by Leonard Mosley in 1961.  Leonard Oswald Mosley OBE OStJ [1913-1992] was a British journalist, historian, biographer and novelist. His works include five novels and biographies of General George Marshall, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Orde Wingate, Walt Disney, Charles Lindbergh, Du Pont family, Eleanor Dulles, Allen Welsh Dulles, John Foster Dulles and Darryl F. Zanuck. He also worked as chief war correspondent for London's The Sunday Times.