Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [148]
Political manipulators from on high found a ready audience among ordinary people stirred to hatred of their neighbours by the corrosive effects of repeated crises and unyielding poverty. Gradually during the spring and summer of 1946, agitations in Calcutta against the British and in favour of the Indian National Army had become flash-points of conflict between local bosses allied with the Congress, the Hindu Mahasabha (the main Hindu activist organization) and the Muslim League. The League blamed the Congress for stirring up trouble because it had done less well than the League in Bengal’s elections. The Congress, for its part, staged numerous strikes and attempted to close down bazaars, including Muslim bazaars. In these straitened times, this was deeply resented by Muslim shopkeepers. As the Cabinet Mission packed up and went home, the Muslim-dominated ministry and its local supporters decided to hold their own shutdown and declared a public holiday in the city to mark Jinnah’s Direct Action Day. This measure, with which the British governor, Sir Frederick Burrows, meekly complied, ensured that large numbers of people would be on the streets and that the issue of closing the bazaars and forcibly preventing people from trading would be particularly fraught. It was already a period of heightened religious sensitivity, for Direct Action Day fell in the middle of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. The city was also going to be full of excitable students preparing for the annual Calcutta University examinations.
There was ample evidence of warlike preparation on both sides. In the weeks before 16 August, young members of Sarat Bose’s section of the Congress were constantly marching and drilling, ostensibly in training as crowd-control volunteers for Indian National Army Day, 18 August, when Congress intended to fête INA officers recently released from jail. Muslim youth groups, such as the Muhammadan Sporting Club, were similarly mobilizing. They, like other Muslim activists, were supposedly using Direct Action Day to make the British government think again about the constitution. But the word put around by the local Muslim League politicians spelled out something different. ‘We are in the midst of the rainy season,’ one handbill declared. ‘But this is a month of real Jehad, of God’s Grace and blessings, of spiritual armament and the moral and physical purge of the nation… It was in Ramzan that the permission of Jehad was granted by Allah.’8 Of course, in Islamic theology, jihad referred to the universal spiritual struggle against evil. Physical warfare against unbelievers was no more than ‘lesser jihad’ and could be resorted to only under special conditions. Yet when circulated among the poor and unlettered a document like this could mean only one thing: ‘prepare for war.’ Similarly sinister calls to the ‘anti-fascist forces’ to mobilize against their enemies were issued in mosques after Friday prayers on 15 August throughout Calcutta and also in Hooghly, just across the river. Some pamphlets did away with all pretence at subtlety: ‘Oh, Kafir [unbeliever], your doom is not far and the general massacre will come!’9 The suspicious and hostile Hindu press predictably denounced the prospective demonstration as ‘pro-Pakistan’ and ‘anti-Hindu’.
On the afternoon of Saturday 16 August some 100,000 Muslims converged on the Ochterlony monument in central Calcutta to hear speeches from members of the League and Bengal government ministers. The monument, which commemorated one of the East India Company’s great Kiplingesque empire-builders of the early nineteenth century, had long been the symbolic heart of British Calcutta. As the crowds flocked to it, however, they passed through