Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [177]
Bose and Suhrawardy were both to be disappointed. The majority of the middle-class Hindu politicians opposed any move that would maintain a Muslim preponderance in Bengal’s politics. Their most vocal leader, Shyama Prasad Mookherjee, denounced the ‘ten year communal raj’ that the Muslims were said to have imposed since the 1935 constitutional reforms. Throughout the early part of 1947 the Hindu middle classes presented petitions and held public meetings to demand partition. The main Hindu organization, Hindu Mahasabha, the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, and the vast majority of local associations in which Hindus predominated pressed for separation. Mookherjee characterized the Bengali ‘paradise to come’ promised by Suhrawardy as simply more of the ‘hell that exists in Bengal today’, the result, he argued, of the chief minister’s well-documented maladministration and the Muslim League’s ‘campaign of hatred’.30 Bengal indeed remained a kind of hell. If the conditions of ordinary people had not been so desperate it is possible that the Bengal assembly might not have voted for partition later in the summer. By now, though, even the representatives of the poor, low-caste Hindu peasants of the east of the province who had previously shared interests with the Muslim peasantry were alarmed and apprehensive. Communist organizers tried to persuade the peasantry that it was an alliance of bosses, imperialists and landlords who were fomenting the communal rioting. They had some success in northeast Bengal.31 Here peasants had traditionally been forced to surrender half their crop as rent to rural bosses, who often then added interest and other charges and sequestered the whole lot. A large agitation (the Tebagha movement) was fighting against this system of exploitation, provoking some clashes between peasant demonstrators and the police. Yet the dominant ideology remained that of religious difference. Communal suspicion did not dissipate. Muslim peasants were asked by lecturing clerics: ‘Why agitate for a larger share of the crop when under Pakistan you would have it all?’ Hindu peasants were reminded of the Noakhali killings.
On the surface the city of Calcutta looked normal. David Lean’s Great Expectations with the young John Mills was playing at the Lighthouse. Burt Lancaster starred in The Killers at the Regal. But these markers of post-war cinema belied the fact that the war seemed to continue out in the side streets and bustees. The supply of wartime weaponry had not yet been exhausted. A score of people were murdered every other day. Arson and attacks on shops and houses with homemade bombs occurred every night. On 7 July, just six weeks before Independence, twenty-five people were stabbed to death in the city and a bomb was thrown in its main thoroughfare, Chowringee. Curfews were regularly imposed on Calcutta and other cities while magistrates banned groups marching in shirts of ‘a certain colour’, presumably a reference to the green and saffron hues favoured by Muslim and Hindu agitators, respectively. The refugee problem worsened. Sixty thousand Muslim refugees had fled from the revenge riots in Bihar that had followed Noakhali the previous autumn. The fear of back-street disturbances drove the poor, many of them already refugees, from their slums onto the pavements of central Calcutta. Public security was so bad that no one could be persuaded to collect the city