Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [178]
The British were alarmed and despondent. Following the euphoria at the end of the war everything seemed to be going wrong. The economic crisis at home, the threat of communism in Europe and the collapse of empire in the East amidst bloodshed and recriminations all seemed to feed off each other. Anti-British feeling in Calcutta was stilled neither by communal violence nor by the imminence of Britain’s departure. The year began badly with a riot in Calcutta about the situation in Indo-China or ‘Viet-nam… of all things’, as John Tyson, the secretary to the governor, put it.33 In February Saraswati Puja, the festival of the goddess of learning, saw displays of more pictures of Subhas Bose than images of the deity and more Congress flags than flowers in her honour.34
In spite of all the arguments for and against the partition of Bengal no one actually foresaw the civil strife that would result. On 20 June the Bengal legislative assembly voted to divide the province. Soon afterwards Sir Cyril Radcliffe, fresh from carving up the Punjab, established himself and his commission in the Belvedere palace and began work on dividing the province’s 25 million Hindus and 33 million Muslims whose lives had so long been intertwined. Radcliffe worked with great speed and without much local knowledge. He was dependent on maps and on the evidence given to him by the local political parties, with all their communal and factional biases.35 Whatever he ruled, most Muslims were likely to be outraged and no one would be entirely satisfied. Mountbatten kept the details of the plan quiet until two days after independence in the hope of avoiding the massive and bloody population movements that were going on in the Punjab. ‘I hope I am not here when the award is announced’, Tyson observed.
As most people expected or feared, the division approximated to the plan of partition that the provincial Congress had been pressing for over the previous year, though it was messier than they had wanted. Given Mountbatten’s distrust of the Muslim leadership and the strength of British commercial interests in Calcutta, it was to be expected that the city would be awarded to India. Not only did this leave what was to become East Pakistan without a major commercial centre, it also severed the growers of the region’s main export crop, jute, from the mills and marketing infrastructure located in and around the city. The future for jute export was already far from rosy because demand for the tough vegetable fibre was declining as new synthetic fibres developed during the war usurped its role. From the very start, the eastern wing of Pakistan was destined to be a drain on the resources of the more prosperous provinces in the west; eventually it would become a millstone. Another fillip for Hindu Bengal and the new India was that two of the rulers of the local princely states, technically independent kingdoms under the crown in British constitutional thinking, opted for India rather than Pakistan. Even though both Tripura in the southeast and Cooch Behar in the northeast had near majority Muslim populations, there was little the Muslim leadership could do. The accession of Tripura to India almost severed the important port district of Chittagong from the rest of East Pakistan, while that of Cooch Behar left a huge hole in the northeast. ‘Moth-eaten’ was a mild description of the misshapen state that emerged from such a random dispensation.
Yet India did not win hands down. Radcliffe’s rapid draughtsmanship assigned the Hindu-majority district of Khulna to East Pakistan. This was close enough to Calcutta to loose a further surge of the Hindu population to the west and further