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By Root 4505 0

were already backing down a little. Everyone was aware that a campaign of ‘mass glorification’ of the INA was going on, particularly in Bengal. The idea that the ordinary ‘white’ rankers, the INA men who had escaped British censure with no more than a dishonourable discharge, would simply be quietly absorbed into the villages was exploded. Instead, provincial Congress committees arranged receptions as the men passed through railway stations on their way home. They were garlanded, eulogized and treated like conquering heroes. One thing that particularly worried the authorities was the way in which the issue might become communal. Though Muslim soldiers had joined the INA, some soldiers from the Muslim peoples of the northwest regarded Bose and his followers as traitorous Hindus. With communal tensions beginning to build up again as the war ended, the British did not want the INA issue to feed into Hindu–Muslim disagreements.65 The authorities reached a consensus at a conference of provincial officers held in November 1945. They agreed that, since there was so much sympathy for the INA among army rank and file and ordinary people, the only safe policy was to confine prosecution to those INA officers specifically accused of brutality against fellow soldiers. It took a while for full import of this decision to sink in, but the fact that so many officials were prepared to overlook the charge of rebellion against the king-emperor was a tacit admission that the imperial game was up.

BENGAL ON THE BRINK

The fallout from the INA and the animosities of the war’s end combined in a noxious way in populous and impoverished Bengal. Calcutta had always acted as the northern hub of the crescent just as Singapore acted as its southern hub. It remained so even when the governments of Burma and Malaya returned to their reconquered territories. Intelligence activities in Indo-China were organized in Calcutta and, however poverty stricken its inhabitants, Calcutta remained the centre of British business for the whole Bay of Bengal. In the second half of 1945 the city of more than 2 million was a place of rising tension that was soon to spill over into an almost perpetual state of violence. In Burma, conflict between the armed representatives of ethnic groups took place mainly in the peripheries of the country; in Bengal it affected the province’s heart. Calcutta began to resemble Thomas Hobbes’s nightmare vision of ‘a war of all against all’.

Bengal, unlike the Punjab, was not home to many soldiers’ families, but war and famine had brutalized a large section of its population. Since 1942 it had sheltered many of the displaced, the refugees from Burma and Malaya. Survivors of the famine of 1943 still eked out a livelihood on its streets. As the war came to its end, new dangers arose. Labour in the city was restive throughout the autumn. Business firms and state enterprises took the opportunity to reduce the ‘dearness allowance’ that they had paid during the wartime emergency. There were postal strikes, steel workers’ strikes and strikes in the Railway Press, one of the major printing houses. People went about in rags because there was a ‘cloth famine’, a consequence, it was said, of profiteering and corruption in the wartime rationing system. Worse, there were eerie echoes of 1943. Floods were afflicting large areas of northern India while other parts of the same region suffered a drought: ‘spontaneous hunger marches and the influx of rural people into the towns had started and the price of rice and paddy were steeply rising’.66

Since the city had been near to the fighting in Burma, a lively trade in contraband arms, ammunition and explosives had grown up. Troops sold their weapons to Calcutta people and many were stolen. The police later indicted the military for ‘carelessness’ in allowing so much war materiel to fall into the wrong hands.67 These arms would be used to deadly effect over the next two years. There were also the men around keen to use these illicit weapons, not people with some military training, as was often to be the