A return to peace
The communal riots that began on Direct Action Day took four days to burn themselves out in Kolkata. News of the Muslim League’s direct action had spread across the country; from Sevagram ashram in central India, Gandhi called it senseless violence that prolonged British rule. He hoped it would not spread. “They can retaliate or refrain,” he wrote on August 19, 1946. “Refraining is easy and simple, if there is the will. Retaliation is complicated.”
Hindu retaliation came on the second and third days, and it wasn’t complicated so much as deadly. The bodies clogged the streets, quickly decomposing in the tropical heat. When British troops removed 150 corpses from a single intersection, an appreciative citizen offered them champagne. According to Stanley Wolpert, “By the night of August 19, rotting corpses posed so serious a threat to [Kolkata] that Bengal’s government offered to pay troops ‘five rupees for each body collected.’”1
Official sources put the death toll at five thousand, with three times as many wounded. Unofficial estimates went as high as sixteen thousand dead, with “appreciably more Muslims than Hindus” killed.2 Thousands more fled the city, filling the railroad station to wait for trains. The masses sorted “themselves automatically into Hindu and Muslim camps.… the Hindu portion easily recognizable by its white cows, each lovingly encircled by the family to which it belonged.”3
The exodus further polarized the city. Mixed neighborhoods saw members of the minority religion flee, hardening community lines, and rival Hindu and Muslim gangs patrolled the streets. The memory of Direct Action Day’s chaos hung over the city like a gravid storm cloud, ready to burst at any moment. A year later, these tensions would inspire city leaders to beg Gandhi to stay in their city on Independence Day, where his presence might avert a sequel.
A week after Kolkata had calmed, Gandhi took a train to the capital, New Delhi. He and Jawaharlal Nehru met with the British viceroy, who was similarly shaken by the riots. The viceroy urged them—the Indian National Congress—to offer a concession to the Muslim League and reopen negotiations for an interim government. Nehru became “very heated” and proclaimed the League was trying to bully them into submission.4 Gandhi explained that Congress reversing its position because of the Kolkata riots would “lead to an encouragement and repetition of such tragedies.”5
Unfortunately, the tragedies repeated themselves anyway, forming a “chain reaction of riot, counter-riot, and reprisal which stormed through India.”6 But that’s another story.
Today’s discussion question builds on this dilemma: Would you do something you believed was wrong if the other party threatened violence?
Jinnah of Pakistan (Stanley Wolpert, 1984) p. 287
Ibid.
Halfway to Freedom (Margaret Bourke-White, 1949) p. 20
Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire (Rajmohan Gandhi, 2008) p. 534
Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Letter to Lord Wavell, August 28, 1946) p. 43,948
Halfway to Freedom (Margaret Bourke-White, 1949) p. 20