Direct Action Day
The best chance for avoiding the 1947 partition of India came in the spring of 1946. With World War Two concluded, the British were finally ready to relinquish control of India, and sent negotiators to see what agreement with the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League could be reached. For a few weeks, both groups accepted a tentative framework for a united India with Muslim-controlled regions. Distrust undermined the proposal, and at the end of July, M.A. Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, withdrew support. At a press conference, he explained their demand for Pakistan would be made by “direct action” on August 16, 1946. “We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India,” he promised.
The destruction in Kolkata on Direct Action Day set off a chain reaction that did indeed produce a divided India.
Kolkata had a population of around three million, or about the size of Chicago today. It was a hub of commercial trading, but also home to vast slums. Hell, one resident observed, was being born an Untouchable in those slums, where poverty was concentrated like nowhere else on earth.1
The trouble started early on Friday morning, August 16. Margaret Bourke-White, in her book Halfway to Freedom, told the story of Nanda Lal, a Hindu shopkeeper who witnessed the first wave of Muslim attackers arriving in the downtown district. They vandalized Hindu stores, destroying wares and setting fires, and Nanda Lal retreated through his shop and took refuge with his family. He was bleeding from a barrage of stones launched through his store’s windows, but successfully barricaded the door to their apartment, where the family stayed for the next few days.
The mob’s primary weapons were clubs, iron bars, and projectiles, and they found many Hindu victims. Bodies began to accumulate in the streets over the cries of “Pakistan zindabad!” (“Long live Pakistan”) and “Allahu Akbar!” From his roof, Nanda Lal saw the green flag of the Muslim League rise up above a college campus a block away.
One contributing factor to the ease with which violence spread was that civil servants, including police and soldiers, had been given the weekend off. The province’s Muslim prime minister, Shaheed Suhrawardy, took credit for arranging their absence at an afternoon rally. The following August, while sharing a house with Gandhi, he would accept responsibilty for the riots.
The population of the city was roughly three-quarters Hindu and one-quarter Muslim, and on the first day, the Hindus took the worst of it. Then, their numerical superiority reversed the tide. It would be three more long days until the destruction ground to a halt.
How would you react if a weekend riot in an American city left more people dead than September 11?
Freedom at Midnight (Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre, 1975) p. 28