Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Before Partition became a border, it became a massacre. Before trains began arriving with the dead, before millions were uprooted from homes that had been theirs for generations, before the new countries of India and Pakistan came into existence, Bengal had already shown us what communal politics could do when fear, faith, political ambition and a paralysed state were allowed to collide.
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On August 16, 1946, Calcutta (now Kolkata) became the killing ground of what came to be known as the “Great Calcutta Killings” in which 5,000 to 10,000 people were killed. It was not an isolated riot. It was a chain of decisions, warnings, mobilisation and failures that turned an already tense city into a slaughterhouse.
And 80 years later, the first thing we should remember is this: Calcutta was a warning to which we did not listen.
The story begins in July 1946.
According to American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White’s book Halfway to Freedom (page number 26), Muhammad Ali Jinnah, at a press conference at his Bombay residence, declared that the Muslim League was “preparing to launch a struggle” and that they “had chalked out a plan”. White, on the following page of her book, noted that Jinnah spoke explicitly of “direct action” and warned of “bringing trouble”.
The following day came a sentence that should have sent shivers through every government office in India: “We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India”.
There was little ambiguity in the threat.
Economist Henry Vincent Hodson, in his book, The Great Divide: Britain-India-Pakistan, wrote that the Direct Action Day was not presented as an ordinary political demonstration. The Muslim League Working Committee subsequently ensured that its meaning was explained to Muslims across the country.
Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the Premier of Bengal, then requested Governor Sir Frederick Burrows to declare 16 August a public holiday. The decision is recorded in Burrows’s report to Viceroy Lord Wavell, according to the archival file in the British Library IOR: L/P&J/8/655 ff. 95, 96–107.
A city already trembling with communal tension was therefore being emptied of the ordinary routines that might have restrained what was coming.
Even the date chosen by the Muslim League carried religious resonance.
The 18th day of Ramadan was associated with the Battle of Badr, the formative battle of early Islamic history, which was fought in present day Badr of Saudi Arabia.
The Calcutta-based Star of India newspaper, which was the mouthpiece of the Muslim League, published detailed instructions for Direct Action Day. Processions from Calcutta, Howrah, Hooghly, Metiabruz and the 24 Parganas were to converge at the Ochterlony Monument, where Suhrawardy would preside over a mass rally.
League branches were instructed to place three workers in every mosque in every ward to explain the programme before Friday prayers. Special prayers were organised after Jumma for the liberation of Muslim India.
The Star of India published on August 12, 1946, explicitly connected the day’s events to Ramadan and invoked the example of Muhammad’s conquest of Mecca and the establishment of the kingdom of Heaven in Arabia.
A constitutional dispute had now acquired the emotional force of religious mobilisation.
Then came Suhrawardy. British historian John Keay, in his book India: A History, detailed Suhrawardy’s speech at 2 pm on August 16, citing the then-Bengal Governor Frederick Burrows’s report to Viceroy Wavell.
According to Keay’s book, Suhrawardy indicated that arrangements had been made to keep the police and army at bay.
His slogans were hardly an appeal for peace: “Maar ke lenge Pakistan, lad ke lenge Pakistan, le kar rahenge Pakistan, Allahu Akbar, nara-e-takbir” (“We will kill and fight to create Pakistan; we are determined to create Pakistan. Allahu Akbar, nara-e-takbir”).
According to accounts of British police and intelligence officers, special petrol coupons were issued in the names of Muslim League ministers, and petrol was used by League musclemen to make petrol bombs. Food rations for a month were reportedly withdrawn and stockpiled to sustain 10,000 Muslim League musclemen and goons.
A senior intelligence operative’s letter to a British officer at Fort William after the “Great Calcutta Killings” made two points especially clear: Hindus had suffered heavily, and there appeared to have been a plan to prevent the army from controlling the situation.
Margaret Bourke-White, in the book, Halfway to Freedom, recorded eyewitness accounts of trucks descending Harrison Road carrying armed Muslim men wielding brickbats and bottles against Hindu-owned shops.
The Muslim League also deliberately obstructed the police and occupied the Control Room, according to testimonies collected by scholar Debjani Sengupta in his historical essay A City Feeding on Itself: Testimonies and Histories of ‘Direct Action’ Day.
And then comes another uncomfortable part of the story.
THE COMMUNISTS
The Communist Party of India (CPI) did not stand outside Bengal’s communal politics.
Brothers Against the Raj biography records that Hashim, secretary of the Muslim League and a central figure in Suhrawardy’s rise, wrote in his memoir, Let Us Go To The War, that he received assistance from Nikhil Chakravartti, a young communist, in organising the programme. Hashim described himself as an “Islamic Socialist”.
Jyoti Basu, along with two other CPI MLAs, attended the Muslim League meeting on Direct Action Day, where anti-Hindu speeches were made and violence followed. Basu even shared the platform with Suhrawardy.
Three days before Direct Action Day, on 13 August, Basu had issued a press statement declaring that the CPI would support the strike in Muslim areas but oppose it in Hindu areas, according to Noakhali Monograph by Shantanu Singha.
The question is unavoidable: Why divide a city along religious lines precisely when communal tension was approaching the breaking point?
Perhaps CPI was trying to ensure the wrath of Muslim League goons fell on the Hindus. The speeches soon became blood.
On 17 August, Syed Farooqui, president of the Garden Reach Textile Workers’ Union, and Elian Mistry killed Hindu mill workers inside the compound of Kesoram Cotton Mills at Lichubagan, Metiabruz, according to the book The Sickle & the Crescent: Communists, Muslim League and India’s Partition by Sunanda Sanyal and Soumya Basu.
Meanwhile, the Hindu Mahasabha’s position was fundamentally different.
Suranjan Das, in Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905–1947, records that before the riots the organisation held rallies in Dacca advocating Akhand Hindusthan and condemning the legislative measures of the Huq ministry: “Akhand Hindusthan was a plea for a united India”.
The contrast could hardly have been more brutal.
Jinnah’s Muslim League was threatening a divided or destroyed India. Savarkar’s Hindu Mahasabha was still demanding that India remain one.
Then Calcutta produced one of the most fiercely contested figures of those terrible days.
GOPAL PATHA
His real name was Gopal Chandra Mukherjee. Calcutta knew him as Gopal Patha, after the mutton shop his family ran in Boubazar.
But to reduce him to a butcher, a wrestler or a neighbourhood strongman is to miss the extraordinary transformation that took place when Calcutta collapsed around him.
He was a large, physically formidable man who commanded respect in Boubazar. He had Muslim friends, Muslim traders among his business associates, and no reputation for indiscriminate hatred of Muslims.
Before the riots, he had already created the Bharat Jatiya Bahini, a nationalist organisation of 600–800 young men. Its purpose was not communal warfare. It helped people in distress and carried out relief work during calamities. Gopal had admired Subhas Chandra Bose and believed in the idea that a people could not simply wait helplessly for someone else to rescue them.
Then came Direct Action Day and Calcutta changed.
For four days, the city became a place where the ordinary rules of life seemed to disappear for Hindus. Hindu neighbourhoods were attacked. Shops were looted. Homes were set ablaze. Women were raped and children were killed. Families ran through streets that had suddenly become unsafe.
Gopal saw what was happening. He did not have the luxury of discussing it from a safe room. He had to decide what to do with the men who already looked to him for leadership.
He chose to fight.
Overnight, the Bharat Jatiya Bahini became a defence force. Through contacts among ex-servicemen and black-market traders, Gopal obtained firearms, grenades and ammunition, much of it reportedly from World War II supplies traded by foreign soldiers stationed in the city.
Then came the instruction that has defined his memory ever since: “If they kill one of ours, kill ten of theirs.”
It is an ugly sentence. It should remain an ugly sentence for ugliness can only be fought with way more ugliness. It came from an ugly hour, when the distinction between retaliation and survival had begun to collapse.
Gopal was not fighting from the comfort of an ideology. He was responding to a neighbourhood that believed it had been abandoned. His men moved through the burning city. They erected barricades and guarded lanes. They established firing positions and organised rapid counterattacks.
The Muslim League mobs that had previously moved through parts of the city with little resistance now encountered something they had not expected: organised resistance.
And that changed the psychology of the streets. Within two days, the momentum of the violence began to turn.
The man who had been a local wrestler and mutton-shop owner had become, almost overnight, the man people came to when the police could not — or would not — protect them.
Senior Muslim League leaders, including Suhrawardy himself, eventually approached Gopal and appealed for the bloodshed to stop. Gopal refused to simply lay down his arms.
His condition was straightforward: the Muslim League had to order its supporters to stand down and disarm first. His refusal helped force a mutual cessation. By August 20, the worst of the killing had subsided.
His intervention prevented the complete collapse of Hindu neighbourhoods and helped prevent a mass exodus of Hindus from Calcutta, thereby frustrating attempts to push the city towards East Pakistan in the Partition settlement.
Gopal Patha was no saint. Nor should he be turned into one. But neither should the circumstances that created him be forgotten.
He was what happens when ordinary people stop believing that the state will come to rescue them. He was what emerges when the police officer disappears, the administration freezes, and the mob arrives first.
And perhaps that is why his most revealing moment came not during the riots, but a year later.
WHERE WAS MAHATMA GANDHI?
“Where was Gandhiji?”
On August 1947, India was finally free. But freedom had arrived carrying Partition, blood and millions of refugees in its wake.
Gandhi came to Calcutta amid renewed communal tension. He appealed to people to surrender their weapons.
People came and swords were placed before him. Daggers. Country-made guns. Gopal Patha stayed away & Gandhi called him twice. He refused.
On the third occasion, persuaded by local Congress leaders to surrender at least some weapons, he finally went. When Gandhi’s secretary asked him to hand over his arms, Gopal replied: “With these arms I saved the women of my area; I saved the people. I will not surrender them.”
Then he asked the question that had apparently been burning inside him for a year: “Where was Gandhiji, I said, during the Great Calcutta Killing? Where was he then?”
And then: “I will not lay down even a nail that was used to defend Hindu honour.”
The account comes from Gopal’s own recollection of the encounter, recorded in a 1997 interview with The Indian Express.
You do not have to agree with Gopal Patha to understand the force of those words. You do not have to celebrate retaliation to understand the despair behind it.
Because beneath his anger was a question larger than Gopal himself: When the state fails to protect you, whom are you supposed to trust?
That is the question Calcutta left behind.
THE WARNING WE IGNORED
Direct Action Day did not end on 16 August. The violence spread. Bengal’s wounds deepened. Noakhali would soon become another name synonymous with terror, displacement and helplessness.
And this is where history becomes larger than the question of who killed whom. The lesson is not that an entire community was guilty.
Nor is it that violence committed in retaliation becomes virtuous. The lesson is that political leaders can turn identity into a weapon. That governments can place political calculations above the safety of their citizens and religious mobilisation can turn neighbours into enemies.
And that once the state abandons its first obligation — the protection of human life — violence acquires a momentum of its own. The British were still in India and the Union Jack still flew over government buildings.
Independence was still a year away. Yet Calcutta had already shown what the coming Partition would look like.
Eighty years ago, the city bled. A year later, the borders came. The trains came and so did refugees. The corpses came, but the warning had come first.
Calcutta was the warning that India failed to hear.
This is the last of a three-part Opinion series.
You can read the first part of the series: Pakistan: A 300-year-old project that Jinnah completed with Partition, here
You can read the second part of the series: A lost home and the question India must ask every August 15, here
(Aabhas Maldahiyar is the author of Babur: The Quest for Hindustan.)
– Ends
(Views expressed in the piece are those of the author)
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
