Pakistan movement: Direct action
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Direct action: the most crucial phase
During his student days in England , Jinnah, it is said, had toured England with a Shakespearian company, and had even played Romeo. Legend, though unproven, also associates him with Miss Horniman’s famous repertory company for sometime. But anyone who has heard him in the Assembly chamber or during the great debate of Pakistan , or would care to read his pronouncements, some of them epoch-making in cold print, would have little difficulty in noticing that “this nodding acquaintance with Shakespeare” seemed to have had little influence on his vocabulary, or his speeches.
Nor does one have to know Jinnah too well to recognize the much too obvious fact that he had no passion for literature. This Hector Bolitho, also, harps on his Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan (1954), the official biography of Pakistan ’s founder. For more telling evidence, see the (only) oral history of Jinnah, encapsulating Bolitho’s interviews with contemporaries, due to be published shortly under the title, “In quest of Jinnah”.
This is not to say that he did not take, though a little haltingly, recourse to famous quotes to put his point across, whenever it suited his purpose. And whenever he did, he made sure that he was superbly apt and extremely effective. His rejoinder to Gandhi – “A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet” - is quite well known. This was made when Gandhi tried to amuse him by posing the ticklish question as to how he would like to be addressed.
On another occasion, when a correspondent asked him, even as he was retiring from a press conference in Bombay in the tempestuous days of 1946, what hope was there for Pakistan in that bleak political climate, he replied: “Hope eternal rises in human breast”, and then he stopped short. An American woman correspondent luckily came to his rescue, and completed the rest of the quote: “And never say die!”
But he did not allow his memory to fail him when he chose to ring down the curtain over the emotionally charged session of the Muslim League Council on June 29, 1946 with a telling couplet from Firdausi. This is interesting since Jinnah could not claim even a nodding acquaintance with Persian.
In any case, the couplet he quoted amidst a crescendo of high tension is significant for us, not so much for its literary value or for establishing his familiarity with the great Persian poet, but for its significance for Muslim India at perhaps the most critical juncture in modern times, and for the future course of Indian politics. The couplet in question was: “We want peace, but if war is forced upon us, we accept it unhesitatingly”. And, indeed, nothing could have summed up more succinctly the bitter mood of the Indian Muslims at this critical crossroad in their chequered history.
Muslim bitterness at the Congres’s “duplicity” and British “perfidy” had resulted in their rescinding their earlier decision to accept the Cabinet Mission Plan of May 16, 1946 and reaffirm their faith in a sovereign, independent Pakistan . Earlier that evening, the League Council had taken a bold decision: it said good-bye to constitutionalism, and sanctioned Direct Action to wrest Pakistan . “… Now the time has come”, so ran the League resolution, “for the Muslim nation to resort to direct action, to achieve Pakistan, to assert their just rights, to indicate their honour and get rid of the British slavery and contemplated future caste-Hindu domination.”
The resolution had also called upon its members to return British titles which it characterized as “tinsels of slavery”. The response was immediate and explosive: member after member went up the rostrum to renounce his title and affirm his preference for a plain Mr. instead. And for now, more than ever, for Muslims, it was literally “ Pakistan or perish”.
Except perhaps for the decision to adopt Pakistan as the League’s supreme goal on March 23-24, 1940 nothing so momentous had taken place in all the annals of the Muslim League which, by then spanned some four decades.
Nor anything so revolutionary, by any standard. Indeed, the call to direct action stirred the country from one end to the other end, enkindling a prairie-like fire. Even so inveterate a critic of Jinnah and the League as the Blitz weekly of Bombay was constrained to observe: “The worst enemies of the Muslim League cannot help envying the leadership of Mr. Jinnah.
Last week’s cataclysmic transformation of the League from the reactionary racket of the Muslim Nawabs, Noons, and Knights into a revolutionary mass organization dedicated, by word if not by deed, to an anti-Imperialist struggle, compels us to express the sneaking national wish that a diplomat and strategist of Jinnah’s proven calibre were at the helm of the Indian National Congres.
There is no denying the fact that by his latest master-stroke of diplomacy Jinnah has outbid, outwitted and outmanoeuvered the British and Congres alike and confounded the common national indictment that the Muslim League is a parasite of British Imperialism.”
One result of the Direct Action resolution was that when the Interim Government came to be inducted on September 2, the Muslim League was by-passed. This was more or less rectified when in view of the deteriorating situation in the country the League accepted the Viceroy’s offer and joined the Interim Government “in its own right” on October 25.
But, more importantly, the Direct Action decision sent a wave of fear and indignation in the Congres circles. Failing to cheat the Muslims by bluff and bluster, the Congres leaders now tried to resort to bludgeon. Sardar Vallabhai Patel who had predicted a civil war between the Hindus and the Muslims as early as January 11, 1946, could not, for now, see the League turn into a revolutionary organization. In a strongly-worded speech he tried to convince his Hindu audience that the League’s contemplated Direct Action was in fact directed towards the Congres and the Hindus since they would be heading the Interim Government in a short while.
Pandit Nehru, who was to head the interim Government, declared that “if the Government is strong Direct Action will go under, and if the government is weak it will go under.” Gandhi wrote in his own inimitable manner, “We are not yet in the midst of a civil war. But we are near it. At present we are playing at it.”
These pronouncements explain why and how the Direct Action Day in Calcutta was turned into a day of orgy, violence and bloodshed. In fixing August 16, 1946 as the Direct Action Day, the League’s object was not to start a direct action movement on that day but to explain to the people the implications of the Bombay resolution of the League Council.
This aspect of the Direct Action Day was emphasized, again and again, in the pronouncements of the League leaders including that of Jinnah before August 16. It was also made clear that the Direct Action would be non-violent and entirely peaceful; that when launched, it would not be directed against anyone in particular, and definitely not against the Hindus; but that it was to create the requisite confidence in the Muslim nation so as to enable it to wrest Pakistan, in spite of the tremendous odds against it and its creation.
In 1946, Bengal alone had a stable League ministry in the country, the other League ministry in Sind being shaky and a victim of intrigues from both within and without. This League ministry in Bengal was, however, an eyesore to the Congres, which obviously was bent upon discrediting it and having it dismissed. And so Calcutta , where Muslims constituted barely 23 percent of the population, was chosen by the Congres as the venue to teach the Muslims and the Muslim League a bitter lesson and to bury the League’s contemplated Direct Action in an avalanche of violence and bloodshed.
In the result, while the day passed off peacefully in the entire country from one end to the other, even in the Muslim majority provinces, it sparked the beginning of a civil war between the Hindus and Muslims – the long-awaited civil war, so confidently predicted by Sardar Patel in January 1946 when the Muslims had discomfited the Congres attempts to drown the League at the polls.
In the Calcutta carnage, about five thousand people lost their lives and a much greater number were injured, while the loss of property was immense and frightful. Never before had any communal riot taken such a heavy toll; never before a riot had reached such murderous heights. The Congres naturally, and according to a well orchestrated plan, blamed the Bengal League ministry, with the blame game climaxing in a no confidence motion against the ministry.
The League rebutted the Congres charges, characterizing the holocaust as an organized, premeditated Hindu attempt to damn and discredit the League ministry and turn the much awaited Direct Action scheme into a spectacular failure.
Muslim India was obviously incensed beyond repair, straining at the leash that held it back. Jinnah succinctly summed up its agitated mood, when in his Eid massage on August 28, he said, “Today the horizon is dark for us… we are vilified, misrepresented and threatened from every direction…
The Muslim League is ignored and by-passed; tremendous false propaganda is carried on to throw the blame on Muslim League for which there is no iota of justification; the Viceroy and the British Government have surrendered to the Congres and it only remains for them now to make a declaration that they have abdicated and are about to hand over to the Fascist caste Hindu Congres, the government of the subcontinent.
“… This has created a very great and dangerous situation for us and we must face it as a united nation and go through the test and fire of being suppressed, oppressed and persecuted. [However,] I am confident that if the hundred million Muslims stand united all the manoeuvers and machinations and designs of our opponents will fail miserably and we shall emerge out of this struggle triumphantly and shall achieve Pakistan which is our only salvation without which we perish.
“We have argued; we have reasoned; we have supplicated and we have made great concessions but all to no purpose. There remains in front of us a great struggle and we must face it boldly and courageously in a disciplined and organized manner… Our demands are just and righteous and we cannot fail.”
Courageous words in that bleak hour, by any standard. No wonder, they boosted the drooping Muslim morale to a new high; they steeled the Muslims to accelerate their heroic struggle to wade through the rough landscape of blood, tears and toil in their unswerving quest for the Promised Land.
But Hindus and the Congres were not sitting with folded hands either. Beginning from September 1, riots flared up in Bombay and Ahmadabad which presently spread to scores of cities, towns and villages in the U.P., C.P., Bihar and Madras . Significantly though, the earliest outbreaks were all in the predominantly Hindu provinces. Had they been fomented to browbeat the Muslims? – is a moot question.
In mid-October, however, when the news of the death of a large number of Muslim boatmen from Naokhali in the Calcutta carnage reached their folks at home, there was a sudden flare-up in Noakhali in East Bengal, in which, according to the Governor of Bengal, the Q.O.C., and the District Magistrate of Noakhali, “less than 200 persons were killed, and cases of rape, abduction and forcible marriages were rare”.
Even so, to the Congres, they were handy enough to lay the blame for the snowballing civil war at the door of the League and to demand, on that basis, its exit from the Interim Government. The Hindu leaders, including Gandhiji and Kriplani, issued statement after statement, grossly exaggerating the casualties; the Congres press frantically engaged itself in spreading tendencious and tell-tale stories of murder, loot and arson. And that even after neutral sources had nailed their oft repeated lies to the counter.
This mounting campaign of hatred, and further instigation, according to some sources, by some “well-known Congres leaders and members of the legislature” in neighbouring Bihar , led to ghastly pogroms. Hindus of the five districts of Saran, Patna , Gaya , Monghyr and Bhagalpur rose en masse against the Muslims. According to several sources, they wiped out some 30,000 Muslims (including women and children) out of existence, and cleared about 300 square miles of territory of all Muslims. More shocking, the Congres ministry in Bihar , a la Nero, didn’t feel it necessary to call in the Army to check rioting for one full week.
There were, of course, alibis galore – to cover up both the foul crimes against the Muslims, and the Congres government’s criminal connivance.
Yet, there was an overriding need to divert attention from these terrible crimes in Bihar . Hence Gandhi, who had earlier gone to Noakhali to put the Bengal League government in the dock, stayed put over there and tried to focus attention on the Hindu minority’s “plight”. While the Muslim League government in Bengal had readily agreed to appoint an Inquiry Committee under Chief justice Sir Patrick Spence, neither Gandhi nor any other Congres leader had any tears to shed on the plight of Bihar Muslims, or to hold an impartial inquiry into the causes and extent of the Bihar killing.
About a week later occurred the three-day holocaust in Garhmukhteswar, in the Meerut District, about 55 miles from Delhi . About 2,000 Muslims were killed, and property worth lakhs of rupees was either destroyed or looted. Not a shot was fired by the police; the Army was called, but after three bloody days.
A fortnight later, on the occasion of the Meerut Congres session, Sardar Patel, “the Iron Man” of the Congres, made an oblique reference to the number of Hindus and Muslims killed in Bengal, Bihar and the U.P., and called on the Muslims to “examine the balance-sheet”, and to reflect. Should any doubt about the Hindu attitude still linger, he declared, “The sword will be met with sword”.
Meantime, the initial fissures in the improvised edifice of the Interim Government development into visible cracks, and the government itself seemed heading for a breakdown. The Congres forced the Viceroy to call the first session of the Constituent Assembly on December 9.
The League, however, refused to withdraw its Bombay resolution, arguing that the Congres reservations about certain vital clauses in the Cabinet Mission Plan had made a nonsense of the Plan. Nor did the Congres Wardha resolution call for a reversal of the League’s decision to boycott the Constituent Assembly. A hastily improvised conference between the Congres, League and the Sikhs under the aegis of His Majesty’s Government in London, early in December 1946, failed to salvage the situation either; but the Statement of December 6 upheld the League’s stand vis-à-vis the grouping principle. The Statement also laid down that “should a constitution come to be framed by the Constituent Assembly in which a large section of the Indian population have not been represented, His Majesty’s Government could not, of course, contemplate forcing such a constitution upon any unwilling part of the country.”
This meant that the League’s boycott of the Constituent Assembly was hugely consequential: it was paying dividends the Congres couldn’t even imagine. Also: continued boycott would facilitate the march to Pakistan .
Reference had already been made as to how the Direct Action had stirred the soul of Muslim India and had put the Muslims on the revolutionary path. One direct result of this resurgence was that whenever and wherever their rights were trampled upon, the Muslims simply refused to be cowed down by bluff, bluster and bludgeon. This was most strikingly demonstrated in the Punjab, the Frontier and in Assam .
In January 1947, Muslim Punjab, now resurgent and indignant at being denied its inalienable right to administer the province, came into clash with the reactionary Tiwana government. The Tiwana-Glancy-Sachar axis which had denied the people even civil liberties, presently went further: it banned the Punjab Muslim National Guards and ordered a search of its headquarters, late in January 1947. The Muslims revolted and launched a province-wide movement for the restoration of civil liberties. Although provoked on numerous occasions, the Muslims persistently refused to turn it into a communal or violent movement.
The Khan of Mamdot, Mian Iftikharuddin, Malik Feroz Khan Noon, Sardar Shaukat Hayat Khan, Mian Mohammad Mumtaz Daulatana and several other top provincial leaders courted arrest. Thousands upon thousands of Muslim men and women defied the Government’s ban on processions and meetings. For the first time in the annals of Muslim movements, women came out into the open and braced all odds. They took out processions, day after day, undeterred by the show of force, defied barricades, and courted arrest.
Such was their grit and do-or-die spirit that a teen-age girl clambered undauntedly over the Secretariat Building , and hoisted the League flag. A rebel paper was printed and circulated. The jails were filled to capacity soon enough, and the Government was forced to release those arrested for want of space. When such be the measure of popular indignation and resistance, the discredited ministry could not possibly survive for long: it collapsed finally in early March when Tiwana tendered his resignation.
To keep the Muslims and the Muslim League in the Frontier suppressed, and himself in power, Khan Sahib, the Premier, had adopted similar tactics. To all who could see, it was evident even as early as October 1946 when Nehru went on tour in the Frontier that the popularity of the Khan brothers had ebbed tremendously. Maulana Azad reports that when Nehru arrived in Peshawar , the airport was swarming with a large posse of police to give protection to the unpopular Premier, and defend him and his guests. It was feared that the hostility of the Pathans might as well spill over into violent action.
This spill over would finally come in late February 1947 when the Pathans’ bitterness over Dr. Khan Saheb’s acts of commission and omission had touched a new high, provoking a movement for the restoration of civil liberties. All the prominent Leaguers including Khan Abdul Qaiyym Khan, Pir Sahib of Manki Sahrif and Pir Sahib of Zakori Sahrif were hauled into gaol. By the end of March over six thousand people had been arrested, and by the first week of April the number rose to twenty thousand. For the first time in the history of the region, the women also took to the streets.
A clandestine radio station in the tribal belt went on the air, to sustain the morale of the people. And, betimes, their fury and indignation reached new heights. And despite tremendous odds, the movement continued for some four long months. It was finally called off on Jinnah’s appeal in his June 3 broadcast, accepting the June 3 Plan.
In the wake of the Punjab and the Frontier, Assam also woke up. Over there, the Bardoloi Congres ministry had imposed a sort of Ghetto Act against the Muslim Bengali immigrants who had settled over there for about three decades. The Muslim cultivators of the neighbouring districts of Bengal had been encouraged in the 1920s to migrate to Assam and cultivate the land, then stemmed in by dense jungles. These immigrants had to face tremendous odds and labour endlessly before they could turn the fearful jungles into smiling cornfields.
By the mid-1940s, however, Bardoloi and the Congres leadership began to see the settlement of these Bengali immigrants in the terms of the establishment of Pakistan in their backyard.
Their “remedy” was the Line System – the lawless law which had never been passed by any legislature. And they resorted to the cruel act of eviction which has scarcely a parallel in its brutality and harassment. Even elephants were put in service to pull down and raze the Bengali immigrants’ huts to the ground.
It was against this inhuman law that the Assam Muslims launched a civil disobedience movement under the energetic leadership of Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani. He was the first to court arrest, followed by Abdul Matin Chaudhry and other Muslim leaders. Bardoloi, however, did not stop there.
He perpetrated greater cruelties on the Muslims: peaceful demonstrators were fired upon; the injured were not attended to, and the dead bodies were made to remain rotting without being handed over to the claimants; hundreds of Muslims were hauled up in jails. This movement also continued with varying fortunes till the announcement of the Partition Plan of June 3.
In perspective, all this was a direct consequence of the Direct Action resolution, which had sparked revolutionary activity among Indian Muslims. And it prepared the ground for the disobedience movements in the Muslim provinces, which was largely responsible in finally convincing the British that Partition was the only solution. But for the spirit the Direct Action had breathed among the Muslims they would never, never have been able to stand steadfast to their ideal in the face of British “perfidy” and Hindu “hoolinganism”. Nor able to demolish the Unionist citadel in the Punjab, ship-wreck the Khan’s ministry in the Frontier, or nibble at the Bardoloi regime in Assam .
Much less would the Muslims in the minority provinces have been able to face death, disaster, and destruction of all they cherished, and rise to such heroic sacrifices which even unnerved the aggressive Hindus. An ideal, however lofty, needs martyrs to grow and become self-sustaining.
And it was the blood of these innocent Muslims that nurtured and nourished the Pakistan ideal.In the historical perspective, then, the Direct Action decision influenced, more than anything else, the course of Indian politics during the last year of British rule, and led directly to the emergence of Pakistan.
Sharif al Mujahid
