The Bengal Conundrum: Understanding State’s Communal Violence Through the 1946 Great Calcutta Killings

It has been a year since unprecedented violence took place in West Bengal after the Assembly election results were announced. The resolution passed on March 23, 1940 said, “…it is the considered view of this session of the All-India Muslim League that no constitutional plan would be workable in this country or acceptable to Muslims unless it is designed on the following basic principle, namely, that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-Western and Eastern Zones of India, should be grouped to constitute ‘Independent States’ in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.” The divide between the Congress and Muslim League continued to widen between 1940 and 1946. Bengal being the only province in India under the Muslim League’s rule was apparently chosen by its leadership as the suitable place for “demonstrating” ‘Direct Action’. No estimate is available, the reason for which is probably that the killings were started by none other than the officialdom… A large number of bodies had been thrown into the river Hooghly, or in the canals that pass through the city, or were pushed into manholes.” Roy further added, “As an example of deliberate abuse of state power to cause mass murders, it compares well in intensity, though not in breadth, with the Nazi holocaust and the killing fields of Pol Pot in Cambodia.” Dr. DC Sinha, Ashok Dasgupta and Ashis Chowdhury have provided detailed account of these riots in their seminal work The Great Calcutta Killings and Noakhali Genocide, “The arrangements were perfect for the programme of loot, arson, rape and murder and truck-loads of goondas armed with dangerous weapons and incendiary material were rapidly sent to the more distant part to reinforce the local hooligans. Further they seemed immune from the action of law, for the police had so far been mostly lookers-on.” Modern Review, one of the most respected journals at that time wrote in its September, 1946 issue, “There is not enough space in these columns to give fuller details of this horrible catastrophe.” To understand the anatomy of communal violence in the state of West Bengal post-independence, it is probably important to understand the anatomy of ‘The Great Calcutta Killings’.