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This
chapter deals with the politics of Calcutta and Bengal during the years running
up to independence.
[Please
note that the communal tensions in 1947, the rise of communism, and the years
of Muslim League rule are dealt with each in separate chapters]
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COMMENTS on India's major political problems by this newspaper since
1942, have been rare. The reason is simple: from that dismal year onwards, very
little, we felt, could helpfully be said. The Statesman, by tradition, in
Indian as in British affairs, stands for liberalism. Between 1937 and 1939,
after politically broad-based Provincial Autonomy had been established under
the provisions of the Government of India Act of 1935, we in general cordially
supported the Congress Ministries in those Provinces—seven out of eleven—where
the electorate had returned Congress majorities to the legislatures.
Since 1939 however, when the Congress party, after war against Germany
was declared withdrew its Ministries, leaving (as was inevitable under the
Constitution) gubernatorial autocracies in their stead, we have suffered, as
have others of liberal sentiments, cumulative disillusion about Indian affairs.
Today is not the occasion to elaborate causes therefor. But two things must be
said. Until 1942 India's war-time political ills were some part obviously
blame-worthy upon HMG, the Government of India, and the then Viceroy, Lord
Linlithgow. They were slow. Collectively—no doubt in part because of extreme
stresses of war in London—they appeared to miss several chances for setting
deteriorating Indian politics to rights.
But the course chosen by the Congress party in the summer of that
year, at the war's blackest phase, was in our considered retrospective
judgment—with which we think many will now concur—an inexcusable, unmitigated,
first-class blunder.
Grave damage was thereby done to nationalist India's prestige and
prospects. Political currents, such as existed at all, have since, inevitably and
consistently, been retrograde and disintegrative. The path of negation, the
lamentable little word "No" to which the Congress under Gandhian
leadership had previously shown itself too much wedded, had again exercised a
fatal.
(COPYRIGHT
NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial
educational research project. The
copyright remains with The Statesman)
THE new Central Government's first Budget was presented by Mr Liaquat
Ali Khan in the Assembly on Friday and will provide much material for thought
and argument in the coming months. In its radicalism it contrasts both with the
Railway Budget which was relatively conservative, and with the General Budget last
year. Sir Archibald Rowlands in 1946 avowedly sought to encourage industry, in
whose expansion he saw a counter-agent to deflationary tendencies as well as
the main hope of providing the vastly increased public revenue needed for
reconstruction. This year the emphasis is declared to be on social justice; the
outstanding features of the budget will, if their purpose is attained,
considerably affect the fortunes of prosperous individuals and corporations. In
so far as the proposals succeed in catching profiteers and black-marketeers and
. in diverting to public revenue some profits of the great financial empires
built up in the war, they will be applauded by large sections
of the public. The Government may find that some at least of the measures now
proposed have been taken too late.
The rather vaguely defined Commission of Inquiry into accumulated
wealth may for that reason alone have a harassing task; it has to succeed where
the vigilance of an experienced Income-Tax Department has been evaded. Further
there is an element of inequality, in that fortunes made outside British India
will presumably have opportunities to escape notice.
(COPYRIGHT
NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial
educational research project. The
copyright remains with The Statesman)
South Calcutta is an urban jungle of plaster, stone and faded palms,
where reeking slums shelter ten people in a room, and ugly Victorian buildings
rise beside modern terraced tenements. It is also a political jungle, inhabited
by a million restive refugees, students, clerks, stevedores, mill hands,
shopkeepers, petty bankers and lawyers. The lords of this jungle have been the three
Bose brothers.
Most prominent of the three was fiery chauvinist Subhas Chandra Bose.
He came out of South Calcutta's anti-British underground to go to the
presidency of the Indian National Congress in 1938; then he broke with Gandhi,
joined the Japanese to fight the British, met death in a Japanese plane in
1945.
His elder brother, Satish Chandra Bose, a quieter and steadier
Congressman, was South Calcutta's delegate to the West Bengal Assembly until
his death last year.
The third brother, Sarat Chandra Bose, now 60, fat and moonfaced, was
Minister of Works, Mines and Power until the Congress in 1946 gave his cabinet
job to a Moslem Leaguer. In a huff, Sarat Bose quit the Congress, organized his
own Socialist Republican Party. He was in Switzerland, recuperating from a mild
heart attack, when a by-election was scheduled for his brother Satish's
legislative seat. Promptly he declared himself a candidate. Onto his bandwagon
leaped opportunist Communists, disgruntled Socialists and rabid Hindu
Communalists—all united against an old Congress Party warhorse, Suresh Das.
Bombs & Bombast. The campaign began just before the monsoon.
Dhoti-clad Calcuttans left their steaming houses, clustered in the streets to drink
lime squash, chew pan (made from the betel nut), and talk politics until
tempers gave way and fists flew. Hoodlum gangs raced through the city, pasting
posters, tearing down opposition signs, breaking up each other's soapbox
meetings with shoes, brickbats, incendiary oil bombs, bursting bottles of
nitric acid. A city ordinance banned loudspeakers, so electioneers shouted
instead through megaphones, day & night.
Through all the sound & fury, Candidate Bose remained in
Switzerland, rallying his supporters with long-distance statements:
"Black-marketeering, profiteering, corruption, favoritism and nepotism
stalk the land. There is resort to police terrorism on the slightest pretext.
The Congress' name today is mud." Congress was split by petty quarrels, weakened
by a 10% rise in food prices during the past year, and harassed by a Communist
gang-up with Bose.
The West Bengal government had outlawed the Communists, but it could
not outmaneuver them. "At a Bose rally I attended," reported TIME
Correspondent Robert Lubar last week, "no party emblems were displayed and
no one as much as whispered the word Communist. But the tenor of the meeting
was clear. It was dominated by a huge, crude painting ridiculing Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru. It showed him wearing a jeweled crown and a uniform with
exaggerated epaulets. Under the portrait was scrawled: 'Down with British
imperialism!'
"When I wandered up, a crowd encircled me. One bespectacled youth
poked a pugnacious finger in my collar and said: 'Will you tell your American
friends that we reject the plans of murderer Truman and American imperialists
to start another war so they can use cheap soldiers of India to crush Soviet
democracy?' Breathlessly he spun out the usual cliches, and wound up: 'Nehru is
a Fascist reactionary who smokes cigarettes with Churchill and offers British
warmongers the sweet mangoes and sweet tongues of India,' "
Bullets & Ballots. The party line reached Calcutta's jails.
Several hundred Communist prisoners staged hunger strikes and other
demonstrations, built barricades of furniture, hurled brickbats at police, drew
gunfire in return. Four prisoners were killed, 33 prisoners and 67 policemen
injured.
The jail riots brought up Congress big guns. Prime Minister Nehru, who
seldom intervenes in local elections, sent a message endorsing faithful Suresh
Das, decrying Bose's tactics: "I fail to see how unbalanced attacks on
Congress and destructive criticism can help the country in any way."
Deputy Prime Minister Sardarj Patel was blunter: "China, Malaya and Burma
have all a lesson to teach us. If we fail to learn it, Bengal would be the
first to suffer."
Last week the election returns were in. Remote-control Rabble-Rouser
Bose, still in Switzerland, had won hands down—19,030 votes to 5,780 for Das.
Congress leaders were plainly worried. Nehru blamed Congressmen for losing
their fervor and for self-seeking—"If we cannot revitalize Congress we
must dissolve it in a dignified manner rather than allow it to disintegrate by
stages." A Red cloud, though not yet bigger than a man's hand, had
appeared on the Congress horizon.
(COPYRIGHT
NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial
educational research project. The
copyright remains with Time Magazine)
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Another group consisting of middle and upper caste Hindus make up a
party called the Hindu Mahasabha. This demands that India would be ruled by the
majority, meaning the Hindus, and is willing to fight for that principle. It is
different from the Congress because the Congress says that it does not stand
for either the Hindus or the Moslems but merely for all India, but the Hindu
Mahasabha says that India belongs to the Hindus and that they should rule it.
(source:
“A Pocket Guide to India” Special Service Division, Army Service Forces, United
States Army. War and Navy Departments Washington D.C [early 1940s]: at:
http://cbi-theater-2.home.comcast.net/booklet/guide-to-india.html)
(COPYRIGHT
NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair
dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with the original
submitter/author)
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Home ● Sitemap ● Reference ● Last updated: 11-March-2009
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If there
are any technical problems, factual inaccuracies or things you have to add,
then please contact the group
under info@calcutta1940s.org