The rampaging mobs in Basirhat and Baduria have revived the myth that Bengal's Hindus and Muslims have always lived in peace and harmony. I wish it were true. The danger of that no doubt well-intentioned but false platitude is that it prevents us from coming to grips with the challenge of multinationalism. We affect to be taken aback every time the two communities fall out only because we have persuaded ourselves that Muslims who were somehow foreign left in 1947 and that those who remain are exactly like Hindus.
That allows us to expunge the memory of Direct Action Day 1946. I was a child then but well remember the nightmare drive home on August 19 through empty streets, past smoke-blackened houses, the occasional handcart piled with stinking bovine carcasses, the occasional body surrounded by vultures too gorged to do more than flap their wings, the all-pervasive stench of death. It was the original of Margaret Bourke-White's "The Vultures of Calcutta" in Life magazine that I saw several decades later. My parents, sister and I had arrived into the eerie silence of Howrah station from Pondicherry on August 17. We spent three days cooped up in someone else's flat near the station before my father was able to mobilize a car and an armed escort to take us home to Mandeville Gardens. Watching from the balcony of Colvin Court during those three days, I remember the alternating chants of "Allah ho Akbar!" and " Hindu-Mussulman bhai-bhai!" that punctured the hours. Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, communal relations swung from bonhomie to hatred from moment to moment.
That worst slaughter in human memory could never have erupted if a corpus of bitterness didn't lie between the two communities. That animosity has never been addressed. It's taboo even to suggest it plays some part in India-Pakistan relations. Overtures like the Khilafat movement exploited it. So too did Direct Action Day. With Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy ruling Bengal, the carnage invites comparison in retrospect with Gujarat 2002. But the many clashes before and after owed less to official instigation than to permanent social and economic tension. The Sachar Committee's finding in 2006 that Bengal Muslims were the poorest in India after the Muslims of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh was probably even truer in the 1920s and 1930s. Given the structure of East Bengal society, it was not surprising the new East Pakistan legislature drafted its zamindari abolition law within seven months of Independence. Lacking religious inducement, the affluent Hooghly group that dominated West Bengal's ruling Congress party didn't get round to doing so until 1955.
Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who draws a distinction between Bengali communalism and violence perpetrated by those whom Bengalis call Hindustanis, traces the former to 1921 when a Bengali friend warned Mahatma Gandhi that a civil disobedience movement would at once encourage East Bengal Muslims to "rise and loot the houses of the Hindu landlords, as well as murder them". When that came to pass, rioting Muslims did not touch Muslim landlords and moneylenders who were just as oppressive and extortionate. Religious difference and social discrimination sharpened the edge of economic grievance. Muzaffar Ahmed, president of the pro-Moscow National Awami Party in East Pakistan and later Bangladesh, would speak of "East Bengal's two-hookah culture", referring to the Hindu bhadralok practice in that vanished world of setting aside a separate hookah for the exclusive use of Muslim visitors. If the underlying prejudice animates primitive parts of the country where ghar wapsi, lynchings and anti-Romeo squads are rampant today, some vestige of it may linger even in the state whose emancipation did not save Rizwanur Rahman from a tragic end. Of course, Chaudhuri would dismiss them as Hindustanis.
It's not that the two communities were constantly at loggerheads. But zamindar and ryot, doctor and patient, babu and chasha, white and blue collar (to employ terms that had little meaning in pre-Independence rural Bengal) were not equally matched. The restraint of Pax Britannica held them together. There were exceptions. Tales are told of heroic rescues from the jaws of death. Gandhi praised the communal amity that characterized the Indian National Army and Azad Hind government. Subhash Chandra Bose cooperated with the Muslim League in Calcutta Corporation, and proposed coalition governments for Bengal, Punjab and Sind. Sugata Bose describes in His Majesty's Opponent how prisoners in the Red Fort told Gandhi they had never felt any distinctions in the INA. "But here we are faced with 'Hindu tea' and 'Muslim tea'," they complained. "Why do you suffer it?" Gandhi asked. "We don't," they said. "We mix 'Hindu tea' and 'Muslim tea' half and half, and then serve. The same with food." It was a deft way of taking the bite out of an equivalent of two-hookah bigotry. C.R. Das's Bengal Pact, which the Congress rejected in 1923 but the Bengal Provincial Congress Conference ratified the following year, might similarly have helped to heal wounds at one level.
Yet, it needed only a spark to get the bonfire blazing. Another reminder of Gujarat 2002, A.K. Fazlul Huq was Bengal's premier in early 1941 when Muslims suddenly attacked, looted and set fire to Hindu villages all over Dhaka district. Thousands of Hindus fled to the safety of princely Tripura. When Calcutta Muslims went on the rampage in 2007 demanding Tasleema Nasrin's expulsion, the instigator turned out to have been a Congress functionary. It has been suggested the cartoon that sent Basirhat Muslims into a frenzy could not have been the handiwork of a Class XI pupil. The provocation for these recurring conflicts was often only a Hindu religious procession passing a mosque, its music (deliberately?) disturbing those at prayer within. Or an arch not high enough for the (deliberately tall?) taziya to pass under. The dead and putrefying cows I can still smell from August 1946 had probably been killed with malicious intent. Perhaps a pile of similarly butchered pigs was rotting somewhere else.
Mamata Banerjee's outrage at the idea of the Bharatiya Janata Party being behind the upsurge smacks of ingenuousness. The BJP's only - and understandable - purpose in a West Bengal that has always rejected its obscurantism is to seize power. That was also Trinamul's raison d'être until she vanquished the Left Front. As for the state governor, the former president of the BJP's Bengal unit and currently the party's national secretary, Rahul Sinha, said it all when he lauded Keshari Nath Tripathi as "a sainik of the Modi Bahini". Governors have long been the Centre's hatchet men.
More information might arguably enable the authorities to accept that Indian Muslims are a distinctly separate community with their own social and cultural characteristics and legal demands which India's diversity must accommodate. As Gandhi reiterated 18 days before he was shot, Hindus and Muslims must learn to live together since they share the same ground. Yet, the truth of even the Great Calcutta Killing, when estimates of the dead on both sides ranged from 5,000 to 20,000 and perhaps more, and tens of thousands were wounded, many critically, was never established. Even the reports of military investigations were not made public. In the absence of information, we have perception, with the chief minister's enemies not finding it necessary to improve on pictures of her absorbed in prayer in what looks like a hijab. Worse, going by the 2016 report, "Living Reality of Muslims in West Bengal" by the Social Network for Assistance to People, Guidance Guild and Pratichi Trust, this flamboyant courtship hasn't resulted in empowerment or, indeed, in any improvement since the Sachar findings.
What it has produced are images of obstreperousness, land grab reports, tales of illegal construction and a reputation for violent over-reaction. All of which feeds Hindu resentment and into the hands of the BJP waiting impatiently in the wings.
