DIRECT ACTION DAY, 16THAUGUST 1946- THE DUBIOUS ROLE OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT IN UNDIVIDED BENGAL ONLY SHOWS HOW THE WEST TRIES TO KEEP INDIANS DIVIDED TILL TODAY
August 16th 2025 was the 79th anniversary of the infamous” Direct Action Day” of the Bengal Muslim League, which triggered the tragic communal violence between Hindus and Muslims, often referred to as the “Great Calcutta Killings”. Estimates of the total number of deaths range from 6000 to 10,000, with the latter figure more likely.
Bias of Left Liberal academic history:
While due to the efforts of many independent historians and influencers on social media, younger generations are becoming acquainted with the horrors of the carnage; there are some aspects to this saga which have been deliberately overlooked or diluted.
What complicates the picture further is the biased or deliberately ambiguous stance taken by standard Left Liberal historiography; to use stereotypes like “Hindu communalism” to intellectually counter the trope of communal politics of the Muslim League in Bengal at the time. In reality, these events were a vicious plan to ethnically cleanse undivided Bengal by the then Muslim League Premier-the controversial HS Suhrawardy- as the recent Partition history by NCERT has shown.
The politics of Undivided Bengal were dominated by the Muslim League and allied formations with tacit British support
Bengal had been ruled by Muslim League and Muslim dominated formations since 1937, with overlordship of British Governors; and war as well as famine had created a great degree of radicalization in the politics of the province.
By 1946, the defeat of the Japanese had brought an end to the efforts of Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army (INA) to attempt to march onto Delhi and seize power by militaristic methods.
The failure of the Simla Conference of 1945 to agree on the structure of an interim government had in particular emboldened the Muslim League, as the covert support of the British to continue to pander to its separatist demands for creating Pakistan as a separate Muslim homeland, comprising among other areas, Bengal(which was Muslim majority) seemed fairly evident.
In fact, as Narinder Singh Sarila has analysed in his pioneering effort” – The Shadow of the Great Game-The Untold Story Of India’s Partition”, the British increasingly were beginning to see an independent Muslim state as a way of preserving their influence in the Indian Sub-Continent; against the potential primacy of the Soviet Union, in a future independent India.
M.A Jinnah’s links with British officialdom have often been alluded to.
Durga Das in “ From Curzon to Nehru and After” has also pointed to how the superficially Westernized Jinnah, with his sharp Saville Row suits and clipped British accented English, certainly had a draw for large sections of the British Establishment.
This backdrop is crucial to remember when trying to understand why the violence of Direct Action Day was almost civil-war like in its brutality; and why Suhrawardy was not stopped by the colonial British Governor-who for the initial days of the violence merely looked away while League mobs butchered and killed-is indeed revealing of a broader strategy. It is only the Hindu fightback organised by the redoubtable Gopal Mukherjee, that stopped the ruthless Suhrawardy.
In a sense this was a continuation of the divisive nature of colonial rule since 1905, when Lord Curzon deliberately partitioned Bengal by creating a separate province of Eastern Bengal where Muslims were in a majority. The various colonial administrative changes of the subsequent years as in the Morley-Minto Reforms(1909), the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms(1919) and the Communal Award(1932) were hardly reformist as much divisive- to stoke a separatist Muslim identity.
To come back to the events of August 1946, its immediate backdrop was the British Cabinet Mission plan to form an Interim Government for handover of eventual power. At first agreeing in principle, due to a perceived advantage in the structure of a “Group of Provinces”, the League then rescinded and instead called on 29th July for “Direct Action” on 16th August 1946 to ensure “either a divided India or a destroyed India”.
In Calcutta, the League Chief Minister, H.S Suhrawardy declared a public holiday, aided and abetted by the British administration’s Chief Secretary R.L Walker, who put up no resistance at all. Though the Bengal Congress opposed the move, and asked Hindus not to observe a holiday, Suhrawardy’s elaborate preparations for the violence about to be unleashed were clearly not anticipated.
Many contemporary accounts as well as oral histories and official documents testify to the fact that in the days preceding 16th August, 1946, Suhrawardy had misused the considerable powers at his disposal as Chief Minister, who also had control of the Home Department, to alter the communal structure of the Calcutta Police.
Burrows, the British Governor did not intervene:
All through, the highest echelons of the British colonial government stayed passive. Governor Frederick Burrows who should have intervened since he had the ultimate power to do so, to stop Suhrawardy did nothing until it was too late.
Was this due to the fear of not repeating the events of Jallianwala Bagh in 2019, when General Dyer had ordered army firing on innocent protestors against the Rowlatt Acts?
Oral records by British servicemen themselves points to the fact that the use of firearms by the armed forces to quell protestors who were more than four in number, was permitted even in 1946; after due warnings were given. Rather, the answer may lie in a cynical calculation that in any case it was unlikely that the British were “staying on”; and allowing the Hindus and Muslims to fight it out, as long as the British and other Europeans were left unscathed, was a safer solution.
It is only when the orgy of violence continued unabated, and even received the attention of global media outlets like the New York Times, that the rule of the British Governor was re-imposed on August 21st.
Diluting the role of the real instigators
Left-liberal eco-system historiography too has largely avoided a clear-cut labelling of the League’s culpability as the main instigator of the riots, instead suffusing analysis in a tremendous amount of opaque and vague assertions about the ‘”Calcutta Underworld” and “ Goondas” at the fore-front of the violence. The thoroughly biased online resource of Wikipedia in fact qualifies the entire nature of the terrible killings by adding a disclaimer that “the article’s factual accuracy is disputed”.
Such Western apologia is typical of most incidents where the riots were part of communal Islamic forces.
It is hoped that in the years ahead, the culture of silence in historiography is addressed. An objective and factually rooted history of the events in mainstream historiography is long overdue. The tendency to dismiss oral historical records, as prejudiced, by the majority of academic writers, is also unfortunate, especially when the absence of documented official records-whether by design or accident- is a tremendous problematic-which needs to be overcome-by bringing out whatever chronicling is available; instead of letting history be erased.
