Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and Partition of Bengal

So many educated Indians I know have this serious misconception that Hindu Mahasabha and its national president in early forties, Shyama Prasad Mukherji was in a government in alliance with Muslim League in Bengal before independence.

There can be nothing farther from the truth.

Truth be told, British Government in India in 1932 introduced the concept of separate electorate and through that they openly activated the communal divide in India. They not only treated Hindus and Muslims separately in terms of their religious affiliations, to divide hindu community, they brought in separate electorate systems for scheduled castes and other backward castes whom they recognised as non hindus. All these were done to weaken the unity of Indians in general and of Hindus in particular such that they could continue their rule.

Government of India act of 1935 called for provincial elections based on this separate electorate process. By and large maximum opposition to this came from caste hindus while majority muslims were not averse to this.

Congress was divided on taking part in elections and in joining provincial governments. While Patel and his associates were in favour, Pandit Nehru and the socialists were against. Finally Congress as a whole agreed to take part and join assemblies if victorious.

In the national election which was held nationally in 1937, Congress became the largest party in Bengal with 54 seats, Krishak Praja Party (led by Abdul Kasem Fazlul Huq) got 35 seats and Muslim League got 40 seats. Independent Muslims got 42 seats and Hindu Mahasabha got just 2 seats.

While Muslim League was a party of Muslim Nawab, Landlords and Landed Gentry, Krishak Praja Party’s support base was primarily among Muslim peasants ( mostly landless and poor) so they were at daggers drawn with each other.

The logical alliance in this case could have been between Congress and KPP as Haque was quite renowned for his secular credentials and was respected by people of both communities in Bengal. This alliance could have kept Muslim League at bay but that was not to be.

Congress decided against forming an alliance government in Bengal and this thoughtless act of theirs pushed Haque towards Muslim League which helped League considerably in finding their feet in the state as we could see in subsequent years. To me this blunder act by Congress to share power paved the way for partition of India and the partition of Bengal. This was the single biggest mistake that the party did.

Anyway, using Haque more as puppet, League charted on its communal agenda during the years between 1939–41. Laws were enacted to give very high reservations to muslims in govt jobs, in administration and also in the field of education bypassing all merit mechanisms which were in place. This was done in the name of progress of backward muslim community. Communal disturbances and riots were regularly organised in various parts of Eastern Bengal which included a big riot in Dacca.

Since the days of communal award of 1932 to the government act of 1935 to these blatantly communal actions and reservations and the ambivalent stand of National & Bengal Congress forced Shyamaprasad Mukherjee to enter the political fray finally in 1939.

Till then he was only in academic arena though briefly he was elected once in legislative council in 1920s first in Congress ticket and later as an independent candidate.

Shyamaprasad was appalled to see the situation of Hindus in Bengal who were leaderless and rudderless at that time after Netaji Bose was unceremoniously forced to resign in 1939 and there was huge factionalism between Bose Congress and Gandhi Congress ( led by Kiran Shankar Roy) and thus they were busy fighting each other more.

Fazlul Haque was sort of maverick and was known for his vacillating positions. After League helped him to become the first prime minister of Bengal, he went out of the way to keep League in good humour so much so that in Lahore Congress of 1940, Haque was willing to read out Pakistan declaration resolution though Haque never realised that this will later be used by Jinnah for his push for Pakistan. But this bonhomie did not last for long. The communal actions of League was hard for Haque to digest and it reached a high point when Haque decided to join the defence council of the governor to which Jinnah was vehemently opposed to. Jinnah felt by joining defence council, Haque is diluting the stand of an independent Pakistan. Jinnah gave an ultimatum to Haque but Haque was a man of his own mind and so within a year of Lahore Congress, Haque’s KPP parted with Muslim League and League withdrew support from the coalition. Haque had to resign but no sooner he had done that, a second coalition government was formed called United Democratic ( Progressive ?) under the stewardship of Fazlul Haque again but this time with the support of Hindu Mahasabha and the Bose faction of Congress came forward to support it. As part of this extraordinary coalition, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee joined the government as the finance minister.

Though Fazlul Haque ( known as Sher E Bangla) was much elder to Shyama Prasad but their personal relationship went a long way. Haque used to consider Mukherjee as his younger brother as Haque considered Mukherjee’s father to be his chief mentor.

The fact was Haque was the last articling student of Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee ( the barrister), the illustrious father of Shyama Prasad before Sir Mukherjee became the judge of Calcutta High Court.

So when Haque became a minority, it was not a very difficult choice for Shyama Prasad to support him to keep the communal League at bay, the chief reason of his joining politics. Though Haque was the prime minister and Mukherji was his deputy but the personality, the abilities and the integrity of Dr Mukherji was such that this government came to be known as Shyama-Haq government in Bengal.

This Shyama-Haq government continued till 1943. British Governor, John Arthur Herbert was absolutely not happy with this coalition as. his divide and rule policy needed Muslim League to be in position of power. During the tenure of this government, two major events took place in Bengal. The Quit India movement started in 1942, this led to a huge violent confrontation in Midnapore where Indians with revolutionary inclinations took charge which was dealt very repressively by British administration killing Matangini Hazra as Tamluk was made independent for some time. This agitation was followed by a massive tsunami like flooding in Midnapore killing a few thousand people and then the worst of all followed which was the terrible Bengal famine which ravaged Bengal in 1943 killing almost 3 million people.

Owing to the irresponsible actions and apathy of governor Arthur Herbert and Viceroy Linlithgow and also of his boss, Leo Amery who was the secretary of India in Churchill’s war cabinet, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee resigned after writing multiple scathing and strong missives to all these men and even visiting the viceroy a couple of times. He specifically took Herbert to task in some of his famous speeches inside assembly irking the administration. Herbert was unduly worried about Japanese attack though Japs indeed dropped a few bombs in Calcutta and thus he followed a scorched earth policy which destroyed Bengal’s countryside. Mukherjee after resigning immersed himself into relief and restoration work in a massive way. But that was the end of his governmental role.

After a few days Herbert forced Haque to resign and finally he installed a Muslim League government in 1943. headed by Sir Khwaja Nazimuddin (a very close aide of Jinnah) which at last brought League into the real position of power and then on they never looked back. A weakened Congress after a failed Quit India movement was in no position to fight back as Sarat Bose was exiled in South India. The Bengal communists directly siding with British during wartime after calling it as people’s war curried favour with League and supported the demand of League of the right of self determination of muslims. In this way, they too indirectly accepted the two nation theory sadly.

In 1946, Nazimuddin was replaced by a more hardened Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy who had no qualms whatsoever to take a communal stand to take forward Jinnah’s case of muslim consolidation. In August of 1946, a direct action was ordered from the stage of Muslim League meeting in Calcutta whereby Hindus were butchered for next two days in the streets of Calcutta with the active connivance of the administration and by League militia. After two days of one sided attack, Hindus organised themselves and fought back and this time it was under the aegis of Hindu Mahasabha. At the end due to this unprecedented resistance, the administration had to finally take note and some sanity prevailed. After being unable to win Calcutta, League took this to far flung Noakhali in extreme East of Bengal where on a Laxmi Puja night, League militia pounced upon the Hindus in a murderous onslaught never seen before in Bengal where hindus and muslims had lived together for centuries. After being unable to forcefully convert lower caste hindus en bloc due to the resistance of Mahasabha led by Shyama Prasad, in that fateful night scores of hindus were killed, maimed, women were violated, forcefully married, even children were not spared. All the tall Mahasabha leaders of Noakhali were slaughtered, even ordinary Congress workers were not spared. Gandhiji who for his whole life spoke of hindu muslim unity and took it upon himself and on hindus to see to it that amity is maintained reached Noakhali and was appalled to see the devastation. He stayed there and try to soothe nerves but his pacifist advice to hindus to forget and accept enraged hindu community so much more that a retributive action almost immediately took place in Bihar where muslims had to face the onslaught from the hindus which forced Gandhi to leave Noakhali hurriedly for Bihar.

All these left Shyama Prasad dumbfounded and he realised that the relationship between hindu and muslim bengalis had ruptured for good and so when Congress finally acceded to the plan of partition of India, he took it upon himself that Bengal too be divided like Punjab such that Bengali hindus at least get a homeland for them. Some quite deliberately term Mukherji as divider of Bengal but the fact of the matter is initially he was not in favour of Indian partition let alone that of Bengal. When Congress leadership capitulated for the division of India and Jinnah was bargaining hard for entire Bengal and his deputy Surawardhy the butcher of Calcutta Killing was scheming a fancy plan with a politically obscure Sarat Bose for an united Bengal outside of India and Pakistan, Mukherji stepped up the gas and formed a broad umbrella organisation for Bengali Hindu Homeland Movement in which other than Hindu Mahasabha, he brought in the entire non Sarat Bose / Kiran Roy faction of Congress ( Bidhan Roy, Nalini Sarkar, Atulya Ghosh, Surendra Mohan Ghosh) and the entire who’s who of Bengal’s intelligentsia which included Ramesh Majumdar, Jadunath Sarkar, Pulin Bihari Das, Sajanikanta Das, Meghnad Saha, Acharya Prafulla Roy, Ramananda Banerjee, Suniti Chattopadhyay, Asutosh Lahiri and many many more. Most of the homeland movement meetings were organised by Congress incidentally rather than Mahasabha supported by the two most prominent nationalist dailies of that era namely Amrita Bazar Patrika and Jugantar. The support for a separate state was so overwhelming due the extraordinary organisation power of Dr Mukherjee that a snap poll conducted by Amrita Bazar found that. more than 85 percent people were in favour of a separate homeland. Jinnah tried his best to get Calcutta but due to astute political acumen of Shyama Prasad and due support from Sardar Patel in Central Congress, Jinnah’s machinations failed. So when a voting finally took place in assembly only for West Bengal representatives, the motion for a separate homeland got passed. Even the two communist members who were thus far cosying up with League voted in favour.

I can keep on writing on this but it will be very long. So let me end here. There are a whole lot of misinformation being spread against Mukherjee deliberately. It would been easier to be politically correct for him by joining Congress, a offer which was made to him repeatedly by Patel, his dear friend Radhakrishnan and by many more but his joining politics was for a particular mission and at a critical time to a community which was cornered from all sides. I could not find a single speech of Mukheji which can remotely be called communal, when he was in administration not for once he did distinguish between his muslim and hindu state mates so much so that Haque reportedly told his muslim colleagues that you will not find a more fair person than Shyama Prasad towards muslims in my whole cabinet and in the whole state. What he stood for was for the right to defend and fight back when a community had been systematically targeted and marginalised. That he envisaged that a separate homeland was required was proven to be correct in subsequent days when we saw how systematically the minorities were targetted first in East Pakistan and then in Bangladesh in 1947–48, in 1950, in 1962–65, in 1970–71 and even later. From a 28 percent population of 1947, today the percentage got reduced to a meagre 8 percent in that land. In all those years, the atrocities which happened to Hindu Bengalis are comparable to some of the worst human atrocities of all times. While in Punjab, complete migration of people were done in Bengal , Nehru administration objected to it and entered into a pact with Liyaqat Ali Khan whose own secretary was purportedly behind organising anti hindu actions. Such was the hypocrisy due to which Shyama Prasad decided to quit Nehru ministry in aghast and got a rousing reception in Calcutta. The stream of hapless refugees in the platforms and streets of Calcutta invigorated Dr Mukherjee and he could not accept the nonchalant attitude of Nehru government anymore though he was asked to join the government by none other than Mahatma Gandhi.

The long and short of this saga is Congress’s reluctance to form government in 1937, its intransigence in 1939 and its complete absence during and after Quit India period allowed League to spread its wings in nook and corner of Bengal and from a marginal party of a few nawabs and landlords in 1937 , through its communal fury which culminated in direct action and noakhali pogroms and with active connivance from British governors like Herbert, it became THE party by 1946 and broke the back of Bengal in 1947 from which it never recovered.

Bengali Hindus who first lit the fire of Indian nationalism in mid 19th century and who were in the forefront of it both intellectually ( Surendranath Banerjee, Aurobindo Ghosh, Swami Vivekananda, Bankimchandra) as well as practically ( CR Das, Bipin Paul, Subhash Bose and numerous other revolutionaries like Surya Sen, Jatin Mukherjee, Sachindranath Sanyal, Rashbehari Bose etc) got one of the rawest deal at the end by losing two thirds of their land and with countless communal killings starting from 1930s till 1970s. Yet in whatever little they could preserve finally at the end, in it Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee had played a historical role. There can be no two ways about it.

Copyright © Manas Sinha July 20 ( Political Writeup Series)

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