(Routledge Studies in South Asian History) Sekhar Bandyopadhyay - Decolonization in South Asia - Meanings of Freedom in Post-Independence West Bengal, 1947-52-Routledge (2009)

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Decolonization in South Asia

This book explores the meanings and complexities of India’s experience of transi-
tion from the colonial to the post-colonial period. It focuses on the first five years –
from independence on 15th August 1947 to the first general election in January
1952 – in the politics of West Bengal, a new Indian province that was created as a
result of the Partition.
The author, a specialist on the history of modern India, discusses what freedom
actually meant to various individuals, communities and political parties, how they
responded to it, how they extended its meaning and how in their anxiety to confront
the realities of free India, they began to invent new enemies of their newly acquired
freedom. By emphasizing the representations of popular mentality rather than the
institutional changes brought in by the process of decolonization, he draws atten-
tion to other concerns and anxieties that were related to the problems of coming to
terms with the newly achieved freedom and the responsibility of devising inde-
pendent rules of governance that would suit the historic needs of a pluralist nation.
Decolonization in South Asia analyzes the transitional politics of West Bengal in
light of recent developments in post-colonial theory on nationalism, treating the
‘nation’ as a space for contestation, rather than a natural breeding ground for homo-
geneity in the complex political scenario of post-independence India. It will appeal
to academics interested in political science, sociology, social anthropology and cul-
tural and Asian studies.
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is Professor of Asian History at Victoria University of

Wellington, New Zealand. He has published widely on the history of South Asia.
His previous books include Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social Dominance in
Colonial Bengal (2004), From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India
(2004) and Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India (1997).
Routledge Studies in South Asian History
1. The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India

Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison
2. Decolonization in South Asia

Meanings of freedom in post-independence West Bengal, 1947–52
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay
Decolonization in South Asia
Meanings of freedom in
post-independence West Bengal,
1947–52
First published 2009

by Routledge
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© 2009 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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ISBN 13: 978–0–203–88628–1 (ebk)
For
once more.
Sohini and Srilekha
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Abbreviations x
Introduction 1
1 The arrival of freedom: celebrations, anxieties and realities 9
2 The discontents of freedom 39
3 Congress Raj in a ‘problem province’ 71
4 The communists: from insurgency to electoral politics 105
5 The fractured Opposition 129
6 The ‘great adventure’: the election of 1952 154
Conclusion 184
Notes 188
Bibliography 233
Index 240
Acknowledgements
I have been working on this book for quite some time now and so on the way I have
incurred many debts. I have discussed this project with many colleagues and have
benefited from their comments and suggestions. I should mention here specifically
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sugata Bose, Robin Jeffrey, John McGuire, Peter Reeves,
Willem van Schendel, Tony Ballantyne, Malcolm Mackinnon, Parimal Ghosh and
Rajsekhar Basu. My greatest debt is, however, to Gautam Bhadra, who was as usual
generous with his advice on primary sources and secondary works, and ideas to
ponder about. I should also thank Joya Chatterji whose valuable research on this
period I have extensively used. Finally, without the research assistance provided by
my former student Craig Watterson, it would have been difficult for me to finish
this book on time while meeting the high demands of my administrative responsi-
bilities; a big thank you for him.
I discussed many aspects of this project with my long-time friend Basudeb
Chattopadhyay, who was the Director of the West Bengal State Archives when I
was working on this book. His untimely death was a rude shock to me, as without
his help, and the most generous assistance of his staff – Ananda Bhattacharya and
Swati Sengupta – it would have been difficult for me to write this book. I have also
worked at various other libraries across the world. These include the library of the
Victoria University of Wellington, ANU Library and Australian National Library
in Canberra, British Library and SOAS Library in London, the libraries of the
University of Amsterdam and the International Institute of Social History at
Amsterdam, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi and National
Library, Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta University Library and the library of the
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Kolkata. I wish to thank the staff of all these
repositories for allowing me to use their collections and helping my research in var-
ious ways.
I have also received funding from various sources. First of all, I must thank my
own Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Victoria University for support-
ing my project with generous funding and research leave. I was offered visiting fel-
lowships at a number of institutions where I worked on this book and these include
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at Australian National University,
South Asia Research Unit at Curtin University of Technology, International
Institute of Asian Studies in Amsterdam, History Departments at Calcutta
Acknowledgements ix
University and Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata. I wish to thank them all for
their generosity.
Sections of this book had appeared previously as an article in South Asia; I am
grateful to its editor Ian Copland for permitting me to reuse those materials in this
book. An earlier version of Chapter 4 had been published in the Journal of South
Asian Development, vol. 3:1 and I am grateful to its editor Rajat Ganguly and pub-
lisher Sage Publications for giving me permission to reuse this material in the book.
Finally, many aspects of this book were previously presented at numerous confer-
ences and seminars in New Zealand, Australia, UK, Holland and India. I am grate-
ful to all the participants for their valuable comments and suggestions.
My daughter Sohini and wife Srilekha have supported me in more ways than I
could possibly acknowledge here or thank them enough for. So this book is for
them. And all the errors are mine.
October 2008
Abbreviations
AICC All India Congress Committee

AIHM All India Hindu Mahasabha
BPA Bengal Police Abstracts
BPCC Bengal Provincial Congress Committee
BPKS Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha
BPSF Bengal Provincial Students Federation
BPTUC Bengal Provincial Trade Union Congress
BPNTUC Bengal Provincial National Trade Union Congress
CPI Communist Party of India
CPSU Communist Party of Soviet Union
CrPC Criminal Procedure Code
Dy HC Deputy High Commissioner
FR Fortnightly Report
GB Government of Bengal
HC High Commissioner
IB Intelligence Branch
ICS Indian Civil Service
IJMA Indian Jute Mill Association
INA Indian National Army
INTUC Indian National Trade Union Congress
IOR India Office Records
KMPP Krishak Mazdoor Praja Party
NMML Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
NVF National Volunteer Force
PUSF People’s United Socialist Front
RCPI Revolutionary Communist Party of India
RSP Revolutionary Socialist Party
RSS Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
UCRC United Central Refugee Council
UP Uttar Pradesh
USOI United Socialist Organization of India
WBPA West Bengal Police Abstracts
WBLAP West Bengal Legislative Assembly Proceedings
WBPCC West Bengal Provincial Congress Committee
WBSA West Bengal State Archives
Introduction
‘Indian history did not end on 15 August 1947’ – Partha Sarathi Gupta reminded his
colleagues in his Presidential Address to the Indian History Congress in 1998.1 Yet,
apart from a few general histories,2 and a few political biographies of Jawaharlal
Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India,3 historians have not written much on post-
1947 India, although ‘the first years of freedom were as full of dramatic interest as
the last years of the Raj’, as Ramachandra Guha observes in his recent book India
after Gandhi. 4 We may perhaps further add that while the historians finished their
inquiries on 15 August 1947, the political scientists and the sociologists did not
quite begin until the 1950s – that is not until the new institutions had taken proper
shape in India and started functioning effectively. So the transition period from the
colonial past to the post-colonial present fell through the cracks of professional and
disciplinary boundaries, constituting some kind of an academic no-man’s land.
And therefore there is no systematic analysis of how different groups of Indians
responded and adjusted to their newly acquired freedom when it finally arrived
after a long struggle. The present book therefore focuses on the first five years of
independence – from15 August 1947 to the first general election in January 1952 –
and seeks to offer a different reading of the history of decolonization and post-
colonial political modernity in India by looking closely at the province of West
Bengal, its mass politics and popular cultural representations of the concepts of
freedom.
There is now a significant literature on ‘decolonization’ – a term evidently
coined from the perspective of the colonial metropole. As a post-war political
process, it is usually defined as ‘the surrender of external political sovereignty,
largely Western European, over colonized non-European peoples, plus the emer-
gence of independent territories where once the West had ruled, or the transfer of
power from empire to nation-state’.5 So on the one hand, decolonization incorpo-
rates the story of the dismantling of European empires or ‘the retreat from empire’,
as John Darwin would put it.6 On the other hand, it is conceptualized as an essen-
tially elitist process, ‘European settlers and officials withdrawing while transfer-
ring power to indigenous leaders’.7 As a result this process also implied continuity;
as D.A. Low has argued, the process of ‘contraction of England did not just entail
the saga of independence’, it also left behind successor polities with ‘innumerable
British-type institutions’.8
2 Introduction
In the case of India too the extant literature, following the publication of
Nicholas Mansergh’s 12 volumes of documents from India Office Records,9 treats
this event of Indian independence either as a simple ‘transfer of power’ from
European to indigenous elites, or just as the beginning of the collapse of the British
Empire, setting a precedent or model for the subsequent orderly withdrawal of
other imperial powers.10 This Commonwealth vision of decolonization – which is
also a very statist vision – therefore sees in the history of post-colonial India more
evidence of continuity than any fundamental epistemological rupture. This is sup-
posedly manifested in the pageantry, rituals, regalia and the institutions of gover-
nance, and above all, in its supposedly uninterrupted linear movement towards
political modernity.11
Some recent decolonization studies, however, have opened up new possibilities
of looking at this post-colonial experience, which one of them has called ‘decolo-
nizing the mind’12 and another the ‘decolonization of imagination’.13 But while
these studies have primarily focussed on the ruptures in literary and linguistic tra-
ditions, so far as the historical experience of the decolonized peoples is concerned,
the more recent studies have hardly left their familiar hermeneutic ground where
decolonization is explained in terms of a contest for sovereignty, a transfer of
power and, in some cases, the trauma of Partition.14 There is little discussion in this
literature on how the people in the decolonized societies viewed their newly
achieved freedom and experienced it in their quotidian lives.
The fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence became an occasion for the pub-
lication of a huge body of literature on post-colonial India. The discussion of 1947
in this literature is largely monopolized by the Partition, its memories and its long-
term effects on the nation.15 The reasons are not difficult to understand, as Indian
public opinion has never been reconciled to the idea of Partition and the violence
and displacement it caused, not only in the border provinces of Bengal and Punjab,
but in the rest of India as well. In contrast to the previous studies on Partition, which
looked at the event as a part of the grand narrative of the formation of two nation-
states in the subcontinent, the historians’ gaze in recent times has shifted to what
Gyanendra Pandey has described as ‘a history of the lives and experiences of the
people who lived through that time’.16
So far as Bengal is concerned, such experiences have been analyzed in two sub-
sets: the experience of the borderland and the experience of the refugees. First, as
the surgical knife of Radcliffe (Sir Cyril) was hastily and erratically driven across
Bengal, it created an international boundary that was seriously flawed and abruptly
disrupted the lives and livelihood of thousands of Bengalis living in the borderlands
– many of whom suddenly found themselves living in their homes and in an enemy
territory at the same time. And as for those who were on the right side of the border,
like the Hindus in Murshidabad and Nadia, their sense of jubilation soon evapo-
rated and was replaced by apprehension that they might be sacrificed or exchanged
for the Hindus in Khulna who were caught up on the wrong side and vehemently
wanted to cross over. For those who lived on the borderlands, the new international
boundary – a rather unfamiliar concept for the rural population of these regions –
affected their family and kinship ties, work relations, trade relations or, in other
Introduction 3
words, almost every aspect of their everyday life.17 On the other hand, thousands
started moving across the boundary with experiences of pain, suffering and dis-
placement. By June 1948, there were about 1.1 million refugees in West Bengal.
Their horrid journeys to Sealdah station and from there to government camps or
squatter colonies, their sense of betrayal, their politicization and articulate demands
for citizen’s rights and their emotional remembering of the villages they left behind
have all been chronicled with empathy in recent years.18 Stories pertaining to the
memories of Partition experience have been translated in English for a wider audi-
ence.19 Partition and its memories thus dominate the historiography of 1947 in
West Bengal.
However in these memories of Partition experience, another historical amnesia

becomes evident. Partition came in the wake of freedom, and there is no study on
the experiences and perceptions of freedom in its early days. In fact Partition itself
had rival connotations of freedom. While for Hindus in West Bengal it meant free-
dom from a possible perpetual domination of a Muslim majority, for many
Muslims in the East, Partition meant freedom from Hindu oppression in their day-
to-day lives. But was Partition the only source of concern in post-1947 West
Bengal, or for that matter in India as a whole? Didn’t ‘freedom’ itself mean any-
thing at all, particularly as it arrived after 200 years of servitude? Or was the idea of
freedom an additional source of anxiety, and was it imbricated in a wider web of
contradictions and conflicts? It might well be that Partition seemed even more
painful because freedom failed to fulfil its promises!
Apart from a few studies on the ceremonies and jubilant celebrations of the first
few days of independence,20 we have no systematic analyses of how the people
responded and adjusted themselves to the newly achieved ‘swaraj’ (self-rule or
independence from foreign domination), which they had fought for so coura-
geously and for so long. The 15th of August is celebrated in India every year as
‘Independence Day’, signalling the birth of the nation-state and the attainment of
political sovereignty. The new state was founded on the concept of people’s sover-
eignty, which located the legitimacy of the state in the will of ‘the people’, which
according to traditional democratic theory was construed to be a homogeneous col-
lectivity.21 But if the idea of people’s sovereignty was predicated on the idea of
equal citizenship, the latter concept also entailed the ‘ethical connotation of partic-
ipation in the sovereignty of the state’. And here the problem of treating ‘the peo-
ple’ as a socially homogeneous category arises. Partha Chatterjee has argued that
the members of the nation did not necessarily live in ‘homogeneous empty time’, as
Benedict Anderson had speculated, rather they inhabited what Chatterjee calls the
‘heterogeneous time of modernity’.22 In other words, the nature of their under-
standing of citizenship and participation in the actual functioning of sovereignty
differed widely. However, before we arrive at such a generalization, we need to
have some empirical data on what meanings the people on the streets and peasants
in the fields derived from this notion of sovereignty and of citizenship when India
experienced the transition from colonial to post-colonial politics.
A recent collection of essays edited by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar
and Andrew Sartori is a significant first step in recovering the history of this
4 Introduction
transitional process from colonial to post-colonial.23 Gyanesh Kudaisya’s recent
book on Uttar Pradesh also traces the emergence of a regional identity, based on
Hindi and Hindutva, in the ‘heartland’ of post-colonial India.24 It provides an excel-
lent point of comparison with the happenings in West Bengal, located at a distance
from the ‘heartland’. So far as West Bengal is concerned, the most important
book on post-colonial politics is Joya Chatterji’s recent and very meticulously
researched book The Spoils of Partition. As the title suggests, Chatterji looks at the
development of post-colonial politics primarily as an aftermath of Partition, which
she thinks profoundly ‘transformed Bengal’s political landscape’.25 It is here that
this book will seek to differ.
The province of West Bengal was created by Partition and it faced all the trau-
matic consequences of that fateful political decision. The historiography of
Partition has raised important questions about citizenship so far as the refugees or
the people on the borderlands were concerned.26 This book does not deny the
importance of those issues – or for that matter of Partition – in the transitional pol-
itics of West Bengal. It is difficult, or indeed impossible, to write a history of West
Bengal between 1947 and 1952 without referring to Partition or the refugees, as
almost every aspect of the province’s life and economy had been affected by them
and continues to be so.27 Partition and the refugees will therefore figure promi-
nently in the description in this book. But it will not assume that: ‘Writing on parti-
tion … means understanding the birth of a nation …’28 Such a narrative closure,
which looks for a history of decolonization only in one event, excludes endless
complexities of decolonization as an experience. To set the balance right in our
existing historiography, this book will therefore focus on other anxieties as well –
not often directly related to Partition – but which arose out of a tendency to look at
freedom through the prism of modernity that tended to define freedom in terms of
a freedom/unfreedom dichotomy. As freedom was the opposite of subjecthood, it
was expected that all the problems associated with the latter condition of life would
be resolved in the former, and when it did not, it created frustration and led to a
search for new enemies of freedom. Divergent visions of freedom led to different
imaginings of the enemy and resulted in contested strategies of political mobiliza-
tion to encounter them. And it was through these encounters that there emerged
what some historians have described as a new hybrid modernity.
There is of course a significant literature on political modernization in India and
its many ambiguities; but either their scope remains limited to the colonial period
alone,29 or they start from the 1950s, as we find in a host of studies on post-colonial
politics and civil society, mostly written by political scientists.30 The transition
from the colonial to the post-colonial period, which is crucial for understanding this
process, has thus slipped out of the gaze of the historians and political scientists,
except for a few works on the notions of ethical good government and understand-
ing of popular sovereignty in Nehruvian thinking immediately after independ-
ence.31 There are not many socially grounded historical studies of decolonization,
as Prasenjit Duara has observed in his introduction to one of the recently published
decolonization readers that we have mentioned earlier.32
This book therefore looks at decolonization as a complex experience, rather than
Introduction 5
just a linear history emanating from one event – either Partition or transfer of power.
And these experiences of freedom in the first post-independence years, we can
argue, can illuminate the ways in which a distinct Indian modernity was being
crafted. But can we define this modernity in singular terms, since there was no
apparent consensus during the freedom struggle as to what freedom or modernity
should mean? This book will therefore explore how different groups of people –
like the vast rural population of West Bengal, the industrial working classes of
Calcutta or the displaced refugees huddled in the squatter camps – were translating
the modern concepts of freedom – encoded in such abstract political terms as
‘sovereignty’ or ‘citizenship’ – into their day-to-day language of entitlement,
expectations, hunger and protests. Freedom perhaps had other connotations for the
office-going bhadralok (literally ‘well-mannered person’, a term used to describe
educated gentlefolk from the middle and upper classes), the intellectuals, and the
political party bosses in West Bengal. Dipesh Chakrabarty has described the
process of decolonization as ‘a historical process that looks necessarily clumsy,
complicated, and inherently incomplete (that is, fragmentary)’.33 Exploring these
fragmentary moments or experiences of freedom is the first task of this book.
It seeks to accomplish this task by exploring first of all the domain of perceptions
and imaginings as articulated in the public space. It will look at the factions,
alliances and networks that jockeyed for influence and power in post-independence
West Bengal; but it will also examine how the meanings of freedom were contested
by the new citizens of West Bengal both in a discursive field as well as through pop-
ular protest actions outside the shaded corridors of Writers’ Building or the closed
chambers of the Congress committee meetings. In order to do this it will look at
popular cultural representations of freedom, examine the mentalities behind mass
agitations, analyze the letters to the editors in popular dailies, and also investigate
organized politics within the institutional structures of a modern state inherited
from the colonial regime. Ranabir Samaddar has observed ‘the strong residuary
existence of a colonial mode of governance’ in the early days of freedom.34 This
book proposes to take that observation further by exploring the tensions between
the old colonial notion of absolute sovereignty of the state and the new post-
colonial expectations about popular sovereignty which gave the citizens the right to
participate in their own government.
A second aim of this book is to understand how the idea of the nation and its
future trajectory were being conceptualized by the new citizens of India at the
moment of arrival. Bipan Chandra and his colleagues in India after Independence
have made an assumption about the existence of a foundational political consensus
in post-independence India. ‘Starting off with a broad social consensus’, they assert
in a certaintist tone,
on the basic contours of the India that was to be built – on the values of nation-
alism, secularism and democracy and the goals of rapid economic develop-
ment and radical social change – was a great advantage. These values and
goals, and the road to their achievement had been mapped over more than sev-
enty years by the national movement.35
6 Introduction
This book argues, however, that such an assumption of ‘consensus’ amounts to a
methodological closure that may preclude all possibilities of retrieving any alter-
native visions. Empirical evidence presented in this book will show that the ‘anti-
imperial consensus’ that had supposedly integrated the national movement,36 did
not naturally evolve into a ‘Nehruvian consensus’ on the post-colonial develop-
ment of the nation.37 In the early days of freedom there were vigorous contestations
and deliberations on the future of the nation-state. In other words, the process of
building a modern nation in India, this book will argue, was not over, but only
entered a different phase in 1947, because this was the time when the Indians got
back ownership of their country and of their future, and started a proper discourse
on how this future was to be built.

It has been suggested by some historians, following Edward Said’s lead, that
colonial rule was sustained through colonization of the mind.38 This book will draw
from here an important set of questions. Did the end of colonial rule result in a
decolonization of the mind and the modes of governance? Could we really avert
Gandhi’s apprehension that India might end up with ‘English rule without the
Englishmen’?39 Or for understanding Indian modernity should we problematize
both these concepts of colonization and decolonization by introducing such other
concepts as alterity or hybridity or take into account the nation’s ambivalence?40
Recent writers on decolonization have all agreed on one point that it was never
meant to be a clinical break from the past; it was rather a dialogic process between
the colonial past and the post-colonial present, a process that never finished with
any degree of certainty or finality.41 This process, as this book will try to show, pro-
duced a hybrid political modernity in which goddess Bharat Mata (Mother India)
could live happily with the notion of a modern secular state (though not always with
happy consequences) or a Communist Party could readily use tribal community
bonds to mobilize its Santhal comrades or the Hindu refugee women in Calcutta
would march on the streets and participate in hunger strikes to demand their rights
of citizenship without jettisoning the traditional modes of gender relations in
Bengali society. Or for that matter, the Gandhians could still hope to achieve their
desired ethical and moral transformation of the polity through the ideal of ‘krishak-
praja-mazdoor raj’ (the rule of the peasants, tenants and workers), despite the post-
colonial modernist political and economic agenda of the ruling elites in the
Congress Party. It is this difference, and also pluralism, of India’s political moder-
nity that this book seeks to explore and highlight. Following Partha Sarathi Gupta’s
cautionary note, it does ‘not equate the history of one all-India party with the his-
tory of the nation’.42
These issues have been addressed at several levels. At the popular level, this
book shows how different individuals and groups interpreted their freedom and
extended its meaning. Acknowledging that ‘nation’ itself was a space for contesta-
tion, as argued by Ania Loomba,43 it seeks to explore how these various meanings
and consequent expectations confronted and collided with each other in the provin-
cial politics of West Bengal, within the broader perimeters of the Indian nation-
state. Sunil Khilnani and more recently Ramachandra Guha have argued that it is
the democratic experience that has kept India united as a nation.44 But democracy
Introduction 7
functioned in India at many levels. Homi Bhabha has discerned two distinct levels
where the nation participated in this democratic exercise: the ‘pedagogic’ level of
the educated elites and the ‘performative’ level of the masses.45 This book looks at
these divergent forms of democratic behaviour by looking closely at what was hap-
pening inside the Legislative Assembly, at how the industrial workers behaved at
the picket lines or peasant insurgents fought during their encounters with the police,
and finally, how the new citizens voted in the first general election in free India, in
the province of West Bengal.
The book is divided into six thematic chapters. The first chapter provides a broad
overview of what was happening in West Bengal during the period under review
(1947–52) and focuses on various literary and visual representations of freedom, as

well as the expectations, tribulations and frustrations that it engendered. The second
chapter looks at how the initial euphoria of freedom gradually gave way to discon-
tents shared by a wide cross-section of the population – the working classes, peasants
and the middle class – and looks at perceptions of freedom at different levels. The
chapter also focuses on the reappearance of communal violence in 1950 and exam-
ines the nation’s problematic relationship with its minorities. The third chapter looks
at the post-independence policies of the Indian National Congress, its ideological het-
erogeneity, its internal factionalism and its new authoritarian face. The fourth chap-
ter focuses on the turbulent years of 1948–50, when the communist militancy to bring
about a ‘People’s Democratic Revolution’ in India posed a serious challenge to the
Congress government in West Bengal. However, this intended revolution was short-
lived and by the end of 1950 the communist leadership decided to withdraw the
movement and announced its decision to participate in the forthcoming general elec-
tion. The fifth chapter traces the rise of political opposition from within the Congress
– both on the left and on the right. All these opposition parties seriously interrogated
the dominant Congress model of Indian modernity and its projected future trajectory.
In the end, this epistemological dissent was not translated into any alternative pro-
grammatic statement that could lead to any significant paradigm shift in post-colonial
politics. But that does not make the dissent any less important.
The sixth chapter of this book focuses on the story of the first election in the
province in 1952, when the common people voted in an election for the first time in
their lives,46 and contrary to the expectations of the political pundits, actually made
sense of a complicated electoral system, but delivered a highly ambiguous result.
This book tries to show how contesting meanings of ‘freedom’ encountered each
other through these fragmentary episodes of political mobilization. In this sense, the
book offers no certaintist conclusion, as it is by no means a comprehensive social or
political history of the period. It tries to tell multiple stories – by no means any
integrated narrative – of how the people of West Bengal perceived their transition
from colonial subjecthood to post-colonial nationhood, with all its accompanying
anxieties and tribulations, ruptures and hybridity. And in doing so, along with the
dominant Congress programme, it also tries to retrieve some of the alternative
visions of the post-colonial future.
This study relies on archival research, both in a conventional and non-conventional
sense. Conventional archival research can bring out the middle-class mind and elite
8 Introduction
actions more easily than the mentalities of the masses, who do not leave behind writ-
ten narratives of their lives and expectations. For recovering mass perceptions, this
book uses the methodology of interpreting behaviour as text, that is, reading popular
minds through their protests and other non-protest everyday actions, and as a histori-
cal study it traces these through documents and other recorded accounts of peasant
and working-class life. It draws upon contemporary newspapers, popular as well as
high literature published around that time, including children’s literature, feature
films, posters and cartoons, and private papers of individuals. Many of these sources
are in Bengali and quotations from them are my translations, except where otherwise
indicated. This study has also used the records of the Indian National Congress and
the Hindu Mahasabha, available at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New
Delhi, and the published documents of the Communist Party of India.
The study has also used official records, which include the records of the
Government of West Bengal, such as the Police and Political department files and
Legislative Assembly Proceedings. Most important of these records are the
recently transferred Intelligence Branch (IB) files of the West Bengal Police
Department at the West Bengal State Archives. Other than that, it has also used the
reports of the British Consulate Office at Calcutta, available at the British Library.
In a way these official archives also form a part of this history of decolonization, as
they show that even in the post-colonial period the IB officers kept the opposition
political leaders under constant surveillance and the British Deputy High
Commissioner continued to write his ‘fortnightly reports’ on the political situation
in the province in the same way as during the time of the Raj. Continuity in the
mentalities and rules of governance and change in aspirations and expectations of
the people constituted the dialectic process of decolonization.
1 The arrival of freedom
Celebrations, anxieties and
realities
Arrival, celebrations and anxieties

For all Indians the arrival of independence on the midnight of 14–15 August 1947
was an exhilarating moment that remained forever ingrained in their memories. But
that moment also arrived with the pain of Partition, as well as enormous challenges
of an uncertain future. Some felt inspired and empowered,1 others felt daunted and
anxious, as the afterglow of celebrations faded away, and the stark realities of free-
dom began to stare at their faces. But let us begin with the celebrations.
On the 15th of August 1947, Calcutta was in an extraordinary festive mood. At
1 a.m., the new Governor Chakravarti Rajagopalachari took the oath of office, fol-
lowed by Dr Prafulla Chandra Ghosh, the Congress Prime Minister,2 and the other
members of his first cabinet of the newly created province of West Bengal. During
the day, tricolour national flags, along with wooden and iron poles to hang them,
and white cotton Gandhi caps with ‘Jai Hind’ (victory to India) inscribed on them
– the new icons of a free nation – were sold in thousands on the pavements of
Calcutta. The main flag hoisting ceremony of the day was scheduled to be held at
the Governor’s House. Thousands gathered at the gates in the morning. The police-
men tried to block them for some time, but soon the locks gave way, with the crowd
rushing in to the lawn where the Governor was giving his speech. When he finished
and retired to his residence, the crowd followed him inside the building. And then,
for the next few hours, thousands of ordinary Calcuttans, many of them from a
working-class background, roamed freely through the building, and when they left,
they took away pieces of furniture and other memorabilia as souvenirs of a period
of their history, which they thought now truly belonged to the past.3 The
Governor’s House was no longer the residence of a living Governor, it had become
the archaeological remains of a past regime. According to unofficial sources, about
200,000 people entered the Governor’s House on that day.4
The Governor’s House was not their only destination, as this story of breaking
barriers continued. The crowd then moved on to the adjacent Assembly House,
where once again police tried to block their entry, but later gave in, and thousands
of citizens of the new nation-state rushed into the debating chamber and greeted the
Governor, then in the middle of his speech, with loud slogans of ‘Jai Hind’.5 The
new citizens of the city were now reclaiming their right to participate in the gover-
nance of their country. And Calcutta was not the exception, as similar scenes of
exuberance could be seen almost everywhere in India. In Bombay, the government
Secretariat Building was taken over by the crowd. Jim Masselos has argued that
such incidents signified that no space was sacrosanct anymore, as the crowd estab-
lished their right to enter the most secure and restricted of all spaces during the days
of the Raj.6 These were, therefore, the symbolic acts of reclaiming lost territory as
their illegitimate occupants had now retreated. Like other cities, Calcutta and its
suburbs also witnessed numerous celebrations, where national flags were hoisted,
patriotic songs were sung and fiery speeches were delivered.7 There were also some
token gestures of national integration across class and caste lines. At some places
the hungry poor were fed; at a local hospital an elderly sweeper woman and at a
District Congress office a harijan girl were given the privilege of hoisting the
national flag. These acts of coming together no doubt pleased Mahatma Gandhi,
then stationed in Calcutta.8
The other major impact of these celebrations on the arrival of freedom was the
disappearance of communal tension that had plagued the city of Calcutta, as well as
adjacent industrial areas of Howrah for the last few months, bringing Gandhi to
Calcutta. As a mark of penance, Gandhi decided to spend the first Independence
Day in fasting and spinning.9 But on that day, almost like magic, all tension disap-
peared. In Calcutta, in the suburbs where communal violence had been endemic
over the past year, Muslims and Hindus with small national flags stuck on their
dresses came out on the streets from midnight and began to embrace each other with
slogans like ‘Bande mataram’ (Hail mother) ‘Jai Hind’, ‘Hindu Muslim ek ho’
(Hindus and Muslims unite) and ‘Allah ho Akbar’ (God is great), chanted in the
same breath.10 In a letter to the editor in The Statesman, a Muslim citizen of Calcutta
wrote: ‘That night in Calcutta we ceased to be Hindus and Muslims, we became
Indians.’11 The Superintendent of Police in Howrah wrote to his superior:
On the 15th [of] August the whole town looked very festive and gay. [The
n]ational flag was hoisted [o]n all the government buildings as well as at all
public places and in almost all the important localities. Trams and buses were
very ... crowded with people who went on shouting ‘Jai Hind’. People greeted
one another both Hindus and Muslims. As if by ... magic, all the differences of
the people were composed overnight, and they all looked happy and cheerful.12
Indeed, that was the harmonious spirit of 15 August 1947. This situation in the
industrial areas of Howrah, one of the worst affected by communal violence in
recent months, is also corroborated in the memoirs of Annada Sankar Roy, then a
Judicial Magistrate in the district.13 In Calcutta there was not a single incident of
communal violence during the whole period between 15 and 30 August and there
were scenes of celebration where the Hindus and Muslims participated and hugged
each other, with national flags in their hands. There was a massive peace procession
in Calcutta on 26 August, in which thousands of Hindus and Muslims participated
chanting slogans like ‘Hindu–Muslim zindabad’(Long live Hindu–Muslim
[unity].14 The Muslims of Upper Chitpore Road donated Rs 1,001 to Gandhi for the
repairing of Hindu temples damaged in the riots of August 1946.15 This new public
The arrival of freedom 11
mood of reconciliation pleased Gandhi very much, as in his post-prayer speech on
15 August he expressed his hope that the example of Calcutta would show the way
to the rest of India.16 In another speech at a civic reception on 24 August at Calcutta
Maidan (literally ‘open field’; the Calcutta Maidan is a large park and venue for
many events), attended by about 200,000 people, he described the situation as nei-
ther a miracle nor an accident, but an act of God.17
But this outburst of goodwill was temporary, as troubles broke out again on the
night of 31 August–1 September. Whether or not it was in response to the
announcement of the decision of the Boundary Commission on 17 August it is dif-
ficult to ascertain, as the Hindus had a lot of resentment against the award.18 The
outbreak of violence forced Gandhi to fast from 1 September, this time with H.S.
Suhrawardy, the man widely believed to be the spirit behind the riots of 1946, by his
side. The riots stopped soon, as there were all-out efforts to restore peace – includ-
ing a two-mile-long students’ peace procession in Calcutta on 3 September19 – and
Gandhi broke his fast with a glass of fruit juice from the hands of Suhrawardy in an
overt gesture of reconciliation.20 Five leaders of Bengal – two Bengali Hindus, one
Bengali Muslim, one Punjabi Hindu and a Sikh – in a ceremonial pledge assured the
Mahatma that they ‘shall never again allow communal strife in the city and shall
strive unto death to prevent it.’21 At a mammoth rally of the Hindus and Muslims of
Calcutta on 7 September Gandhi appealed for maintaining peace in Bengal and
announced his decision to leave for Punjab. If Calcutta remained peaceful, the rest
of the country would follow her example. Gandhi expressed his optimism in his
departing message.22
An uneasy peace indeed resided in West Bengal for some time, despite some
political outfits, allegedly financed by Marwari businessmen, complaining loudly
about Congress appeasement of the Muslims and the police intelligence reports
apprehending a fresh outbreak of communal violence shortly after the departure of
Gandhi.23 There were also reports of some renegade elements of the Muslim
League and the Muslim National Guard creating trouble in the border district of
Murshidabad.24 But despite all that and the continuous refugee influx from East
Pakistan, no major communal violence occurred until February–March 1950. Then
it reappeared with a vengeance, leading to the large-scale flight of Muslims from
Calcutta and the neighbouring industrial districts. We will discuss that story later in
detail (Chapter 2), but it is important to mention it here to bring home the point that
freedom’s magic touch was temporary and Partition had not resolved the issue of
Hindu–Muslim relations in this province, or defined with any amount of certitude
the place of the minorities within the new nation-state.
As a protest against Partition, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Communist Party of
India (CPI) did not participate in the celebrations of 15 August. Sarat Bose, the
brother of Subhas Chandra Bose and a believer in a united Bengal, also spent the
day in solitude at his Calcutta residence; two weeks earlier he had resigned from the
Congress and formed his own party, the Socialist Republican Party.25 Referring to
the Partition and its aftermath of hatred and violence, a columnist in the Bengali lit-
erary magazine Masik Basumati wrote in a rather pensive tone: ‘India has become
free. But this is not the freedom that we struggled for.’26
The whole atmosphere of jubilation and celebrations, therefore, had a significant
amount of ambivalence and uncertainty in it, and this created anxiety in the minds
of many, particularly the middle-class Bengalis. Their anxiety originated partly
from the high hopes generated by independence and partly from the realities of
divided Bengal. As Annada Sankar Roy writes in his memoirs: ‘The fifteenth of
August was not a day of undiluted joy. It was a day mixed with plenty of tears, blood
and blemishes.’ On the one hand, there was tremendous optimism: ‘that wonderful
day appeared other-worldly. Everything seemed possible. As if freedom was the
land where people could get all they desired. The citizens of this country could
achieve whatever they wanted.’ But on the other, freedom also had different mean-
ings for different people – it did not only mean freedom from British rule; it came
with Partition, which meant freedom from the dominance of the majorities, that is,
the Hindus in undivided India, and the Muslims in undivided Punjab and Bengal.
This had important political ramifications. The day also indicated that the concept
of freedom needed to be expanded, from its political manifestation to its social and
economic expectations, from its narrower connotation of political sovereignty to its
wider meaning of citizenship that entailed the equal right to enjoy prosperity and
happiness. The presence of Gandhi, Roy further writes, reminded everyone that
what we wanted was not just political freedom, but also social and economic free-
dom, which we could now strive to attain.27
A leftist intellectual, Gopal Haldar shared the same concerns when he wrote just
before the formal attainment of freedom that the meaning of the term swaraj had pro-
foundly changed over the years as the freedom struggle made progress. Today it did
not merely mean Home Rule or just taking control of the administrative machinery,
but an empowerment of the people and a revolutionary change of social and eco-
nomic forces.28 A resonance of the same meanings of freedom could also be heard in
the statements of the Gandhian leader Ajoy Mukherjee, the hero of the Midnapur
national government of 1942. He warned his countrymen on the eve of independ-
ence that the real swaraj would come only when the Gandhian ideal of ‘krishak-
praja-mazdoor raj’ (the rule of the peasants, tenants and workers) would be realized
in this country.29 But this would not be an easy task. The real implications of freedom
would be clear in a few days, because the British had left a ‘bankrupt zamindari
estate’, historian Jadunath Sarkar reminded his countrymen in a radio speech, refer-
ring to problems like sterling balance, inflation and food shortages.30 In other words,
behind the celebrations and jubilation there were expectations and a lurching
anxiety about the difficult tasks ahead of fulfilling the expectations of the people and
looking after one’s own house amidst the mess left behind by the previous colonial
regime. An article in Masik Basumati cautioned the new citizens that freedom was
not an immovable property that you could acquire and enjoy. You would have to
strive continually to make it deliver its promises.31 A local newspaper Millat noted
in the same tune as the metropolitan intellectuals that fighting for freedom was one
thing, constructing the architecture of freedom was yet another.32
This was a sentiment also shared by the Congress and its leaders who now held
the reins of power in the province and could see the burdens of responsibility. In a
message to the nation on 15 August the Congress President J.B. Kripalani assuaged
the nation: ‘Let us not be disheartened because freedom has not come in the full
glory of a united India.’ But Congress would strive to ‘ensure individual liberty,
equality of opportunity and the fullest scope for every citizen for the development
of his personality.’33 In a message to the people of the province, Prime Minister P.C.
Ghosh announced that we had attained swaraj so that everyone could have social,
economic and political justice, equal status and civil liberties.34 As a gesture of rec-
onciliation, the government released all political prisoners, including those held in
connection with the communist-led Tebhaga movement, and all court cases related
to that and the Burdwan canal tax movement were withdrawn.35
But to ensure social justice and equal rights of citizenship much more than sym-
bolic political gestures were needed. In a press statement on 15 August, the West
Bengal Provincial Congress Committee therefore cautioned the people that there
were still ‘enemies’ of our freedom, but today our ‘enemies’ were not outside but
within us, and these were our ignorance, superstition, mistakes and above all, vio-
lence and disorder born of communal hatred. The task of fighting with these ‘ene-
mies’, or in other words, building a modern nation, was even more difficult than the
struggle for political freedom. ‘We cannot have real swaraj until democracy is not
just confined to politics but becomes effective in the social and economic fields as
well.’ This meant there were greater challenges ahead, and every citizen must help
the state in overcoming them.36
There were many who could not quite grapple with these uncertainties and saw
in the unrestrained expression of jubilation on 15 August an ominous sign of an
impending disaster. This mood was captured splendidly in the essays of Birendra
Krishna Bhadra, writing under the pseudonym Birupaksha. His satirical social
commentaries, originally read out from the Calcutta station of the all-India Radio,
were later compiled and published as a book, with the title Birupaksher Bisham
Bipad, which should be appropriately translated as ‘Birupaksha’s serious crisis’.
These are social satires written in a superb style, evoking laughter, but reflecting at
the same time the middle-class anxieties and a sense of crisis immediately after
independence. For many, as he writes, the current situation represented a break-
down of legitimate authority. Swaraj, Birupaksha observes, means that you can do
anything you like, even ransack the Governor’s House, if only for once you find the
gates open. Our reason and intellect had been restrained within our heads and were
treading along the right path as long as the British were here. Once they are gone, it
is gushing out like ghee (clarified butter) – just as floods in the river Damodar.
Swaraj for many, Birupaksha writes, seems like a complete breakdown of order
and discipline, as no one listens to anyone. The younger generation does not listen
to their elders, the subordinate staff do not obey their superiors, students do not
respect their teachers, the housemaids do not care for the householders, children do
not follow their parents and finally, wives do not listen to their husbands. In other
words, it is chaos, anarchy and the breakdown of all structures of authority. ‘If this
happens at the very introduction, then I shudder to think what will happen to this
country when freedom will be running at full force’, wrote Birupaksha37 in his
characteristic satirical exaggeration of an anxiety that came from the inner psycho-
logical depths of a community of (babus) clerks who were used to the disciplines of
the Raj, supervised by their sahibs (masters). The sons of the Bengali babus pros-
pered well in their jobs under the British, Birupaksha wrote in another of his popu-
lar books, because they willingly surrendered their free will and self-respect to their
bosses. They had learnt well the ‘art’ of keeping their jobs by doing whatever they
were asked to do.38 So now the burden of this autonomy that suddenly made them
masters of their own destiny was too much for them to bear. The popularity of his
radio programmes and the way his book went into a second print within a short time
indicate that this sense of unease was possibly shared by a wide section of the
middle-class urban population.39
But middle-class patriots were nonetheless involved enthusiastically in choos-
ing the symbols that would represent their national identity in a modern world. This
modernity had to be distinctively Indian, and therefore the Gandhi cap became the
most authentic uniform of a nationalist, and thousands wore it in a public display of
their loyalty to their new nation-state.40 Its most modern symbol, the national flag,
was also sold in thousands on the pavements of Calcutta in the first few days of free-
dom. The tricolour flag with the Asoka chakra (the wheel of Asoka) in the middle
became the most sacred symbol of the nation, and its citizens were inspired to die
for its honour.41 A children’s history book told its young readers that the flag was
not just a piece of cloth dyed in simple colours; it was the greatest symbol of their
nation, its history, its civilization and its existence.42 On the first anniversary of
independence, as The Statesman reported, ‘Flags were flown on almost all private
buildings and Government and commercial houses.’ Congress leaders like Suresh
Chandra Banerji reminded their audiences that the national flag represented every-
thing that was implied in the idea of freedom.43
But freedom and the flag had different meanings for different people. The
Congress party proudly emphasized the genealogy of the flag tracing its origin back
to the Congress flag designed by Gandhi and adopted by the party in 1931.44 At the
All-India Congress Committee (AICC) meeting in Calcutta on 22 March 1952
Nehru described the Congress flag as the ‘symbol of our freedom struggle and the
unity of India’ and narrated the story of how it evolved into the ‘flag of the nation’
through a minor substitution of the charkha (spinning wheel) with the chakra.45
The design was approved by the Constituent Assembly in July 1947 and later in
1951 the state asserted its ownership and standardized its appearance by providing
through a Notification of the Indian Standards Institution the specifications for its
general design, constructional details and shades of colour.46 The government in
another notification restricted its use on private, public and residential houses and
buildings, making it more sacred. The replacement of the charkha with the imperial
icon of a Buddhist monarch, picked up from India’s pre-colonial past, perhaps sym-
bolized, as Richard Davis has argued, a change from the Gandhian ideal of self-help
to the Nehruvian modern vision of a strong secular territorial state.47 But the semi-
otics of the change were less obvious at this stage as the boundaries were less
sharply drawn. Congress decided to retain its own flag with the charkha in the mid-
dle, and frequently – sometimes unknowingly, but most often deliberately – tried to
obfuscate the difference between the two flags in order to establish a political con-
flation of the party, nation and the state.48
It was because of this attempted conflation that the symbol and its meanings were
hotly contested. At a meeting of the Hindu Mahasabha at Calcutta’s Deshbandhu
Park on 24 December 1949, Veer Savarkar declared that the freedom of India was
the victory of Hindudom and described the national flag as the ‘Hindu flag’ although
others might call it a secular flag or a democratic flag. At the centre of it was the
dharma chakra of Asoka – but it was the dharma of the ‘Hindu race’. And behind it
loomed the Sudarshan chakra, which would be spun into action, he emphasized, if
any aggression endangered the freedom of this land of the Hindus.49 There were also
others who did not accept the existing flag as the symbol of the nation: on 15 August
1947 the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in some areas of West Bengal organized
its own celebrations where its bhagwa jhanda (saffron flag) – the emblem of a Hindu
nation – was hoisted.50 Once the CPI started its campaign in 1948 to achieve real
freedom – arguing that this freedom was fake – burning national flags became a
mode of registering a symbolic protest (see Chapter 4) against the state.
The other contested symbol of the nation was the national anthem. Two songs
were contestants for the honour as it was debated at the Constituent Assembly: one
was Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Bande mataram, which had become the
anthem of the nationalist movement; but many thought – and there were some
Muslim complaints as well – that it had Hindu overtones. The other contender was
the more secular lyric of Rabindranath Tagore, Jana gana mana. The West Bengal
Premier Bidhan Chandra Roy, who had succeeded P.C. Ghosh in January 1948,
was in favour of Bande mataram, because of its ‘great historical tradition’. He
wrote to Nehru: ‘Men have gone to jail, have faced bullets, and have gone to the gal-
lows with this song on their lips.’ And therefore, the West Bengal cabinet hoped
that this would be the national anthem, and Roy believed that he represented the
‘public opinion of Bengal’ on this issue.51 But Nehru responded to his friend by
mentioning that: ‘A national anthem should be something of victory and fulfilment,
not of past struggle.’ And moreover, in a national anthem what was important was
‘chiefly music and not words’, and it must have ‘a lilt about it and which can be
played satisfactorily all over the world.’52 In the end, the Constituent Assembly
adopted Jana gana mana, which was already being provisionally used as the
national anthem, signalling a victory for Nehru’s modern futuristic vision for the
nation over the romantic nostalgia of Roy and others, also perhaps indicating the
direction in which India was to move hereafter.
Once selected, the state sought to universalize its own symbols of power and
identity through a variety of public secular rituals. The celebrations of national
days, as Jim Masselos has argued, are important for their hegemonic function as
well as symbolic representation of the values that the nation-state stood for.53 The
major attraction of the official celebration of the first anniversary of independence
in West Bengal was a military and police parade at the Brigade Parade Ground,
where the governor took the salute, the national flag was unfurled, the national
anthem was sung and a 31-gun salute proudly proclaimed to the world the power of
the modern nation-state of India. About 200,000 people watched the parade and the
spectacle and celebrated the first anniversary of independence in Calcutta.54 A
similar celebratory programme was drawn up to mark the establishment of the
Republic on 26 January 1950. National flags were hoisted on all government build-
ings, military parades were staged, and a 17-gun salute proclaimed the birth of the
new republic. In a bid to universalize the new symbol of the nation-state, a govern-
ment press note announced on the eve of the Republic Day that the hoisting of
national flags in private houses, business premises, factories, mills and river crafts
would be appreciated.55 The map too was soon to become the new logo of a modern
nation-state, but for India it assumed a different significance, as the familiar map that
the imperial cartographers had drawn and their education system had homogenized
became irrelevant within a few days of independence as the Radcliffe Commission
drew the new boundary partitioning Bengal for the second time in history. For the
educated Bengali bhadralok, the new map of modern India became the one ‘sliced
up by the stroke of Mr Radcliffe’s pen’, representing a sense of loss that accompa-
nied the joys of freedom.56
There was a lot of ambivalence in the nation’s perception of modernity as well.
Along with the symbols of a modern territorial nation-state, its traditional heritage
was also reinvoked to assert her distinctiveness. One of the remarkable features of
the celebration of the first anniversary of independence was a spinning demonstra-
tion by about 300 men and women. Called ‘sutra yajna’ (ritual of thread) it was held
at the Marble Hall of the Governor’s House in memory of Mahatma Gandhi, who
had been assassinated a few months ago.57 And this became an ongoing tradition, as
in the celebrations of the first anniversary of the Republic Day on 26 January 1951,
a spinning ritual and an all-faith prayer meeting accompanied the most modern
grandiose military and police parade, representing an awe-inspiring spectacle
staged by the state.58
Apart from such ceremonial official rituals, a reinvented national history soon
found its place in public discourse. It spoke of a universalist nation whose pride was
located not just in its modernity, but in its brilliant inclusive cultural past. A new
children’s literature sought to homogenize this new national history, in which India
was represented as a nation not just of Chandragupta Maurya, the conqueror, but
also of Priyadarshi Asoka who spread to the world at large the message of peace,
and of Bikramaditya who was a known patron of art and literature.59 It was also the
land of Akbar who sought to unite all religions through his Din-i-Ilahi, the land of
Rabindranath Tagore who won the hearts of the world with his poetry and the land
of Mahatma Gandhi who symbolized truth and non-violence to the entire world.60
This non-modern aspect of the nation’s past and present was also represented in
the iconography of Bharat Mata (Mother India) which Abanindranath Tagore had
introduced into the nationalist imagining back in 1905.61 It is true that in the way
Bharat Mata was subsequently represented in later nationalist iconography of the
1940s, it is difficult to miss the obvious modernist elements like the flag and the
map.62 But then it will be simplistic to describe this symbolic representation of a
spiritual nation as purely modern; more appropriately we should recognize its
hybrid nature, because the evidence of cultural alterity in this nationalist imagina-
tion is too obvious to miss. Around 1948, shortly after independence, a history text-
book for school children in West Bengal (Sonar Bharat or Golden India) published
a picture of Bharat Mata imposed on a map of India.63 This was no doubt a modern
representation of the political geography of Bengal, as the map showed that East
Bengal had been cut out of it and blood was oozing from the wound. The map also
represented what Sumathi Ramaswamy has called the ‘peninsularized’ India, con-
structed by scientific colonial cartography.64 But at the bottom of the picture there
is a couplet from a well-known patriotic song by the Bengali poet Dwijendralal
Roy. In English translation, those lines would mean: ‘the day Mother India you
emerged from the depths of the blue ocean’. The poet’s nationalist imagination thus
pushed the history of the motherland back to the earliest day of creation – a nation
naturally born. Furthermore, the map shows no territorial boundaries – apart from
the natural boundaries provided by the oceans and the mountains. This absence of
boundary lines leaves us not exactly with the representation of a territorial nation-
state that the British left for us – despite the obvious reference to Partition – but with
an image of a cultural space – the more traditional idea of ‘a-samudra-himachal-
Bharat Barsha’ (Bharat or India that stretched from the Himalayas to the ocean) –
that had been the cradle for an Indian civilization that flourished over centuries.
We do not know much about how the villages celebrated the coming of freedom.
A social novel, Hey more durbhaga desh (Oh my unfortunate country) published in
1947 describes one such rural celebration organized by the village headman and a
local businessman, who had recently made a lot of money during the war and har-
boured political aspirations. They invited influential guests from Calcutta to add
respectability to their celebration of independence, where the national flag was
hoisted, sweets were distributed and the peasants participated. But the latter could
hardly enjoy the celebration, as the harvest was bad that year because of lack of rain.
They could not figure out how they would benefit from freedom, yet they came in
groups, and left the place with a feeling: ‘Oh yes, we observed a great tamasha’
(entertainment).65 This picture does not seem to be out of tune with the realities of
rural life in West Bengal, which had been in ruins since the early 1940s, as depicted
vividly in the novels of Tarasankar Banerjee. ‘People did not have enough to satisfy
even their minimum needs’, he observed in Ganadevata; they found it difficult ‘to
provide themselves with two sets of clothes a year and two handfuls of rice a day.’
Yet, they often found their rates raised by their local zamindars and their agents, who
maintained a close connection with the local Congress committees and the bureau-
cracy.66 And since it was these same elite who continued to reign in the countryside
after independence, it is not surprising that freedom would have less of an ontologi-
cal meaning for the peasant society. The reports that a young leftist journalist Subhas
Mukhopadhyay wrote of rural Bengal shortly after independence certainly corrobo-
rate this picture of an apathetic village community reeling under abject poverty.67
And the happenings of the next few months are enough testimony to the anxieties
and insecurities of the Bengal peasantry whose understanding of freedom was cer-
tainly different from those of the urban middle class and their politicians.
The other side of freedom

On 15 August 1948 when the Indian nation-state celebrated its first birth anniver-
sary, there was evidently much less public exuberance. Instead, there was a growing
sense of discontent and frustration as the promises of freedom had failed to deliver
for many people and their wrath fell on the Congress. In Calcutta posters were dis-
tributed urging people not to join the celebrations.68 Listing all the woes of the past
year, a columnist in Masik Basumati wrote in angst: ‘Perhaps we have become free,
but we cannot feel it. We look forward to that day when we will achieve real free-
dom.’69 A year later when the Constituent Assembly passed the new constitution, the
same columnist wrote again: ‘The way the constitution has been drafted it looks as
if its purpose has been to ensure that the Congress party can remain in power at the
centre for a very long time to come.’70 Such scepticism did not represent any odd
cynicism, as similar notes of frustration and indignation were regularly voiced in
suburban newspapers and periodicals like Bardhamaner Katha or Birbhum Bani.71

When, on 26 January 1950, the government organized public celebrations that we
have mentioned earlier to mark the promulgation of the new constitution and the
establishment of the new Republic, there were protests and bomb throwing.72 Jyoti
Basu of the CPI condemned the constitution as undemocratic and authoritarian, rep-
resenting vested interests.73 Sarat Bose condemned the new constitution for sacrific-
ing India’s sovereignty, for denying the fundamental rights to food, shelter,
employment and security, and described it as ‘an undeclared war upon opposition,
present and future.’74 Two leftist parties – Revolutionary Socialist Party and
Forward Bloc (Marxist) – organized meetings at Shraddhananda Park, Wellington
Square and Beadon Square in Calcutta condemning the new constitution as ‘a char-
ter of slavery’, ‘framed by a British sponsored Constituent Assembly’ that was not
constituted on the basis of universal adult franchise, and therefore was not a repre-
sentative body of the people of India. It surrendered India’s independence to British
interests by remaining within the Commonwealth.75
Then again on the first anniversary of the Republic Day on 26 January 1951,
there were reports of clashes from the districts, where angry industrial workers dis-
played black flags. And at mammoth public meetings at Wellington Square and the
Maidan in Calcutta even some of the important Congress leaders, like Ajoy
Mukherjee and Suresh Chandra Banerji, were complaining that though they had
‘won political freedom, economic freedom was yet to be achieved’, and for this
they blamed their own Congress government, which allegedly was drifting away
from the Congress ideals and from the common people.76 In other words, as the
realities of freedom began to stare at the faces of the new citizens, the detractors of
the Congress government – communists as well as non-communist leftist elements
and the old Gandhians – began to highlight these failing promises of freedom.
The most important and biting realities of the day that gradually made freedom
taste bitter were food shortages and the spiralling inflation rate. Food prices in
Bengal had been going up since the Second World War, but did not come down
after independence, though this was widely expected by the people. The famine of
1943 had revealed with disastrous consequences that the colonial government, both
at the centre and at the province, lacked an effective food policy; and the rationing
system put in place in the wake of the famine did not work properly because of the
absence of an appropriate procurement strategy.77 By the end of December 1947
food prices in Calcutta had risen by 32 per cent in one year and were about 283 per
cent higher than the 1941 prices.78 Things did not improve dramatically after inde-
pendence, as the Congress government that came into power did not yet have the
time or the political will to initiate any alternative food policy or for that matter
introduce any economic development plan for the country, which its leaders had
presaged in the days before independence.79 At the AICC meeting at Bombay on 25
April 1948 Nehru announced the decision to appoint a Planning Commission;80 but
it was not until 15 October 1951 that he was able to present his First Five Year Plan
to the parliament.81 In the meantime, the food situation had been deteriorating fast.
By the middle of September 1947 India was facing a major food shortage, and so
far as West Bengal was concerned, reports in the newspapers indicated an almost
complete breakdown of the rationing system in Calcutta and the industrial areas,
because procurement fell sharply due to the high black market price of rice.82 The
Bengal Civil Supplies Minister Charu Chandra Bhandari admitted the crisis, but
assured the public that there was ‘no serious apprehension of famine’.83 But there
were no signs of improvement in the next few months. As for general inflation,
according to one report there was an 86.8 per cent rise in average prices in one year
between June 1947 and June 1948.84 Another report suggested that between
December 1947 and July 1948 the prices of vegetables rose by 50 per cent, that of
fruits by 92 per cent, that of milk products by 20 per cent and that of fish by
24 per cent.85
The ineptitude of the government in controlling prices of daily necessities can be
measured if we look closely at the story of cloth. In January 1948 the government
relaxed restrictions on the marketing of cloth and a huge smuggling trade with East
Pakistan within months caused a 200 per cent rise in cloth prices in West Bengal –
unscrupulous businessmen reaping somewhere ‘between 250 and 400 percent
profit’.86 Some haphazard actions followed – a few smugglers were arrested at the
railway stations near the Indo-Pak border. In the frontier districts of Murshidabad,
Nadia and the 24-Parganas police and vigilante Congress volunteers sealed some
shops and uncovered some hidden stocks. But these measures hardly had any effect
on the prices. For, as the president of the Retail Shops Association complained in
Calcutta, the Marwari wholesalers at Burrabazar were demanding 50 to 150 per
cent premium over the normal prices and smuggling was being carried on by some
‘big interests’. When the government failed to curb smuggling, it stopped the sup-
ply of cloth to West Bengal from other provinces. This created a panic about
scarcity and pushed the prices further up. Meanwhile, the mill owners and some
traders colluded to manipulate supply from the mills and created more artificial
scarcity, and the Police Commissioner of Calcutta expressed his inability to do any-
thing about it, as his legal powers, he complained, were limited.87
By the end of April, therefore, the government again considered reimposing con-
trol on cloth. In August they decided to stamp prices on the cloth; some godowns in
Burrabazar were inspected and stocks were frozen.88 In a broadcast on 17 August
1948 the new Civil Supplies Minister Prafulla Chandra Sen admitted that ‘the
Government’s policy of decontrol gave the chance to blackmarketeers, profiteers
and smugglers’, and finally announced the reimposition of rationing on cloth.89 But
that did not improve the situation, as the traders continued to manipulate the market
and even in the puja season of 1950, more than two years after the reimposition of
control, the average consumers in Calcutta continued to face difficulties in getting
cloth at controlled retail prices. The Enforcement Branch of the Calcutta Police, in
the meantime, only talked of some symbolic actions, such as preparing a list of sus-
pected black marketeers of cloth in the city or threatening to seize their hoarded
stocks90 – but no concrete actions followed.
An inquiry by the provincial Labour department in 1948 revealed that the cost of
living for the working classes in Calcutta and Howrah had risen three times over the
1938 prices, and food prices particularly rose four times and claimed 52.5 per cent
of the working-class family budget.91 Prafulla Sen admitted in the Assembly on 22
March 1949: ‘There is no gain-saying the fact that India as a whole and West
Bengal in particular are deficit in food grains both quantitatively and qualita-
tively.’92 But the government continued to mismanage the situation. It announced
its decision to introduce rationing of sugar – the commodity just vanished instantly
from the market, to be sold later at exorbitantly high prices. People began to fight in
long and time-consuming queues for sugar, and in the end shops were looted. There
was a similar rumour about salt, and it disappeared too from the Calcutta markets,
causing a mad rush to the shops where people bought salt at double the usual price.93
A central government report in August 1949 showed that 75 per cent of its employ-
ees in Calcutta with an income under Rs 500 were in debt, as against 40 per cent in
Delhi, and were spending more than half of their family budget on food. If we
remember that they were ‘the most advantageously situated segment of the middle-
class’, having a stable source of income,94 it will not be difficult to imagine the con-
ditions in which the less fortunate working classes lived in this province. As for the
rural population, a government report suggested that around the end of 1949 more
than 65 per cent of the peasant families were either not producing or barely produc-
ing what they needed for family consumption for the whole year.95 In other words,
they too were equally hard hit by this phenomenal price rise.
The government at this juncture put more emphasis on a ‘Grow More Food’ cam-
paign, as Nehru told a meeting of provincial premiers that the solution of the food
problem should take precedence over all other reforms.96 But the project failed to
keep pace with the growth in population in West Bengal, despite the provision for
257 new irrigation schemes in the province. The government sought to explain the
failure in terms of ‘a series of natural calamities’.97 But many sceptics pointed out
that the surest way of encouraging peasants to grow more food was to initiate land
reforms through the abolition of the zamindari system. This expectation, as some
economic historians think, might not have been totally misplaced.98 So it will be
worthwhile to explore here why zamindari abolition was delayed in this province
in the early years of freedom.
The first discussion of the abolition of zamindari in West Bengal started in
January 1948 when P.C. Ghosh was still the premier. It was decided that the zamin-
dars would be paid compensation, which would amount to Rs 360 million; and in
the lands thus taken over the government would introduce co-operative farming. It
was expected that a Zamindari Abolition Bill would be brought before the
Assembly as early as March 1948.99 However, as Ghosh was replaced by Bidhan
Chandra Roy as the new premier, the plans changed. In March 1948 when the
budget was placed before the Assembly, the communist leader Jyoti Basu reminded
the government that although Congress had all along been talking about kisan
(peasant) raj, nothing had been done towards the abolition of the zamindari sys-
tem.100 In May the provincial government initiated a fresh discussion on this issue
and decided that two stages of the scheme, that is, abolition of rent receiving inter-
ests and creation of a new land system, would be attempted simultaneously in this
province where no strong tradition of collective village institution existed.101 But
since then work progressed slowly: a revisional settlement was undertaken in the
Sundarban areas and in early September 1948 that work was extended to the settled
areas of the 24-Parganas. Besides that, the work for a new revisional settlement was
initiated in Burdwan. It was announced that these revisional operations were meant
to be preliminary measures to state acquisition of rent receiving interests in land.102
Later that month the Government of India announced that no financial assistance
would be given to the provinces to defray the cost of compensation to be paid for
zamindari abolition. About six months later, West Bengal’s Finance Minister
Nalini Ranjan Sarkar told the Assembly that in view of this announcement the
zamindari abolition scheme in the province would be, for the time being, confined
only to the pilot project in the Sundarbans.103
In the next two years, unlike some other provinces such as UP and Bihar,104 noth-
ing happened in West Bengal in this direction. In September 1950, in the course of
the debate over the governor’s annual speech in the Assembly, the Socialist leader
Sibnath Banerjee alleged that the zamindari abolition could not go ahead in this
province because of the chief minister’s unshakable faith in the sanctity of private
property. The labour leader Suresh Chandra Banerji calculated that if the zamin-
dars were to be compensated for their loss of property, it would cost 5,000 million
rupees, which the provincial government was unable to afford. Hence the reform
was put on hold. However, the chief minister remained unmoved by this criticism
and expressed his preference for moving ‘cautiously’. The next year’s budget dis-
cussion revealed that this cautious approach meant little action.105 It is difficult to
speculate on the reasons behind this note of caution – it could be Roy’s faith in the
sanctity of private property as alleged; but it might also be his close association with
the landed magnates like the Maharaja of Burdwan or Kasimbazar. It could also be
his particular understanding of rural economy, for he did not believe that abolition
of zamindari or elimination of other intermediary interests would ‘by itself lead to
an increase in the yield of crops.’ In November 1951, close to the election and under
pressure from the media, he announced that he would introduce only a ‘carefully
worked scheme of land reform’.106
Meanwhile, while land reforms were kept on hold, inflation continued to be ‘the
major problem’ confronting the country’s economy. A Reserve Bank of India
report showed the price index rising from 378.3 in June 1949 to a record 395.6 in
June 1950. The Rupee was devalued, and this made it all the more imperative for
the government to control inflation.107 In West Bengal food shortages reached pre-
carious levels in 1950, particularly in the border districts and in the cities. In August
1950 abnormally high prices of rice were reported from Malda, Nadia and
Murshidabad, with reports of starvation deaths from the latter area. Exasperated by
government inaction even local Congress leaders like Khagendranath Sarkar of
Bishnupur (24-Parganas) thought of organizing ‘hunger marches’ to put pressure
on the Food Minister. The latter denied the reports of starvation deaths, and tried to
explain the shortages in terms of heavy rains, a poor aus (autumn) crop and an
influx of a huge number of refugees – 1,867,399 refugees had arrived in West
Bengal between January and July 1950. Bengal always depended on importation of
rice, which had become difficult after independence, he argued. And the recent
diversion of 200,000 acres of rice land to jute cultivation under the order of the
Government of India further contributed to the food shortage. In addition, 120,000
acres of land belonging to Muslims who had fled after the riots in the early months
of 1950 had remained fallow. The government tried an ad hoc solution by rushing
an additional supply of rice and wheat and putting the deficit areas under a system
of modified rationing, but no substantial solution emerged.108
On 23 October 1950 Sen finally admitted in a radio talk that ‘West Bengal’s dif-
ficulties on the food front still persist, and the future is extremely uncertain for rea-
sons beyond the control of the Government.’109 In such a situation, even for
middle-class Bengalis life became difficult. Visits to markets turned out to be a
frustrating experience. Birupaksha writes that you cannot put anything in your
bags, at the most you can only touch them and come home. He speaks of a scarcity
of almost everything – of cloth, coal, kerosene, sugar, public transport, rented
houses, jobs and seats in educational institutions. In West Bengal standing in long
queues for hours became a part of regular middle-class life in the first few years of
freedom.110 So widespread must have been this middle-class frustration, that the
tobacco company W.D. & H.O. Wills ran an advertisement campaign in 1947
showing long queues in front of ration shops, promising relief and relaxation for
those who would smoke their ‘Scissors’ cigarettes!111
That the situation had already spun out of control was signalled by what hap-
pened in Cooch Behar on 21 April 1951. Traditionally a surplus area in terms of
food production, this erstwhile Princely State joined the Indian Union on 1 January
1950 and was integrated into the economy of the border region of north Bengal,
which was already a deficit area. By April 1951 rice was being sold here at Rs 60 to
70 per maund (approximately 82 lbs) compared with the government controlled
rate of Rs 16. So a demonstration was organized in Cooch Behar town on 19 April
to demand that the district be brought under the full rationing system. On the next
day, demonstrations were again held at Cooch Behar and seven people started a
hunger strike in front of the office of the District Magistrate. The following day, 21
April, a procession of about 2,000 ‘hunger-marchers’ went to the local Secretariat
building, allegedly became unruly, and was fired upon, resulting in five people
being killed, including two women and a child; 35 people were injured. Similar
food riots were also reported from Dinhata and Mathabhanga subdivisions in the
district. The army was swiftly called upon to restore order in Cooch Behar town. A
spontaneous hartal (strike) was observed on the next day. A ‘Cooch Behar Day’
was observed on 25 April, when black flags were flown at every house and shop in
Cooch Behar town. A mile-long procession on that day headed towards the
Sagardighi area, where the firing had taken place the previous day, and ended its
two-and-a-half-hour-long journey at the Municipal Square. Here at a meeting in
front of a makeshift Shahid bedi (martyr’s tomb), resolutions were passed demand-
ing punishment of the guilty officers.112
The government’s administrative response was swift, in contrast to its rather
insensitive political response. The Food Minister Sen alleged that the current
scarcity in Cooch Behar was because of hoarding by the powerful jotedars of the
region. He ordered extra food supplies to be rushed to the district, which was
brought under ‘modified’ rationing, covering the low- and the middle-income
groups.113 However, Chief Minister Roy in a letter to the Secretary of the Cooch
Behar People’s Association denied that there was any real problem of food short-
age in the area and alleged that the entire movement was orchestrated by opposition
parties to embarrass the government.114 This attitude of denial by a beleaguered
government only helped to politicize the food issue.115 A few months later, the
‘Cooch Behar firing’ became an emotive theme in the election campaign of the
Hindu Mahasabha116 and a number of other leftist parties.117
The food situation in 1951 was critical all over India. On 2 May 1951, in a radio
broadcast, Nehru declared ‘war on famines’ and warned all those who were hoard-
ing food grains.118 In West Bengal the situation was particularly critical.119 But to be
fair to the government of the day, it needs to be pointed out that much of this prob-
lem was due to what Geoffrey Tyson, the editor of Capital (Calcutta), had
described as the ‘economics of Partition’, which deprived India and especially
West Bengal of important supplies of raw materials and sources of foodstuffs.120
This was ‘the legacy we had inherited from the past’, the West Bengal Finance
Minister Nalini Ranjan Sarkar reminded everyone when he presented his first
budget on 17 February 1948. After the Partition, he explained, West Bengal
received 35.1 per cent of the population and 36.4 per cent of the area of undivided
Bengal. West Bengal received most of the industries of the previous province, but
much less of the arable land. This had anomalous consequences for food supply, as
the scarcity of food was partly caused by this imbalance. The continuous refugee
influx added to the complexities.121 The abnormal food shortage in the border dis-
tricts in August 1950, as Prafulla Sen explained, was largely due to an increase in
population of these districts by about 50 per cent since 1941, the refugees number-
ing about 1.2 million. The influx of refugees also intensified the density of popula-
tion in the urban areas.122
In West Bengal 22 per cent of the population lived in towns, while for East
Bengal the corresponding figure was only 4 per cent. This urban crowding did not
just put pressure on health, housing and food prices, but most obviously worsened
the employment situation. Particularly problematic, as Finance Minister Sarkar
conceded, was ‘the extent of unemployment among the middle class educated
youth’.123 In general, this was a time when the ‘avenues of employment … [were]
shrinking everyday, the number of unemployed … [was] also growing daily’,
Sarkar acknowledged. The problem had its solution; but it could ‘never be found in
a day as if by the magician’s wand …’124 In 1946 the number of factory workers
employed in Bengal was higher than in Bombay; but by 1951 Maharashtra
overtook West Bengal in numbers, and the situation was further rapidly reversed
between 1951 and 1956.125 However, the government could blame Partition only to
an extent for this slowdown and rapidly growing factory unemployment. In 1951
the minister had to admit in the Assembly that even after about four years of inde-
pendence the government did not have a proper machinery to know the ‘exact sta-
tistics’ about the number of people unemployed in the country.126 Thinking about a
sustainable economic policy to generate employment was still years away.
Of course, some of the anomalous consequences of Partition were hard to man-
age. One such bizarre story was that of the jute industry, possibly the largest indus-
trial employer in the province. ‘Roughly speaking the Indian Dominion had 25% of
the jute crop and all the jute mills. Pakistan had 75% of the crop and no jute mill.’
There could be no better summation of the problem of the Bengal jute industry as
given by M.P. Birla, the Chairman of the Indian Jute Mill Association (IJMA) in
February 1948.127 As a result of this incongruity, the jute industry in West Bengal
became heavily dependent on raw jute produced in East Pakistan. Its annual need
by 1949 was 6,000,000 bales of jute, while only about half of that was produced in
West Bengal. In July 1948 the Government of India decided to bring an additional
150,000 acres (later increased to 200,000 acres) of land under jute cultivation in
West Bengal, but it would take time for its effect to be felt in the industry. In the
meanwhile the India-Pakistan Commodities Agreement announced on 1 July 1949
was meant to provide for a steady supply of raw jute from the east to the west. But
this steady supply was suspended within a few weeks as the East Pakistani author-
ities detained the transportation of raw jute purchased by Indian mill-owners in
Pakistan before the recent devaluation of the Rupee. The Government of India
described it as a violation of the Agreement and protested.128 But, as a consequence
of this, from July 1949 the IJMA had to close down the mills for one week in four
to cope with the shortage of raw jute, causing the retrenchment of some 575 per-
manent staff and reduced wages for all the others.129
In September 1949 the Pakistan government decided not to devalue its rupee in
relation to the dollar and the new exchange rate between Pakistani and Indian
rupees shocked the raw jute and jute mill interests in India, as it would effectively
mean a complete closure of the mills for a month or more. The stock position of raw
jute improved somewhat in November and the IJMA immediately rushed to revoke
its decision of week-long closure.130 The urgency to increase production was not to
alleviate the miseries of the workers, but to meet the additional Argentine demand,
created by a new trade agreement, and the eagerness to tap into the American mar-
ket.131 But the supply of raw jute from East Bengal remained tangled in a diplomatic
row, as the Pakistani government continued to hold up 500,000 bales of raw jute
bound for India. In retaliation, in December, the Government of India stopped the
despatch of coal to Pakistan and threatened to annul the Indo-Pakistani Trade
Pact.132 It was not until January 1950 that the Pakistani government actually
released the held-up jute bought by the Indian mills.133 But even that did not resolve
the problem of the jute industry, the major employer in the province.
On the one hand the government’s policy of ‘self-sufficiency in jute’ made
rather slow progress but, on the other hand, the diversion of 200,000 acres of
fertile aus land in the districts of Nadia, Murshidabad, Jalpaiguri, Malda and West
Dinajpur to jute cultivation under the central government plan contributed further
to the food shortage.134 The newly created Central Jute Board’s attempts to regulate
supply of raw jute remained unsatisfactory. In his 1951 Budget speech, the finance
minister had to concede that jute manufacture in the province had declined by
22.8 per cent since last year, having obvious repercussions on the employment
situation.135
So the government of the day was not entirely to blame for the failings of the
economy in the initial years of independence. As the available evidence suggests,
inflation and scarcity as well as unemployment had been regular features of Bengali
public life ever since the outbreak of the Second World War. Indeed, the prices had
begun to rise sharply from 1943–44, the year of the great famine, and had not quite
fallen after that.136 On 11 July 1947, on the eve of independence, the then Bengal
Governor F.J. Burrows wrote to Mountbatten that: ‘Prices of rice have risen dan-
gerously during the past month.’137 So high prices immediately after independence
were neither unnatural nor unusual; but what seemed to have made a difference
now was the expectation that freedom would fix the situation and the frustration
that it did not!
In other words, if freedom was expected to bring an end to the day-to-day mis-
eries of the people, that utopian dream soon started faltering. On the second
anniversary of independence, a Congress leader, Mrityunjoy Banerjee, noted the
paradox of this situation:
In the British period it used to be emphasized by our leaders, rightly or

wrongly, that foreign rule was the root cause of India’s poverty and many other
economic and social ills. The corollary was natural that with Independence
these evils would vanish and the common man, along with his political free-
dom, will get his economic and social emancipation. Evidently these were
exaggerated hopes and unfounded aspirations.138
The absurdity of the situation was not quite lost on opposition leaders, as the
Socialist leader Sibnath Banerjee noted: ‘Isn’t it absurd to expect the Government
in power to eradicate all our problems – social, economical and defence all in two
years?’139 An irate Finance Minister, annoyed by criticism by his credulous fellow
citizens, would burst out in exasperation: ‘People seemed to think freedom was a
quack’s specific which promised to cure all our ills all at once.’140 Dr Pattabhi
Sitaramayya, the Congress President, was more sympathetic and understanding; he
urged the local Congress committees to ‘hold the balance between the people who
want the moon and the Ministers who can give only the candle.’141 But it seemed the
Congress was increasingly losing the battle of perceptions. As the food and cloth
situation deteriorated day by day, as retrenchment and unemployment continued
unabated, the rosy dreams of freedom were shattered for many people. On 12
February 1951, a sad Gandhian labour leader, Suresh Chandra Banerji noted in the
West Bengal Assembly that: ‘Many people these days think that they were proba-
bly better off when they were not free.’142
Corruption and cholera
In these early post-independence days what everybody knew was the fact that a
major reason behind the losing battle against prices and scarcity was black marke-
teering and corruption. These were not new vices in the public life of Bengal; but
what was once seen as exceptional, now in the post-independence period of transi-
tion and unsettled politics looked like a normalized social practice. On 10
December 1947, the then Congress Minister for Food and Civil Supplies, Charu
Chandra Bhandari, made a fervent appeal to all traders to refrain from unfair trad-
ing practices and resort to self-correction, because, he thought, this could not go on
after 15 August.143 But that was wishful thinking, and since then what pervaded all
levels of bureaucracy and political leadership was apathy and complicity. Nehru’s
earlier assertion that ‘the black marketeer should be hanged at the next possible
tree’, after countless repetitions in political speeches became a meaningless rheto-
ric for political point scoring, and consequently a subject of derision.144 The gov-
ernment tried to curb these vices, but with very limited visible results, and in public
perception it was results that counted more.
In October 1947 the Government of West Bengal issued two notifications to its
employees requiring them to declare their assets every year and completely pro-
hibiting them from participating in racing, gambling and share market specula-
tion.145 An Anti-Corruption Department was created and between January and
April 1948 it prosecuted 30 government officials for various corrupt practices,
mostly of a rather petty nature.146 In the subsequent months the government issued
press statements claiming satisfactory progress of this anti-corruption drive.
However, the cases reported were only those of petty bribery involving lower-level
government functionaries.147 A few smuggling operations involving illegal supply
of cotton yarn to East Pakistan were intercepted and the ringleaders were arrested
and prosecuted. But no more drastic action was possible, the Police Commissioner
explained, because he did not have an appropriate law to deal with the black mar-
keteers and profiteers. 148
So in December 1947 the West Bengal Black Marketeering Bill was passed. It pro-
vided for summary trial and minimum punishments and made black-marketeering
a non-bailable offence. It also had provisions for dealing with dereliction of duty and
abetment of black marketeering by corrupt officials. Yet, the people, and even some
Congress politicians, remained cynical, because they thought the law enforcing
machinery had become so corrupt that a change of law would hardly make any dif-
ference.149 There were even allegations that some of the Congress ministers were
themselves involved in corrupt business practices.150 The bill was indeed referred
back by the Governor-General, suggesting amendments, as objections were raised
about its provision of ‘heavy minimum punishment’. An amended bill was finally
and unanimously passed on 21 September 1948;151 but it hardly made a difference.
In early 1949 the media reported large-scale adulteration of mustard oil in West
Bengal with argemone seeds, which caused an illness called dropsy. In June, the
Health Department of the Calcutta Corporation carried out ‘an intensive drive’ and
over 1,000 maunds of adulterated oil were seized from various parts of the city. But
in the end nothing happened and the Health Officer gave a statement that evidence
of adulteration was ‘not extensive’. An outraged editorial in Amrita Bazar Patrika
observed:
But why talk of mustard oil alone? Is there anything today, we mean of course
foodstuffs, which is not adulterated in some form or other? … A few months
ago several bags of flour mixed with soap-stone were seized in Calcutta. …
Much stir was created for a day and for a day only and nobody heard anything
about it thereafter. Is this the way the administration should be carried on?
Health was almost a neglected subject in the British regime. Should it be so
when we have our own Government?152
The frustration became widespread as the black marketeers continued to have a

field day, and the authorities could not do anything about it, allegedly because of
the continued absence of an appropriate law. By August 1949 dropsy – or Beri Beri,
as it was popularly known – became an epidemic in Calcutta, causing deaths. But
the Calcutta Corporation authorities, which had seized about 4,000 maunds of adul-
terated mustard oil by then, could not destroy them, allegedly because of ‘legal dif-
ficulties’.153 In July 1950, reviewing the results of the drive against adulterated
mustard oil, the Municipal Health Officer reported that so far 236 cases had been
instituted in the municipal courts, of which 154 cases had been disposed of. But
these resulted only in fines totalling Rs 6,970 and only 112 maunds of oil were
destroyed, out of a total of 4,000 maunds seized.154 Around the same period a tem-
porary shortage of baby food led to its sky rocketing prices, and once again the
authorities could not do anything about it.155
B.C. Roy, the chief minister of the province, made bold statements in the
Assembly about curbing corruption: ‘I for one am an enemy of corruption, whether
it is done by a Congressman or a non-Congressman. Anyone who is guilty of cor-
ruption has no place in any civilized society.’156 On 28 September 1950 he told the
Assembly that the government had two instruments to deal with black marketeer-
ing, one was the Black Marketeering Act and the other was the Essential Supplies
Act. Under the first Act, which dealt with substantial wholesalers, in the last six
months there were 16 cases, out of which three ended in conviction, seven were still
before the special Tribunal and one had to be withdrawn. And under the second Act,
1,815 persons in Calcutta and 3,621 persons in the districts had been prosecuted
during the same period, and out of them 1,418 and 2,734 cases respectively ended
in conviction. ‘So we are trying our level best’, he told a sceptical House which
remained unconvinced.157
The problem was certainly larger than such token government action. In the
wake of freedom, black marketeering and corruption had become an established
culture of public life – so much so that there was even a resigned acceptance of it,
as it becomes clear from the satirical literature of the period. Where 95 per cent of
the population were involved in corrupt practices in some form or other, noted
Birupaksha with his prophetic humour, how could we expect progress in that
country? Everyone should first rectify himself and then look at others.158 As
Birupaksha observed in one of his popular skits, Birupaksher Nidarun Abhignata
(Birupaksha’s unbearable experience), black marketeering had become a vocation
and avocation for many gentlemen. But there was at least one consolation – after
all, it was free India, and the money was not being drained out of the country, it was
being pocketed by our own countrymen and remained hoarded in swadeshi
(domestic) treasure chests.159 Even more telling was another skit that came out in
the literary magazine Sanibarer Chithi. Written under a pseudonym, it captures the
environment of corruption in post-independence West Bengal so aptly that it
deserves to be quoted at length here.
Onkarnath has decided that he will steal. In his mind he has gone through all
the arguments that he believes exist in favour of and against stealing.

Why shall I steal?
1 Everyone is stealing in his or her respective fields.
2 A successful thief is never disparaged; on the contrary, he gains in social
status.
3 If you do not steal you cannot maintain your family – let alone ideology.
4 If you do not steal, your wife will think you are a coward, friends will con-
sider you to be a hypocrite, and the servants will think you are unem-
ployed.
5 No one so far has prospered without stealing.
6 If you do not get caught, there is no easier way of making money than
stealing.
7 No one will help you in your difficult days just because you are honest.
8 Mr X is a confirmed thief – does that affect his social status and prestige?
9 Where everyone is a thief, not stealing is an anti-social activity.
10 I am deprived and the rich have plenty – it seems God himself has created
the appropriate reason for stealing.
Why should I not steal?
1 The prohibition entailed in a few books called the shastras and by a few
men known as great men.
Therefore, I must steal. But it needs to be done by carefully avoiding any
breaches of the law. But that’s the initial hassle; after some time, when you are
known as a successful thief, you need not even bother about that.160
Corruption, in other words, was in the process of becoming a normalized social

practice in West Bengal’s public life after independence, so that it became, it
seems, less and less of a moral issue. Everyone knew about it and yet no one could
do anything about it, except making fun of it in resigned anguish. Any talk about
morality today, observed another essay in Sanibarer Chithi, had become the sub-
ject of ridicule.161
But how do we comprehend this public perception of corruption that gives the
impression of a complete breakdown of the ethical order so soon after independ-
ence? Corruption certainly was not anything new in Bengal’s public life. Just after
independence in September 1947, the Mayor of the Calcutta Corporation, S.C. Ray
Chaudhuri resigned from his position alleging ‘inefficiency, corruption, jobbery
and nepotism’ at all levels of the corporation making it non-functioning.162 Black
marketeering was blatant and rampant since the time of the Second World War,
which created opportunities for short-term quick profits. Hoarding and profiteering
by unscrupulous businessmen, some of them having connections with the Congress
or the Muslim League, and functioning in conjunction with a corrupt bureaucracy,
were some of the major factors behind the famine of 1943.163 They pocketed
millions of rupees in illegitimate profits, while millions of people died or became
destitute. And after the famine, when the provincial government put in place a
rationing system, it worked hardly at all, as food grains from government-
controlled fair-price shops ended up straight on the black market.164 When a

beleaguered colonial state was obsessed with its wartime and post-war problems of
existence, and seemed disinterested in maintaining the moral or social order, cor-
ruption and black marketeering flourished naturally. And after independence this
virus spread quickly and widely, as it filtered downward with the active complicity
of the people at every echelon of power – from the top politician in the province to
the lowest functionary in the state bureaucracy.
As the Congress government began to distribute licenses and permits for fair price
shops, businesses and industries, the natural tendency was to patronize their local
clienteles.165 Allegations of nepotism and corruption gradually became louder –
coming even from their own disgruntled cadres – as an unholy nexus between the
Congress heavyweights and non-Bengali businessmen became stronger and daringly
unabashed.166 Bengali middle-class morality was outraged, but felt helpless, as a
sharp-tongued Birupaksha could only observe in his characteristic sarcasm that in the
new age if anyone wanted to become a politician, he would have to lose both his ears,
that is, all his sense of shame.167 In other words, corruption was still associated with a
sense of shame in middle-class morality, but it was soon gaining some sort of legiti-
macy because of political patronage. And this political corruption was seen not just as
a provincial but a national phenomenon, as a cartoon by the cartoonist Shankar
depicts the Congress politicians queuing up for a position in the cabinet – or in other
words, to claim their rewards for all the sacrifices they had made during the freedom
struggle.168 They had fought for freedom, and it was the nation’s payback time!
In West Bengal, even the names of chief minister B.C. Roy and finance minister
N.R. Sarkar were implicated in an affair in May 1948 involving the purchase of 400
buses for a newly floated Calcutta transport company – an affair which the British
Deputy High Commissioner in Calcutta described as ‘thoroughly scandalous’.169
The Congress leadership was certainly aware of the problem. In September 1948
the West Bengal Provincial Congress Committee (WBPCC) proposed to hold a
meeting to launch a drive to combat corruption and black marketeering.170 On 17
January 1949, in view of ‘universal complaints about bribery and black marketeer-
ing’ [emphasis added], the Congress President Dr Pattabh Sitaramayya issued a
directive to all Congressmen, which said: ‘No Congressman – more especially the
members of the elective bodies – should interest himself in recommending candi-
dates for offices, for securing permits for export or import or for obtaining licenses
for shops, for themselves and their friends’171
But this was hardly expected to work, as an editorial in Amrita Bazar Patrika
pointed out, because often the corrupt leaders exerted great influence in the
Provincial Congress Committees and it was difficult for ministers to defy them.172
Haripada Chatterjee, a dissident Congress MLA representing the district of Nadia,
described in detail in the Assembly, on 12 February 1951, how the local daroga
(Officer-in-charge of the police station) in collusion with the local Congress lead-
ers had been indulging in corrupt practices in his district as well as in
Murshidabad.173 And as the communist leader Jyoti Basu complained in the
Assembly, ‘first and foremost the Minsters are corrupt and that … [makes it] diffi-
cult for their officials not to be corrupt.’ The government had taken no action
against the Birla House regarding the recent tax evasion allegations against it.174
‘The middle class is aware’, he said in his usual demagogic style,
who are the biggest patrons of corruption and corruption in the social and
the economic life of Bengal. … to cleanse our society we have to begin at
the beginning and clean up the Writers’ Building, the fountainhead of all
corruption …’175
But the question was, who would do this cleaning job? D.N. Sen, who once repre-
sented the Bengal Chamber of Commerce in the Bengal Legislative Assembly,
reminded his fellow citizens in a hard hitting article in Amrita Bazar Patrika: ‘We
must all of us take responsibility for the general atmosphere of corruption which
now prevails in the country …’176 But a responsible and articulate civil society was
yet to take charge in independent West Bengal.177 So the common people lived with
corruption, made fun of it, and like Birupaksha, accepted it as a necessary corollary
of freedom, or in fact as the new rules of the game, which they too could make use
of to eke out a living. Chandan Mitra has argued that corruption per se was never
‘socially stigmatized in India’, and therefore ‘an innately corruption-prone mind-
set’ continued to assert itself hegemonically in different forms and in different his-
torical periods – from Kautilya’s time to the period of the corrupt East India
Company nabobs it was ever present in Indian society. However, what was still
within manageable limits at the dawn of independence, with political patronage and
public indifference, gradually corroded India’s public morality more thoroughly by
the 1970s.178 It is also true that it was because of the growing public association of
the Congress politicians with corruption that middle-class political sympathies
gradually began to shift towards the left in the 1950s.179
In addition to corruption and high prices, the ordinary citizens of new India had
to live with diseases that began to appear in epidemic proportions. The people of
Bengal were certainly not unfamiliar with the outbreak of epidemics. Since the last
century various colonial development projects – such as construction of railways –
had so seriously disrupted the ecological system that the obvious result was the out-
break of cholera and malaria in epidemic forms.180 In the wake of the famine of
1943, the Bengal Medical Relief Co-ordination Committee, of which Dr B.C. Roy
was the chair, calculated that nearly 20 million people in the province had been
afflicted by cholera, smallpox or malaria in 1943–44, and the available hospital
facilities proved pathetically inadequate to cope with the magnitude of debilitation
and mortality.181 And now after independence, cholera and smallpox reappeared
again as epidemics in Calcutta with high mortality rates, as the civic infrastructure
broke down, unable to withstand the increasing demographic pressures in the wake
of freedom and Partition. By the end of 1947 the population of the Calcutta corpo-
ration area had increased by 110 per cent over the 1941 figures, and there was a con-
tinuous weekly influx of about 35,000 refugees and other migrants into the city.182
An epidemic outbreak of cholera was reported in Calcutta in January–February
1948, while smallpox was already causing havoc in the city. By the end of March
1948 the city of Calcutta recorded a 68 per cent rise in the incidence of cholera.
Between 3 January and 8 May 1948, 1,326 people died of cholera and 4,861 died of
smallpox. Smallpox was contained, but did not disappear, for even in the early
months of 1949 people were dying of this disease.183 The cholera epidemic contin-
ued for a far longer period, and with much more virulence, despite the fact that the
government had opened inoculation centres, with a few mobile units as well. The
situation did not improve, as the Director of Health Services diagnosed, because of
an inadequate supply of pure and filtered water, unprecedented urban crowding
caused by the refugee influx, unhealthy conditions in the slum areas and uncon-
trolled sale of unclean and unwholesome food on the streets of Calcutta.184 The sup-
ply of filtered water in the city had increased only by 10 per cent in ten years since
1939, while in the meantime the population had increased manifold.185 Around July
1948 on an average more than 165 people were being infected by cholera every
week, and of them 50 to 60 were dying.186
Describing this situation, the British Deputy High Commissioner wrote from
Calcutta: ‘A situation of this kind a few years ago would have resulted in British
Troops being “confined to Barracks” or debarred from entering certain areas’.187
This state of affairs continued into the early months of 1950; in April the weekly
death rate from the two diseases rose to about 500; in early May it reached 1,600.
What contributed to the virulence was the continuing refugee influx in the city and
squalid insanitary conditions in some of the refugee camps.188 It was only in August
1950 that cholera and smallpox were declared to be ‘non-epidemic’.189 However,
smallpox reappeared again in November 1950 affecting areas like Maniktala and
Kasipur, and the health officials once again considered declaring it an ‘epidemic’.
The appointment of an extra 109 temporary inoculators in addition to the 60
permanent staff failed to make a difference.190
To add to the health scare in the city, an outbreak of plague was reported in April
1948 – after an interval of 50 years. Every day 10 to 20 suspected cases of plague
were taken to the Campbell Hospital; not all of them were confirmed as plague, but
five of them died. It affected a large area in central and northern Calcutta. By the
end of April the numbers began to decline, as by then 87,670 people had been inocu-
lated. An additional supply of plague vaccine arrived from UP and the Director of
the Haffkine Institute in Bombay arrived to help the Calcutta health officials. The
government prepared a scheme costing Rs 1,250,000 to combat plague in Calcutta
and Howrah.191 As a result, it did not become as serious a health threat as the others,
as the inoculation drive led to a temporary containment of the disease by the end of
June.192 But in January 1949 two suspected plague cases were again detected and
removed to Campbell Hospital from Upper Chitpore Road, and by the summer of
1949, it reappeared with a vengeance in Calcutta with a higher ratio between
attacks and deaths.193 And it was even more alarming now as it turned out to be the
more dangerous pneumonic variety.194 In the end plague was contained, but the
great public panic it created is not difficult to imagine.
Refugees and the bitter taste of freedom

One of the major reasons for the outbreak of a cholera epidemic in Calcutta was of
course the refugee influx from East Bengal, for which the infrastructure of the city
was not prepared.195 When Bengal was partitioned, 42 per cent of its non-Muslim
population remained in East Pakistan196 and by June 1948, according to Prafulla
Chakrabarti’s reckoning, about 1,100,000 of them had migrated to West Bengal.197
According to the statistics of the Relief Department of the Government of West
Bengal, the figure was more than 1,200,000 in April that year, and about 66 per cent
of them settled in Calcutta, while the rest were scattered in the 13 districts of the
province, the majority of them being in Nadia.198 Of those who remained in the city
of Calcutta about 95 per cent were of the bhadralok class, while the rest were peas-
ants and artisans. The former group mostly lived with their relatives, stretching
their meagre resources to the limit. Others were accommodated in government
relief camps in and around the city. To avoid encouraging further migration, the
government initially refrained from opening refugee camps. But that decision was
changed when more refugees arrived in the city in the second half of 1948, and hun-
dreds of them began to squat on the Sealdah station platforms. While describing the
squalid conditions in which they lived, the reporter of the Amrita Bazar Patrika
gave a rather sickening picture:
How do these refugees spend their days and nights on the station platform? …
Imagine … a healthy baby eating and playing by the side of a cholera patient.
Imagine again sleeping in a place a few feet away from a room which is used
by thousands as a latrine and which remains unwashed for days together.
Imagine, again, cooking your food on the bricks with rubbish as fuel on the
street along which pass hundreds of motor cars, lorries and other kinds of vehi-
cles. This is how they spend their days.199
It was no wonder that cholera refused to leave Calcutta for a while. The conditions
in the districts were no better either. About 70,000 refugees, mostly agriculturists
and artisans, were concentrated in Nabadwip, a pilgrimage town in the district of
Nadia that had only 30,000 inhabitants before the war. So the accommodation
arrangements and civic facilities in the town broke down under this additional pop-
ulation pressure. Moreover, these refugees who were forced to move to the districts
were poor people who came with meagre resources that were exhausted within a
short while. There were no job opportunities in the region and government relief
was hopelessly inadequate. As a result, in May 1948 starvation deaths were
reported from Nabadwip. If large-scale epidemics did not beak out here, it was
because the local municipality health workers had managed to inoculate about
80,000 people – the only positive aspect of this whole saga.200
The government policy on the East Bengali refugees at this stage was focussed
more on relief rather than rehabilitation.201 As the available reports suggest, these
refugees had started moving in since the time of the Noakhali riot in 1946, that is,
shortly before Partition, and since then they continued to trickle in. If this could not
be checked, it was feared, the entire economy of West Bengal would collapse under
pressure. In a letter to the Bengal premier on 25 August 1948 Nehru wrote in panic:
‘everything should be done to prevent Hindus in East Bengal from migrating to
West Bengal. If that happened on a mass scale it would be a disaster of the first mag-
nitude.’202 Roy, despite his personal reservations, had already been toeing the party
line.203 At a press conference on 9 April he had pointed out that the government did
not give any generous grants to the refugees because that might potentially lure
more migration from East Bengal. It only provided loans to facilitate their rehabil-
itation. While initially the refugees were accommodated in huts in military camps
in and around Calcutta, loans were given to help them build their own accommoda-
tion in the countryside. There were other schemes for training and employment of
various agricultural and artisan groups, but there was no provision for generous
grants, he reiterated in a desperate attempt to discourage further migration.204
For the Government of India, there were, of course, grounds for belief that in 1948
there were no direct political reasons behind such large-scale migration. Dr Satish
Chandra Das Gupta, the founder of the Khadi Pratisthan, who had worked with
Mahatma Gandhi during the Noakhali riot and had decided to stay back in Noakhali
after Partition, came to New Delhi in April 1948 and assured the Government of
India that there was no legitimate reason for Hindus to migrate. The general Muslim
population in East Bengal, he argued, were friendly towards the Hindu minorities,
and barring isolated incidents, there was no reason for any panic about a large-scale
exodus. Those who left East Bengal, Das Gupta, argued, were mostly Hindu
bhadralok motivated by a vague sense of ‘loss of prestige’.205 Even J.P. Mitter, the
President of the Council for the Protection of the Rights of Minorities, in a press con-
ference on 6 April reiterated the same point. The majority of the Muslims in East
Bengal did not want their Hindu neighbours to leave, he reassured. It was only pin-
pricks by unsocial elements and a small section of petty officials which had given
rise to a sense of fear in the minds of the Hindus, leading to the exodus.206 However,
many in West Bengal did not agree with that observation and believed that Hindu life
and property were in real danger in East Pakistan.207
It is therefore necessary here to unpack the meanings condensed in this idea of ‘loss
of prestige’ that Das Gupta alluded to. In early April, S.C. Roy Chowdhury, an ex-
Mayor of Calcutta along with H.S. Suhrawardy, the ex-premier of Bengal, visited
Eastern Bengal on a ‘Goodwill Mission’. What they found was that although at the
people’s level there was a lot of goodwill among the Hindus and Muslims, there were
numerous complaints about the lack of fair play when it came to the officialdom.
Particularly, after the recent announcement of Pakistan as an Islamic state by Jinnah
and Liaquat Ali Khan, the bhadralok Hindu-Bengalis felt completely alienated, as
their sense of identity as Hindu-Bengalis could hardly be accommodated, they felt,
within the perimeters of an Islamic state.208 As Annada Sankar Roy had noted (cited
earlier), Partition was also perceived by many as freedom from the domination of the
majority. Hence for many of the East Bengali Hindu bhadralok migration to India
was a journey towards freedom from the domination of the Muslim-majority in an
Islamic state. Furthermore, although a numerical minority, the East Bengali
bhadralok, being mostly zamindars and rent receivers of various kinds, were the his-
toric dominant class in the eastern districts of undivided Bengal, with Muslims being
mostly their tenants and labourers. These old power relations were turned upside
down after the Partition, as the Muslim labouring classes, inspired by a new sense of
liberation, frequently infringed the prevailing boundaries of reverent behaviour. This

provided ample reason for migration for many such families, fearing indignities from
their former subordinate classes.209 There was already an existing ‘sense of acute
insecurity’ in the minds of the East Bengali Hindus since the Noakhali riot of October
1946.210 And now it expanded into what Nilanjana Chatterjee has described as a fear
of ‘physical annihilation, political powerlessness, social and economic deterioration,
and loss of identity’,211 providing potent enough reasons to migrate to the safe haven
of West Bengal. In other words, the notion of freedom worked in many ways in pro-
viding the impetus behind this largely bhadralok migration. And when they moved,
their clientele – the artisans and the peasants – followed soon after.212
So the East Pakistan government refused to accept that there was any communal
problem. Suhrawardy’s communal harmony mission was stopped and his tour was
not allowed to go ahead, while the refugee influx from East Bengal continued.
Suhrawardy was concerned about the interconnectedness of the minority problems
in the two Bengals. If the Hindus continued to migrate and settle on this side of the
border, he feared, it would naturally create more bitterness against the Muslims in
West Bengal. He was clearly disappointed when Khwaja Nazimuddin in Dacca
simply refused to acknowledge that this was a problem.213 And his apprehensions
were not unfounded, as the Hindu Mahasabha even before Partition had demanded
that the Muslim minorities in West Bengal were to be treated as hostages for the
security of the Hindu minority in the East.214 By July 1948 reports of communal
clashes between Hindus and Muslims were already arriving from districts like
Bankura and Murshidabad. And the ‘black-out’ of such news in East Bengal led to
wild rumours about such occurrences.215 There were also police intelligence reports
that some radical elements of the former Anushilan Samiti and the Bengal
Volunteer Group were planning violent agitations to protest against the govern-
ment’s apathy towards the conditions of the Hindu minority in East Pakistan.216 In
April 1948 Dr P.C. Ghosh also went to East Bengal with a view to talk to the East
Bengal leaders about the security of the Hindu minority there. Habibullah Bahar, a
minister in the East Pakistan cabinet, agreed that some ‘mischief-mongers’ were
creating panic in some areas, and the government would not tolerate such
‘zooloom’(oppression). But when it came to ascertaining the reasons for the minor-
ity exodus, he blamed primarily the Calcutta media for carrying exaggerated news
of atrocities from East Bengal and the restrictions on inter-dominion trade, which
created economic hardship and motivated people to look for greener pastures.217 In
other words, economic reasons rather than communal disharmony, he argued, were
the real motivations behind migration.
To address these issues, inter-Dominion talks were scheduled in Calcutta on 13
April 1948. It was to discuss a five-point agenda: exodus of minorities from one
Dominion to the other, creating necessary conditions to encourage them to live in
their own territories, to encourage the refugees to return to their original homes,
free flow of goods between the two Dominions and removal of customs restrictions
on inter-Dominion trade.218 The two delegations came to the negotiating table with
two different sets of priorities. For the Indians the political issue of the refugees was
of utmost importance, while for the Pakistani delegation the minority issue could
not be resolved without addressing the economic issues first. Ultimately, after three
days of deliberations, the Inter-Dominion Agreement was signed on 19 April. It
provided, among other things, for the establishment of provincial and local minor-
ity boards to protect the interests of the minorities, to remove fear from their minds
and inspire confidence in them in the two Dominions. Strict measures were to be
taken against officials failing in their duties towards the minorities and against per-
sons threatening inter-Dominion relations or creating alarm in the minds of the
minorities. Mr K.C. Neogy, the Indian Minister of Relief and Rehabilitation and the
leader of the Indian delegation, thought that the ‘Agreement was one of the most
important events that had taken place since the partition’.219 Steps were taken
immediately to implement the provisions of the Agreement and district officials
were briefed.220 But these largely cosmetic measures could hardly reassure the
Hindu minorities in East Bengal and their westward drift continued.
By the end of May 1948 the regular influx of refugees from East Bengal increased
by over 2,000 per week, and now the government had to open camps not only at mili-
tary huts in Calcutta but also in airfields in various districts; these refugees were also
to be given cash doles.221 Between 15 April and 17 June 1948 about 100,000 people
migrated from East to West Bengal.222 The majority of them being middle-class pro-
fessionals, they had brought in some resources; but that was soon exhausted. While
they looked for jobs in the city, the government, hard pressed for accommodation,
wanted to relocate them to districts. The government opened relief camps – 389 of
them – in various districts to relieve the pressure on Calcutta. There were attempts to
rehabilitate some of them in the neighbouring provinces of Assam, Bihar and
Orissa.223 There was also a modest plan to ship them off to the Andaman Islands. But
none of these plans really worked.224 The refugees flocked to Calcutta, where they
expected better prospects of rehabilitation, but faced the acute shortage of accommo-
dation.225 A desperate group of about 500 families in June 1948 therefore ‘took over’
the vacant army huts in the Dhakuria Lake area in south Calcutta;226 a few days later
another 80 families took possession of the Ballygunge military camp area.227 This
establishment of squatter colonies soon became an organized campaign in early 1948,
conducted often with tacit approval of the government; but it also contained the seeds
of conflict with the rich land speculators having a vested interest in the development
and expansion of the city. From early 1949 the establishment of squatter colonies was
actively sponsored by the newly founded Nikhil Banga Bastuhara Karma Parishad
(All Bengal Refugee Council of Action; discussed in detail in Chapter 6).228
As the situation began to spin out of control, the government refugee policy
underwent a remarkable shift in focus – from relief to repatriation, rather than reha-
bilitation. A desperate West Bengal government declared in a press note that peo-
ple migrating after 25 June 1948 would not be registered as ‘refugees’ and would
not be entitled to any special assistance because the communal situation since the
signing of the Inter-Dominion Agreement had decisively improved in East Bengal
and there was no legitimate reason for a mass exodus, other than economic
causes.229 The order came under heavy criticism from the East Bengal Minority
Welfare Central Committee, which met in Calcutta and described the order as
‘cruel and callous’, an evidence of the government abdicating its responsibilities
for the Hindu minorities in East Bengal.230 But the government stood its ground, as
B.C. Roy explained to a group of Congressmen from East Bengal that the grants the
provincial government received from the centre were for refugees displaced by
communal disturbances, not for economic migrants. A recent Government of India
notification had defined the refugee as ‘a person … displaced from any area outside
India … on account of civil disturbances or fear of such disturbances’.231 Hence
Roy declared at a press conference in early July that ‘every attempt should be made
not only to stop the present exodus of Hindus from East to West Bengal but also to
induce the people who have already come to return to their homes.’232 However,
those who would choose to stay would be given citizen’s rights and would be
entered in electoral rolls, and for that, as Rajendra Prasad assured A.C. Dutta, the
President of the East Bengal Minorities Welfare Committee, the usual residency
requirements would be waived.233
However, the government warnings and disincentives did not stop the steady
flow of refugees from East Bengal. After the signing of the Inter-Dominion
Agreement it had slowed down a little, but never completely stopped,234 and it
picked up again in August. In early August Mohanlal Saksena, who had succeeded
Neogy as the Relief and Rehabilitation Minister, came to Calcutta and warned that
more than one crore (ten million) Hindus in East Bengal could not be absorbed into
the West Bengal economy; so he advised them not to leave their homes.235 A few
days later B.C. Roy repeated the same warning that the ‘exodus of a large number
of people from East Bengal will be a catastrophe of the first magnitude which all of
us should try to prevent’.236 Yet, despite all these warnings the number of refugees
actually increased in late September. By the beginning of October approximately
2000–3000 people were arriving every day at the Sealdah station, expecting to be
accommodated at one of the relief camps run by the government. But by this time
all the 50 refugee relief camps in Calcutta and the surrounding districts were filled
to capacity, and the Civil Supplies Department could not provide sufficient quanti-
ties of food out of its already limited stocks. So the refugees – thousands of them –
were stranded at the Sealdah station, left to fend for themselves, living their lives in
the squalid conditions described above. Not sure what to do with this mass of
people, the West Bengal government chose to be even more harsh in its treatment
of refugees. On 5 October it issued a press note announcing that if the exodus did
not stop, the government from the next month would be compelled to stop paying
cash doles to all refugees and urged them to help themselves.237 Yet, that threat too
could not stop the steady inflow and this put heavy pressure on the provincial econ-
omy and infrastructure, already stretched to their limits.
On 1 December 1949 Bidhan Roy wrote a hard-hitting letter to Nehru complain-
ing that the funds provided by the central government for the relief of the refugees
from East Pakistan were ‘insignificant’ compared with what was provided for the
refugees from West Pakistan. In fact the letter was so critical in tone that Patel wrote
back to Roy telling him that he was not being sufficiently ‘deferential’ to the high
position of the Prime Minister.238 Two-and-a-half months later on 16 February
1949 Nehru announced in the parliament that there would be no discrimination in
terms of help to be given to the refugees from East or West Pakistan.239 But by then
the situation had gone out of control. A few days later Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherji,
the central Minister for Industry and Supply came to Calcutta and conferred with
Dr Roy to finalize ultimately a plan for the rehabilitation of about 1,500,000
refugees.240 To monitor the scheme a Branch Secretariat of the central
Rehabilitation Ministry was opened in Calcutta.241 On 22 August 1950, Roy told a
press conference that under this scheme about 200,000 refugee families comprising
1,000,000 people were rehabilitated in the state either entirely by the government
or through private efforts aided by the government. Of them 22,000 refugees had
been settled in Bihar and 14,000 in Orissa.242 However, it needs to be mentioned
here that even at this stage, especially after the fresh waves of mass exodus after the
Khulna riot of January 1950 (see Chapter 2 for details), the primary thrust of the cen-
tral government’s refugee policy in the East remained relief and repatriation, rather
than rehabilitation, as it still believed that the majority of them would go back.243
But why was there a steady stream of refugees from East Bengal around this time
(1949–50)? Unlike the previous wave, these refugees consisted of a cross section of
the population – some agriculturists, some artisans and others from the lower mid-
dle classes, all whom had been affected by the economic situation in East Bengal,
marked by high prices of rice and other necessities of life and a high rate of unem-
ployment. And, over and above that, rumours spread through word of mouth about
the assurance of cash doles and guaranteed accommodation on arrival at Sealdah
station.244 So the government suspected that economic reasons rather than religious
persecution had been the prime motives behind such a large-scale exodus, which
was reminiscent of the great movement of people at the time of the famine of 1943.
It was true that for the educated middle-class Hindus there was little left in an
Islamic Pakistan that they could identify with. But as they left, so did those who
economically depended on them and followed their lead.245 In other words, at least
for many of these refugees, this migration was a journey towards economic free-
dom, however unreal that expectation might be.
The Calcutta press, however, wished to highlight the political aspect of migra-
tion more than the economic migration argument of the government, although their
own field investigations often told a different story. The Amrita Bazar Patrika on
20 October 1948 published a report based on interviews with some of the refugees.
These refugees told the reporters that although ‘there was no large-scale distur-
bance, the pin pricks, economic boycott by the majority community, terrorisation
of Hindus in several areas and fear of disturbances’ served as some of the causes for
this evacuation. ‘But above all else’, the report emphasized, ‘was the economic
conditions [sic] – the high price of essential goods and foodstuffs and the earlier
migration of those Hindus belonging to the upper middle class on whom they would
depend.’246 However, just four days later the same Amrita Bazar Patrika ques-
tioned the government’s position in a more assertive way: ‘If the statements of the
recently arrived refugees of the artisan classes are any index, it is difficult to resist
the conclusion that it has been inspired more by political principles and social
causes than for sheer economic reasons.’247 Comments and reports published in the
district level newspapers and periodicals around this time also suggest that this was
indeed a widespread perception in West Bengal.248 In reality, however, it was diffi-
cult to pinpoint any specific reason behind migration; there was a penumbra of rea-
sons, all entangled in a complex mentality gripped by terror, apprehensions and
hope. Then in January 1950 serious communal violence broke out in large parts of
Eastern Bengal, causing fresh waves of refugee migration, and this also led to retal-
iatory violence against the Muslim minorities on the Indian side of the border
(details in Chapter 2). The situation only indicated the level of anxiety and tension
associated with this narrative of continued migration.
For understanding these social anxieties in post-independence West Bengal,
what is important is not the motive but the scale of migration. By September 1950,
according to the figures provided by the government, about 4,000,000 refugees
came to West Bengal, of whom the government claimed to have rehabilitated just
over 1,100,000 at the cost of 60,000,000 rupees. In other words, an overwhelming
number of refugees remained there as a huge unsolved problem for the government.
Dr Kailash Nath Katju, the Governor of West Bengal, pointed at the magnitude of
this problem in his annual speech in the Assembly on 25 September 1950: ‘The
influx into West Bengal of a large number of refugees – starving or ill-nourished,
weak and distressed – has increased the incidence of illness not only amongst them
but amongst the local population.’ This unprecedented exodus, he admitted, had
also ‘resulted in an increased demand on our limited food resources’.249 The food
shortages, high prices and epidemics – the three major problems afflicting the very
physical existence of the Bengalis in post-independence West Bengal – were thus
very directly related to, though not entirely because of, the arrival of millions of
refugees from East Bengal. As a result, by this time the refugees did not just repre-
sent the nethermost levels of human misery, they also came to constitute a new con-
stituency where intense political battles were to be fought. What was worse, the
refugees were often held responsible for many of the woes of post-independence
West Bengal, and were looked at as ‘object(s) of derision and contempt’, both by
the government as well as by a section of the general public.250 This led to consid-
erable social tension, particularly when the squatter camps were being set up on pri-
vate properties – we will return to that story in a subsequent chapter.
The taste of freedom was thus fast becoming bitter, and that initiated a search for
the enemies of freedom. In other words, dreams were shattered, apprehensions
were confirmed and the euphoria of freedom gradually gave way to discontents
even before the first anniversary of independence. We will look at the representa-
tions and manifestations of these discontents in the next chapter.
2 The discontents of freedom
Working class and peasant militancy

The dreams and expectations that freedom would be the silver bullet for all the
problems that the colonized society suffered from came to a shattering end within
the first few months of freedom, as the touch of reality brought home the challenges
of freedom. As a new and inexperienced government failed to handle the problems
of the new nation-state, steep price rises, shortages of food and other necessities of
daily life, epidemics, continuing corruption and the black market, and above all, the
continuous refugee influx from East Bengal inevitably led to greater social unrest.
In this environment of disquiet and uncertainty everyone began to invent new
enemies of freedom – located both inside and outside the boundaries of their
putative nation.
First of all, what aggravated middle-class frustration and anxiety was a higher
crime rate in an overcrowded city of Calcutta in the days immediately after inde-
pendence. The crime figures for the city rose from 12,300 in 1946 to 14,300 in
1947.1 One important feature of this crime situation was the increasing number of
‘crimes against property’, which were, in a sociological sense, directly related to
the economic and social conditions of the time, rather than a reflection of a general
breakdown of authority as middle-class anxiety would have it.2 According to the
Police Commissioner of the city, the ‘increasing armed robberies in Calcutta’ were
due to a general lawlessness caused by war and the disturbances that followed.3 In
January 1948 it was reported that there was a 75 per cent rise in the number of
‘dacoities’,4 although official reports sought to underplay such rising trends.5 The
Commissioner reported in April 1948 that there was a considerable decrease in
‘burglaries’ in Calcutta; but his own figures suggested that such crimes had risen in
the middle-class and relatively wealthy areas of South Calcutta, like Ballygunge,
Tollygunge, Alipore and Park Street.6 In the industrial town of Howrah too,
although the overall crime rate declined, the number of dacoity and robbery cases
experienced a marked increase.7 But as the conditions settled down, this situation
gradually came under control – at least seemingly so. A year later, in February
1949, the Commissioner reported a further improvement in the crime situation in
Calcutta.8 Whether this was the result of better policing or of less reporting of such
crimes, it is difficult to ascertain.
Apart from crimes, in the urban industrial areas of Calcutta and Howrah the most
immediate result of the unsettled conditions, fuelled further by retrenchment and
unemployment, was the increasing industrial strife, which continued well into
1949. Although the organized trade union movement in West Bengal during this
period remained organizationally and politically splintered,9 this was nonetheless a
period of extreme industrial volatility. Almost every group of worker, usually
under various kinds of leftist unions, went into industrial action during this period.
On average, six to ten industrial establishments remained closed every week due to
strike action10 and the worst affected were the jute mills, followed by the engineer-
ing sector, tea plantations and the cotton industry.11 The government and bank
employees also struck work, creating critical consequences for the provincial econ-
omy, as we shall see later.

This situation continued well into 1949, with a rise in both strikes and lockouts
due to disputes over wages, allowances, bonus, retrenchment and grievances over
personnel.12 Particularly hard-hit were the European-owned concerns, like the
Imperial Chemical Industry, Britannia Engineering, Jessop & Co., Martin Burn,
Lipton, Jenson & Nicholson and others. Apart from that, industrial unrest affected
various public services. The workers of the Calcutta Tramway Company – still a
British-owned concern – struck for four days in July 1949; bombs were thrown
when attempts were made to bring out some trams in south Calcutta.13 In the
Calcutta Corporation, the pumping station employees went on strike in October
1948 and sabotaged the boiler of the Talla pumping station threatening the city’s
water supply, and attempted unsuccessfully to shut the penstock gates in order to
flood the city with its own sewage.14 Then, a year later, 25,000 workers of the
Corporation went on a general strike from midnight of 21 October 1949.15 In
November the school and college teachers went on a two-day token strike demand-
ing additional dearness allowance, as their salaries, they complained, remained low
in comparison with the salaries of even unskilled workers and bus conductors. The
government agreed, but pleaded scarcity of resources.16 In December the trainee
nurses at Calcutta Medical College went on strike over their grievances about duty
hours.17 In January 1950, 700 Calcutta gas workers went on strike to protest against
the arrest of three of their colleagues.18 The instabilities on the labour front
improved in 1950, when according to the statement of the Labour Minister there
were only 129 strikes and lockouts, involving 164,902 workers and causing a loss
of 2,254,677 man-days.19 But this was probably more due to a protest fatigue than
because of any perceptible improvement in labour relations or in the objective con-
ditions of the workers (see Chapter 4).
A remarkable feature of the industrial unrest of this period was repeated physical
assaults on European engineers and supervisors.20 In August 1948 it was reported
that a European engineer in a jute mill in Titagarh was physically assaulted by the
workers when he refused to sanction leave for one of them.21 Such incidents were
not exceptional or isolated affairs. In March 1948 The Statesman reported that in
the Calcutta Tramways assaults on the supervisory staff by the workers had become
a regular feature.22 In April 1949, following retrenchment and industrial dispute,
the British supervisory staff at the Britannia Engineering Works at Titagarh were
threatened with physical violence.23 Around the same time, the Lipton factory in
The discontents of freedom 41
Calcutta declared a lock out in view of threats of violence to its European supervi-
sory staff following a sit-down strike on 12 and 18 April.24 In July a factory man-
ager at the paint factory of Messrs Jenson & Nicholson, some 20 miles north of
Calcutta, was seriously attacked; and when Mr H.C. Welby, the General Manager
of the company, came to visit the factory, he was attacked too and just escaped with
his life. The situation became so tense that the British and Indian senior technical
executives began to leave the industrial concerns in that whole area.25 In August a
European officer at the Garden Reach factory of the Messrs Associated Electrical
Industries was surrounded by workers for two hours and had to be rescued by the
police. A lockout in the factory was declared after this.26
The worst case of physical attack on European supervisory staff was the one
orchestrated by a rebel group of the Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI)
at the Jessop factory in Dum Dum on 27 February 1949. Here three foreign engineers
were thrown into the blazing furnace, and another was stabbed, who later suc-
cumbed to his injuries.27 This was indeed a daring and well-planned attack, appar-
ently in retaliation of a retrenchment order. Almost simultaneously, another party
attacked a nearby ammunition factory called Dum Dum Gun and Shell Factory, and
shot the sentry. This was followed by an attack on the Dum Dum airport, where a
plane was set on fire and seven rifles were looted. The raiders then fled toward
Basirhat, where they attacked a police station, killed two of the guards and snatched
away about 26 rifles. Meanwhile, police reinforcements arrived from Calcutta and a
gun battle followed, in which an inspector died of bullet wounds. The raiders then
tried to flee towards the East Pakistan border, but were ultimately apprehended. B.C.
Roy in his statement in the Assembly described it as ‘a well-laid plot carefully
planned for the purpose of creating an unusually striking situation’. Twenty-five
raiders, together with four leaders of the RCPI, were arrested in connection with this
daring incident.28 But what was most politically significant about this incident was
the violent death of four Europeans, which caused concern in England and the issue
was raised in both houses of the British parliament. The British legislators were reas-
sured that this had ‘no anti-British significance’;29 but this anxiety could have far-
reaching repercussions for diplomatic relations and foreign investments.
The Jessop incident, therefore, became a major headache for the government and
the police, who were intent on preventing any recurrence of such attacks on
Europeans, as this would have serious adverse effects on the country’s economy
and foreign relations. The Government of India, in a circular, warned all the provin-
cial governments that the communists were trying to instigate violent attacks on
European managers through local union leaders and, in one instance, had stopped
the local domestic servants from working in the house of the European managers.
Stern measures were to be taken where industrial relations could take on such a
‘racial complexion’.30 In West Bengal, information was continually pouring in
about industrial labour in the western districts and the plantation labour in the
north, under the instigation of the communists, planning more of such attacks.
Particularly in the tea gardens there was increasing apprehension that there would
be attacks on the European planters – in order to kill them, along with their families,
and loot their arms and ammunition.31
It is difficult to speculate on what motivated such physical attacks. The govern-
ment believed that this was due to widespread rumours that recent retrenchments
were because of the European staff, and the assumption that these could be pre-
vented by threatening or coercing the latter.32 But perhaps a more cogent motive
behind such attacks was an attempt to reclaim the right of citizenship as the work-
ers interpreted it. A railway employee, allegedly victimized by his European boss,
complained in disgust: ‘If in an “Independent India” the European can victimise an
Indian for a correct stand of the latter… I do not know for what this country has
its independence and [whether] such independence is for enjoyment or for
endurance.’33 In Calcutta, at a meeting of the Post and Telegraph workers’ union, in
November 1951, a speaker referred to the ‘tyranny’ of one European supervisor

named ‘David’. The speaker urged the workers ‘not to tolerate the torture and abuse
of David as we are the citizens of a free country. We have every right to live like
David.’34 In other words, the old ways of controlling labour would not work any
more in the new days of freedom, which had transformed the workers into citizens
and their European bosses into enemies of their freedom.
What this mood represented was a wider tendency to get rid of all symbols of
alien domination. This included a proposal to change anglicized place names like
Calcutta to its original ‘Kalikata’,35 and a government-sponsored attempt to remove
all statues of European imperial statesmen from the city.36 None of these proposals
went very far, but they signalled a mood to fight any symbol or residual existence
of colonial modes of domination. This mood was further buttressed by the continu-
ing European social exclusivism in the urban civic life of Calcutta. European social
organizations like the Bengal Club or Calcutta Swimming Bath (later Club)
retained their European-only membership policy long after independence. It was
alleged that organizations like the YMCA gave preference to Europeans when it
came to allocating bedrooms.37 This continuing sense of privilege contrasted
starkly with a developing popular notion that in independent India the European
body was no longer sacrosanct, a sentiment, which could be seen in various social
spheres of urban life in Calcutta. As the British Deputy High Commissioner
reported from Calcutta, for the first time in 1948 the European and Anglo-Indian
ladies – even travelling in motorcars – became targets for throwing coloured water
during the holi festival, something that never happened during the days of the Raj.38
While in the upper echelons of society there were more subtle acts of anti-
Europeanism and ‘unfair discrimination’, as many British businessmen in Calcutta
complained,39 at a more plebeian level it possibly took the shape of physical viola-
tion of the European body.
In other words, industrial relations in post-colonial India were intimately related
to the varying perceptions of freedom.On the one hand freedom for the employers
meant that they ‘with one voice claimed the inherent right of retrenching workers’,
as a Government of West Bengal Labour Department report complained.40 The
government, in many cases, refused to allow this for fear of adverse political fall
out.41 On the other hand, freedom for the workers meant a gutsy refusal to accept
that right, even when there were seemingly reasonable financial grounds for
retrenchment. For example, when the Grand Hotel in Calcutta fired some of its
table serving staff in May 1948 during the ‘off-season’, there was an instant strike
by the kitchen staff, which continued until their colleagues were reinstated.42 But
workers were not so lucky all the time, as some of the employers took draconian
measures, sometimes with the support of the government and the protection of the
police. For example, in November 1948, when the union failed to implement an
agreement, the Lloyds Bank dismissed 550 out of its total staff of 650 and recruited
new ones, with the full protection of the police. A press note issued by the govern-
ment displayed little sympathy for the workers.43
It is true that the industrial tribunals in West Bengal, which started working since
February 1948, intervened from time to time to protect the interests of the workers
against arbitrary retrenchment and to mediate in wage disputes.44 Indeed, in

February 1950 the All-India Industrial Tribunal instructed the Lloyds Bank to rein-
state the dismissed employees and granted them pay and allowance for six months
prior to their reinstatement.45 As for the philosophy behind the tribunals, the
Congress labour leader Suresh Chandra Banerji explained to the Legislative
Assembly that since we earned freedom in a peaceful way, the Congress wanted to
introduce socialism through non-violent means of mediation, and not the con-
frontational methods of strikes. The philosophy echoed the Gandhian ideal of
mediation as the most effective tool of resolving industrial disputes. Hence, the
Industrial Disputes Act of 1947 stipulated that all issues relating to the labour–
capital relationship were first to be referred to the Works Committee, to be formed
in every business and factory employing more than a hundred workers. If the com-
mittee failed to resolve the issue, it was to be referred to the government; and if the
government failed to mediate, it was to be referred to the Tribunal, whose verdict
was to be binding on both the workers and the employees. But in the end these
awards satisfied none.
To give some examples, in September 1948 the Jute Tribunal gave its verdict
recommending a minimum wage of Rs 58.8 for manual workers in 89 jute mills in
West Bengal. The Indian Jute Mill Association (IJMA) thought the decision was
‘inequitable and unrealistic’, while Mrinal Kanti Bose, the leader of the Bengal
Provincial Trade Union Congress (BPTUC), thought that the judges had expressed
‘more concern for the capitalist than for labour’.46 Other sceptics like the commu-
nist leader Jyoti Basu complained that the tribunal process took a long time. The
workers of the Basanti Cotton Mills had to strike for five-and-a-half months – the
longest strike so far on record in the province – before they got a tribunal. And often
the employers found ingenious ways to ignore or flout the verdicts of the tri-
bunals.47 On 29 July 1948 the left dominated BPTUC organized a mammoth meet-
ing at the Calcutta Maidan, attended by 10,000–15,000 people, where demands
were raised to compel the employers to implement the awards of tribunals and to
prevent them from violating the Industrial Disputes Act. This would ensure eco-
nomic freedom for the labouring classes. And without economic freedom – speaker
after speaker reiterated – political freedom meant nothing.48
The allegation was not without foundation, as the employers hated the tribunals.
At the Annual Meeting of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce in 1948 the tribunals
came under severe criticism for undue intervention in labour management
matters.49 In July 1948 the Labour Arbitration Tribunal gave its judgement cover-
ing labour in 63 firms affiliated to the Engineering Association of India. The
employers feared that the award would raise their wage bill by 25 per cent, and this
apprehension produced the worst shock in a long time at the Calcutta Stock
Exchange.50 Another tribunal award for the workers in the hydraulic jute press
industry around the same time raised their minimum wage to Rs 70 a month. The
press proprietors protested loudly, alleging that the higher wage bills would result
in total extinction of the industry.51 The government could prosecute employers for
not implementing an award of the tribunal; but when it did, prosecutions resulted in
only insignificant punishments that were hardly any deterrent. The first conviction
of this kind was secured in May 1949 when a director of Messrs Balmer Lawrie &
Co. was fined a paltry Rs 50 for not implementing a tribunal award reinstating two
dismissed workers.52
The government often gave in to the pressure continually mounted by the
employers’ organizations. In December 1950, Sir Paul Benthall, in his Presidential
Address at the annual meeting of the Associated Chamber of Commerce of India in
Calcutta, directly blamed the ‘generosity’ of the tribunal awards for growing indis-
cipline among the industrial workers and their falling productivity. As a result of
this, he warned, capital – both foreign and Indian – might feel shy of investment in
Indian industries. The meeting adopted resolutions asserting the employers’ free-
dom to retrench labour, as well as expressing their angst against the ‘misguided
generosity’ of the tribunals which were held responsible for the increased cost of
production. Government ministers, including the Labour Minister, were present at
this meeting.53
This employer reluctance and resistance to implement the tribunal awards, and
the government’s inability in most cases to effectively mediate, frustrated even
some of the Congress leaders who were active on the labour front. ‘It is high time
that Congress should be a little more progressive in its policy towards the solution
of the labour problem’, observed Suresh Chandra Das, the President of the South
Calcutta District Congress Committee in a press statement on 6 July 1949. ‘Cases
are not wanting’, he further noted in a public display of dissent, ‘where the
Government has even tried to suppress the legitimate demands of the labour by tak-
ing sides with the capitalists.’54 On 29 July 1950, after the lifting of bans on meet-
ings in Calcutta, the West Bengal branches of the Indian National Trade Union
Congress (INTUC) held a mammoth meeting at the Maidan to protest against the
‘anti-democratic measures’ of the Congress government.55
However, the government’s attitude to industrial relations at the dawn of free-
dom was to give priority to national interests over any narrower class interests. On
16 December 1947 at an Industries Conference in New Delhi – chaired by the
Industries Minister Shyama Prasad Mukherji and addressed by Prime Minister
Nehru – labour and management were called upon to ‘agree to maintain industrial
peace and avert lock-outs, strikes or the slowing down of production during the
next three years.’56 In West Bengal, at a meeting of the INTUC, B.C. Roy reminded
the workers that with the achievement of independence their responsibilities had
become greater. So the right principle for the trade unions to follow was the path of
discussion, adjustment and agreement between the employers and the employees.57
He also asked the employers to change their attitudes. Inaugurating a meeting of the
All-India Organization of Industrial Employers in Calcutta on 10 October 1950, he
told them: ‘The time has now come when the industrialist and the labourer should
realize that mill or factory production is not the contribution of one of them alone
but the result of the co-operative effort of the two.’58 The Congress Labour Minister
in 1949, Kalipada Mukherjee, also wanted ‘the employers, trade union leaders and
the industrial workers at large to create and develop a new outlook of co-operation
and collaboration for increased production of national wealth.’59 However, when
the workers did not listen and the economy faltered, industrial action appeared to be
unpatriotic. For example, when in October 1947 the transport workers of the Civil
Supplies Department went on strike threatening the food supply system in Calcutta,
their action was described as ‘anti-social’. ‘It seems quite clear that the strikers
have no loyalty to the state’, said a government press statement.60 Thus a strike for
their legitimate economic demands immediately made the workers the enemies of
the state.
On 3 January 1948, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the Deputy Prime Minister, told a
public rally at Calcutta Maidan that the country needed industrialization and there-
fore strikes were against the interests of the nation. He asked for ‘two or three years
(sic) time to see India through the present crisis’. However, on that same day at a
luncheon meeting hosted by the businessman Sir Badridas Goenka, he observed
that labour must be rescued from bad leadership and that there must be firm dealing
with labour agitators to restore labour discipline.61 Nehru too warned the workers
of the country against strikes. He sympathized with their demands; but even if those
were not fulfilled, they should not go on strike, ‘which would do them no good but
would cause immense harm to the country.’62 Referring to the threatened railway
strike of 9 March 1949, Nehru frankly told the parliament that the ‘Government are
determined to maintain the well-established rights of labour. But they cannot sub-
mit to threats of violence and incitement to active revolt from any quarter.’ So he
introduced a bill in the parliament to prohibit strikes in all essential services for an
initial period of six months and as a preventive measure, the government arrested
about 870 people in connection with the railway strike.63 At a press conference in
Calcutta two days later, Jayaprakash Narayan, the President of the Railwaymen’s
Federation, could only describe this action as the ‘semi-fascist’ tendency of the
Nehru government. He found it particularly disturbing that ‘the greatest democrat
in Asia’ was at the helm of this government.64
It was this attitude that in the eyes of the workers made the Congress government
the new enemy of the workers’ real freedom, which involved their right to work and
being properly remunerated. This became more than apparent when, in April 1948,
the central government employees went on strike in Calcutta to demand the imple-
mentation of the Pay Commission’s recommendations and to protest against the
government’s retrenchment policy at the Military and Factory Accounts depart-
ment. The 300 jobs that were to go were in fact created during the war and so after
the war they had to go, and for this reason Nehru advised the workers not to go on
strike. Other Congress leaders and the Congress controlled Bengal Provincial
National Trade Union Congress (BPNTUC) appealed to the workers not to go on
strike. Yet, members of the Federation of Central Government Employees Union
decided to go on hunger strike in batches – thus protesting with ‘strictly non-violent
methods’.65 One of the posters displayed during the strike said:
We have had enough of bullying and threats from Imperialist rulers. It was
from Panditji that we learnt how to react to it. Panditji may change but his les-
sons are still clear and inspiring. We will rise a thousand times stronger against
your threats Panditji! Till you meet our legitimate demands and let us live hon-
ourably in free India.66
The workers, it seems, had extended the meaning of freedom from a nationalist pre-
occupation with sovereignty to a concern for subjective freedom – ‘to live hon-
ourably in free India’ – and had also identified a new enemy endangering that
freedom. The strike was not a major success, causing no major disruption of public
life, as a European Deputy Commissioner was put in charge of the police force han-
dling the strikers.67 What was interesting however was the press statement by the
West Bengal Governor about the strikers. ‘What hope has India’, he exclaimed, ‘if
Government employees do not see the need for patriotic respect for the word of the
Prime Minister of India?’68 Conformity thus became synonymous with patriotism
in the political vocabulary of the Congress leaders – at a time when the workers
were trying to find their own distinctive meanings of freedom and identifying its
enemies.
Often this conformity was ensured through methods which would shock even the
most conservative advocates of workplace discipline today. Growing discontent-
ment among the employees had been causing trouble for the B.C. Roy government
for some time. In the first week of March 1948 there was a convention of govern-
ment employees, and three of them were suspended for taking an active role in it.
To protest against the suspension the subordinate Secretariat staff demonstrated on
17 March in front of the Assembly building, when the house was in session. The
premier gave in, and, after a public apology, the suspended staff were reinstated;
Roy also promised to revise their pay scale in six months’ time.69 But then again on
14 July 1948 about 200 clerks in the Secretariat building in Calcutta went on strike
and a deputation waited on the premier demanding reinstatement of another dis-
charged colleague. Roy’s patience now wore out; he did not like this ‘regrettable
lack of discipline’ and in the evening the government issued a press note. It said that
next morning all the gates of the Writers’ Building would be closed and the employ-
ees would be allowed in only if they agreed to first verbally undertake ‘to discharge
[their] official duties loyally and conscientiously in accordance with all review
rules and orders that are in force or may be framed in future’, and then sign a writ-
ten undertaking to that effect. Those who refused would be suspended immediately
and departmental proceedings would be started against them. The next morning
2,500 government employees queued up in front of the Writers’ Building; everyone
had to individually take the verbal oath in front of a Registrar and was then allowed
in; and later on that day everyone had to sign a written undertaking of loyalty.70
Discipline was thus restored in the offices of the West Bengal government in the
interests of the nation. Such encounters between competing understandings of free-
dom, the rights it promised and the responsibilities it entailed, remained a continu-
ing feature of public life in immediate post-independence India.
If the city workers were reeling under pressure, the peasants were no better
either. In late September 1947 the hungry villagers of Howrah marched along a ten-
mile route to the office of the Minister of Civil Supplies in Calcutta demanding food
and shouting slogans like ‘Howrah is in the grip of famine’.71 On 21 November
1947, when the West Bengal Legislative Assembly met for the first time in free
India, several thousand peasants organized by the Kisan Sabha came to Calcutta to
greet the new Assembly and to let the new government know of their grievances.
The then Prime Minister Dr Ghosh did not want them to come to the Assembly
premises, because that would encourage all other protesters to come there as well.
But he agreed to address the rally at some other place, like the Maidan. The march
ultimately ended at the Esplanade area, where the police stopped them near the
Curzon Park with a lathi-charge (method of crowd dispersal similar to a later
charge, using lathis or long canes) and tear gas. According to the government, this
happened because another student procession came to that spot at the same time,
and tried to break the police cordon by force, leaving the police with no choice. The
Prime Minister, according to his statement in the Assembly, went to the Maidan to
address the rally, but found no one there. At a later stage he sent his Revenue
Minister Kalipada Mukherjee to read out a written statement to the rally. But by this
time, tear gas had been fired and lathis had broken the heads of peaceful demon-
strators. No wonder, Mukherjee was greeted with ‘filthy and grossly abusive lan-
guage’. This was certainly not a good beginning of freedom for the peasants. In his
statement Dr Ghosh justified the police action by saying:
It is always distasteful for any popular Government to use force… . The policy
of our Government is to use force only when we must… . The people also have
their duty by (sic) their Government, and must help it in maintaining peace and
discipline even under provocation. Government must prevent disorder at all
costs.’72
What is important to note here is that a peaceful political demonstration by unarmed

peasants, which in the days of the freedom struggle would be acclaimed as satya-
graha (literally ‘truth force’; a method of nonviolent resistance developed by
M.K. Gandhi), now in the definition of a national government became ‘disorder’.
This concern for discipline and order spoke of the continuity of a colonial under-
standing of sovereignty that continually clashed in free India with the new expecta-
tions of popular sovereignty.
Rural unrest became manifest from 1948 in a series of violent incidents under
communist leadership in the districts of Burdwan, Birbhum, Bankura, Hooghly and
Midnapur.73 This wave of rural disquiet reached its peak in the second half of 1949,
which we will discuss in Chapter 4. Without going into the details here, it will be
worthwhile to mention that a Police Intelligence Report noted 131 violent incidents
in the West Bengal countryside between 1 May and 31 December 1949.74 The
Congress government in power was aware of this unrest and political mobilization
in the countryside, and in this they discovered their own enemy of freedom – the
communists. However, before looking at the communist insurgency, we need to
discuss communalism, the other enemy of the nation, as it appeared in the percep-
tion of the Congress, which had proposed to build in India a secular democratic
state.75
Communal riots and the minorities

‘It is always the sacred duty of the majority community to protect the minorities in
any state’, said C.R. Rajagopalachari, the new Governor of West Bengal at a joint
Id–Bijaya function (a social gathering on the occasion of the Muslim holy day of Id
and the Hindu festival of Bijaya) at Park Circus in Calcutta on 28 October 1947.76
But to what extent the majority community of the new nation had embraced that
‘sacred duty’ or considered the minorities as the new enemies of freedom is a ques-
tion that remains to be explored. At the dawn of freedom on 15 August, when the
Hindus and Muslims were hugging each other in an exuberant display of commu-
nal harmony (see Chapter 1), there were some sceptics as well. Birupaksha, the
social satirist, could not mask his surprise at this unusual scene. People who were
killing each other the last night are hugging each other this morning! There must be
something unreal in this situation, he wrote.77 Two-and-a-half years later he was to
be proved right. And this was despite the Congress resolution at Jaipur in 1948 that
it would strive to build ‘this great country as a democratic secular state’.78 Contrary
to what intellectuals like Annada Sankar Roy believed (see Chapter 1), Partition did
not mean the end of dominance of the majorities over minorities. Indeed, Partition,
intended to create homogeneous nations, created new minorities – the Muslims in
West Bengal (25 per cent of the population) and the Hindus in East Pakistan (28.2
per cent of the population). In March 1948 the Home Minister Kiran Shankar Roy
gave an assurance that the government would not discriminate between the
majority and the minority communities.79 But the fierce riots in Calcutta in
February–March 1950 revealed that the new nation had not yet been able to deter-
mine its relationship with its minorities – particularly with the Muslims who chose
to live on this side of the border.
In West Bengal, so far as organized religious politics was concerned, there were
healthy signs of reconciliation. On 15 August 1947 when Gandhi spent the day in
Calcutta, fasting and spinning as a mark of penance for the communal violence that
had shaken the province over the last year, he had two important companions
by his side. One was the previous Muslim League Premier of Bengal H.S.
Suhrawardy, widely known as the man behind the riot of 1946, and the other was
S.M. Osman, the Secretary of the Calcutta District Committee of the Muslim
League.80 If this signalled a mood of reconciliation, more confirmation came on 18
March 1948 when Abul Hashem, one of the most prominent Muslim League
MLAs, informed the Legislative Assembly that the West Bengal Muslim League
Parliamentary Party, along with their counterparts in Orissa and Assam, had been
dissolved, because ‘in the changed circumstances in the Indian Dominion commu-
nal organizations should be liquidated in the best interests of the people of the
Indian Dominion.’81 On the first anniversary of Indian Independence, the Jamiat-
ul-ulema-e-Hind organized a major public meeting at Muhammad Ali Park in
Calcutta, where prominent Muslim citizens of the city spoke to assure the nation of
their loyalty to the Indian nation-state. Speaker after speaker emphasized the point
that for those Muslims who had chosen to remain in India, this was their country, its
freedom was their freedom and its protection was their solemn responsibility.82
But there were many sceptics who did not believe in this public display of an
apparent change of heart.83 On 8 June 1948, a few weeks before Mahatma Gandhi’s
assassination, Ashutosh Lahiry, the General Secretary of the All-India Hindu

Mahasabha (AIHM), said in a press conference:
Muslims have now got their own home-land in Pakistan for which they had
struggled and those of the Muslims who are now in the Indian Union are still
supporting the Pakistan and the two-nation theory. … I feel that these Muslims
should now take their rightful place in Pakistan ...84
However, this veiled threat of ethnic cleansing was put on hold as the Hindu
Mahasabha faced public wrath following Gandhi’s assassination in January 1948.
An irate crowd threw stones and brickbats at its leader Shyama Prasad Mukherji’s
Calcutta residence and in view of this public backlash the party decided, in
February 1948, to withdraw from all political activities and focus only on philan-
thropic programmes.85 But the communal problem in West Bengal was far from
resolved by this winding up of the so-called ‘communal’ parties, as the plight of the
minorities in both Bengals remained tangled, and was made precarious by the con-
tinuous influx of Hindu refugees from the East and the rumours that spread of their
harassment in an Islamic Pakistan.
The situation began to turn ugly at the beginning of 1950 when it was first
reported that about 500 families had migrated to the border town of Bongaon, being
driven out of Khulna after the occurrence of an ‘incident’ in Bagerhat.86 On
1 February Pundit Lakshikanta Maitra, an MP from Nadia, brought it to the notice
of the Indian parliament. Nehru took a ‘serious view’ of the situation as retaliatory
violence was already being reported from the Indian border district of
Murshidabad.87 The Dacca authorities responded immediately to the allegations
and in a press note issued on 3 February blamed the ‘irresponsible anti-Pakistan
propaganda in the Calcutta press’ for the faux pas. The actual incident, it argued,
had taken place on 20 December 1949 in village Kalshira in Bagerhat, when a
police party came to look for a communist suspect and was attacked by a commu-
nist mob of Namasudras (an agrarian caste of East Bengal). In the attack one police
constable died and others were seriously injured, after which the Ansars (an armed
volunteer group affiliated to the Muslim League) and villagers from the neigh-
bouring districts came to their rescue. Hereafter, the residents of Kalshira and
Jhalordanga villages fled to escape reprisals or avoid police arrest. The situation
was taken advantage of by some ‘bad characters and miscreants’ who looted their
movable properties, which had now been recovered. Only two cases of criminal
offence against women were reported and these were being investigated. On the
other hand, the Dacca press note also alleged communal atrocities against Muslims
in the West Bengal border districts of Murshidabad and 24-Parganas, triggering an
exodus of refugees across the border to the East.88
The description of the incident was somewhat different in Nehru’s rendering of
the story in the Indian Parliament on 23 February. He complimented the Indian
press for restraint and condemned the Pakistani press for exaggeration. He accepted
the communist part of the story, but pointed out that when the actual suspect was not
found, the police party assaulted all the members of the family, including women.
Attracted by the cries of the women, the neighbours came in their rescue and a free
fight ensued, in which two police constables died. Two days later a large police
force assisted by Ansars and other rowdy elements attacked not this one but 22
other neighbouring villages inhabited by Hindu Namasudras. Then what followed
needs to be presented in the Indian Prime Minister’s own words:
There was arson and looting on a large scale, men were murdered and women
ravished. There were also forcible conversions and desecration of places of
worship. The residents of those villages could not escape from the scene
because of a rigid cordon maintained by the armed police and others. And even
news could not come through.
There was a similar incident in Nachole in Rajshahi district, Nehru reported, where
700 Santhal families, following clashes with the police, had to leave for West
Bengal.89
There were indeed many other versions of the story with subtle but significant
variations,90 but truth became irrelevant, as each side was prepared to believe only
its own version. And each version was coded in emotions that might lead to retal-
iatory violence at any time. The West Bengal Chief Minister B.C. Roy scornfully
rejected the Dacca report91 and sent 16 chartered planes to airlift beleaguered Hindu
minorities from Dacca.92 The Calcutta newspaper editorials also began to prick
holes in the Dacca statement and expressed concerns about the security of minori-
ties in the East.93 Tension began to mount and kept the Muslims in West Bengal on
tenterhooks. Already there were reports of attacks on the Muslims in Berhampore
town and in a village in Beldanga thana (area of jurisdiction of the local police sta-
tion) in Murshidabad district, and at Batanagore near Calcutta. On 4 February there
were stray assaults on some Muslims in Calcutta, where some Muslim bustees
(slums) were burnt. Stern measures were taken immediately to deal with these spo-
radic incidents, scores of arrests were made and local volunteer peace committees
were formed. The former Muslim League MLA Syed Badruddoja thanked the
Chief Minister for prompt action to ensure the security of the minorities. Although
no one at this stage expected any major outbreak of communal violence, the
Muslims nevertheless felt extremely insecure. At a public meeting at Park Circus,
a nervous Mostafisur Rahman Chowdhury moved a resolution against the League
government in East Pakistan, urging a joint movement of the Muslims and Hindus
to replace it.94 In the meanwhile, as disturbances spread from Khulna to Barisal and
Rajshahi districts,95 about 13,000 refugees arrived at Bongaon, and many of them
travelled to Sealdah station to tell their stories of persecution.96 The emotions now
boiled over and full scale anti-Muslim riots broke out in Calcutta on 8 February
1950, after more than two years of apparent communal harmony.
The disturbances were initially confined to Maniktala area in north Calcutta,
where houses evacuated by Muslims in a hurry and out of nervousness were set on
fire. The situations in Howrah and Hooghly districts also remained extremely
tense. The government responded quickly; all meetings and processions were
banned; curfew was imposed in the Maniktala area; and the army was called upon
for patrolling duties. Newspaper editors were told not to publish any report or any
letter that might further inflame the situation and submit to government censorship
at least for the next few days.97 But in spite of all these precautions, 24 people were
reported to have been wounded, two of them later succumbing to their injuries. The
Chief Minister, along with Mr Badruddoja, visited the affected places, and
commissioned the services of the Congress sevadals (volunteer groups) to distrib-
ute food and other relief. The East Bengal Premier Mr Nurul Amin also issued an
appeal for calm in East Bengal and proposed that the Chief Secretaries’ conference,
which was scheduled to meet on the same day at Dacca, would discuss the
situation.98
Both Prime Minister Nehru and Deputy Prime Minister Patel made fervent
appeals to bring back normalcy. Yet, the trouble soon spread to new areas. In
bustees in Maniktala, Muslim houses were looted and burnt. And what was most
disturbing, in one case, as an eyewitness alleged, the mob was led by some men in
khaki, giving the appearance of belonging to either the police or military. On other
occasions, patrolling police parties often ignored the cries for help when the attacks
were actually taking place; they arrived to assist when the mischief had already
been done.99 So, unable to trust the state machinery, the Muslims looked to their
community for protection. In thousands, they fled to what they considered to be
safer localities in Muslim-majority areas like Park Circus and Beniapukur; some
congregated at Narkeldanga, while others took shelter in Zakaria Street and
Kidderpur areas.100 Reports of arson and looting continued to pour in; 56 people
were wounded on the second day, one of them later dying. The number of police
and army personnel patrolling the city was now increased and curfew was imposed
in two additional areas of Beliaghata and Amherst Street thanas. What was worse,
retaliatory violence was now reported from Dacca, despite the appeals from Nurul
Amin, as well as from the former premier Fazlul Huq. What Huq told his co-reli-
gionists in Dacca was significant: they should desist from harming the Hindus ‘in
the interest of the Muslims in West Bengal’.101 The statement in no uncertain terms
revealed the vulnerabilities of the minorities in the two Bengals.
On the third day the situation seemingly improved a little, as the Chief
Secretaries’ Conference at Dacca reviewed the situation. But the hopes of an early
return to normalcy were belied the next day, when troubles extended to the neigh-
bouring industrial areas of Howrah, where Muslim slums were set on fire at
Bellilious Road and a Muslim-owned shop was gutted in Panchanantala Road, and
curfew had to be imposed. Curfew also had to be extended to two new areas of
Calcutta, namely Tangra and Entally police stations. This escalation of violence
was partly because of fresh anxiety, as aeroplanes in Dacca airport that were taking
on Calcutta-bound passengers were attacked by armed mobs, and that day’s
Dacca–Calcutta flight returned empty. Also, trains from Khulna arrived empty at
Sealdah station, as all their passengers were detrained at the border for fear that they
might spread fresh rumours.102
The situation improved the next day as air services were resumed and passengers
arrived back in Sealdah after a protest from the West Bengal government. Satish
Chandra Das Gupta and three other Hindu members of the East Bengal Legislative
Assembly issued a press statement that the situation was under control in Dacca and
the government was doing its best to protect the lives and properties of the minori-
ties. Calcutta by now was calm, and normal business was resumed, but Howrah
continued to be volatile and remained under curfew.103 On 15 February, the sixth
day of the riot, when Maulana Azad, the central Education Minister, arrived in
Calcutta to review the situation, Calcutta had almost become normal and conditions
had also vastly improved in Howrah. Azad was happy because although there had
been ‘much loss of property, the number of casualties was relatively small’. An all-
parties Central Peace Committee had been formed and on 17 February ‘peace
squads’ in lorries and cars toured the troubled areas with slogans like ‘Mahatma
Gandhi ki jai’ (victory to Mahatma Gandhi), ‘Hindu Muslim ek ho’ (Hindus and
Muslims unite), and ‘Maramari bandh karo’ (stop fighting).104
On 23 February, in his statement in the Indian parliament, Nehru mentioned that
he had proposed to Liaquat Ali Khan that a joint fact-finding commission be
formed and the two Prime Ministers make a joint tour of the troubled areas in the
two Bengals. The latter turned down the proposals, as he thought the ‘situation has
become normal’.105 But the situation was far from normal. Fuelled by Pakistani
intransigence and spurred by continuous reports of atrocities in East Bengal, par-
ticularly often exaggerated reports about the abuse of women,106 and the steady
inflow of refugees at Sealdah station, there was a fresh wave of rioting in West
Bengal beginning from 1 March. In this round, Chandernagore was first affected
thanks to some over-zealous local leaders, and then the fire spread to Hooghly and
Howrah districts. As evacuees from Chandernagore took shelter in Barrackpore on
the other side of the river Hooghly, that area was affected too. There were cases of
arson, and killings were ‘very heavy’; and the working classes were involved in
large numbers.107 In Howrah, armed gangs attacked Muslim villages and set their
houses on fire and looted their movable properties. There was also unprecedented
violence reminiscent of the Partition days. Men were dragged out of ambulances
and moving cars and killed. At Lilooah and Howrah Maidan stations, men armed
with swords and spears stopped trains and killed Muslim passengers.108 On 27
March martial law was imposed in Howrah and Bali police station areas, where an
army commander was left in charge. At several places in Howrah the army had to
open fire, and long distance trains bound for or leaving Howrah station were either
terminated earlier or redirected or cancelled.109 There were also sporadic incidents
in the villages of Burdwan and Midnapur where Muslim shops were looted,
Muslim houses were attacked and bustees were set on fire.110 The worst cases of
violence took place in the border district of Nadia, where the Namasudra peasants
driven out of their villages in Khulna took their revenge on Muslim villagers, driv-
ing them back to Pakistan, resulting ultimately in an almost virtual population
exchange.111
The riot of 1950, the first major communal conflagration since the cessation of
Partition-related violence, therefore raised some wider questions about the place of
minorities in the post-independence and post-Partition Indian nation-state. On 11
February 1950 an editorial in Amrita Bazar Patrika expressed surprise at the fact
that the minorities had been attacked in such a way in Calcutta, although ‘only the
other day’ it ‘seemed that those grim days [of communal riots of 1946–47] had been
completely forgotten’ and ‘Calcutta became an example to the rest of India in the
realization of common citizenship – the distinguishing feature of a secular state’. It
refused to accept any responsibility for this sudden degeneration; the situation, it
argued, ‘originated in East Bengal’. In other words, it refused to see that in the new
secular Indian state the loyalty of the religious minorities was still under a cloud of
suspicion – no matter how much the nation talked about common citizenship. This
suspicion bred insecurity at times of riots, which very easily made them hostages
for the safety of the Hindu minorities on the other side of the border, in just the way
the Hindu Mahasabha had once wanted it to be.112
It is difficult to generalize how widespread this feeling of suspicion and hatred
was at different layers of the Bengali social fabric.113 The available evidence sug-
gests that Nehru’s cautionary words to Roy that ‘[t]he fact that a man is a Muslim,
does not make him a non-national’114 – had not sunk deep in the minds of many
Bengali Hindus. The Muslims were often treated as ‘internal enemies’ of free-
dom.115 A columnist in Masik Basumati wrote in March 1950, in a rather belliger-
ent tone, that some of those who had brandished their swords ‘to fight their way to
Pakistan’ (ladke lenge Pakistan) a few days ago were still living in India, holding
high offices and probably spying for Pakistan.116 It was indeed a suspicion shared
by many ordinary citizens. On 14 January 1948, Niranjan Bose from Dum Dum
wrote to Veer Savarkar:
I cannot persuade myself to believe that the 50 millions of Muslims who a few
days ago strongly supported Pakistan, have converted themselves to be pucca
nationalist (sic). They are nothing but 5th columnists and Mr Jinnah wants them
to stay in India only as spies.117
At the height of the February riots of 1950, another ordinary citizen, Krishna
Chandra Chattopadhyay of Nayan Sur Lane, Calcutta, wrote to another opposition
leader, Sarat Chandra Bose, that the Muslims in this country as a community did not
identify with this land, its great men or its political parties. He was indignant that
leaders like Bose were still ambivalent in their position vis-à-vis the Muslims and
Pakistan.118 It seems that some of the police officers in post-independence West
Bengal also shared this view, as its resonance could be clearly heard through
some of their reports on Muslim affairs.119 So the complicity – or perhaps a distinct
bias – of a section of the security forces during the riots, as alleged by some of the
victims, might not be altogether a figment of the imagination.120
This Hindu middle-class attitude of distrust did not of course mean that inter-
communal relations at individual, local or plebeian levels were always and univer-
sally marked by hatred, suspicion and hostility. At the height of the riots in Calcutta
a variety of social and philanthropic organizations and trade unions had organized
relief work among the riot victims and had incessantly pleaded in a series of public
meetings for calm and sanity.121 As a witness later deposed before the Riot Inquiry
Commission, in Maniktala bustees the Muslims and Hindus, many of them
refugees, lived harmoniously before the riots and ‘behaved like brothers’; but
attackers from outside came to burn and rob their houses at the onset of the riot.122
In the districts too, everywhere the eyewitnesses reported to the Inquiry
Commission that communal relations in their localities were excellent until reports
of atrocities on Hindus in East Bengal embittered them and outsiders came to attack
minority properties and lives in their villages.123 A college student from
Bhadreswar in Hooghly district told the commission that political leaders from the
majority community were responsible for the riots in his area.124 This evidence only
confirms the absurdity of communal hatred in the quotidian lives of the common
people; it does not however tell us who exactly these ‘outsiders’ were. We can only
indulge in some informed speculation.
At the political level, this suspicion and non-acceptance of the Muslims as true
citizens of India were shared by a wide variety of people in the highest echelons of
the Congress hierarchy and these were men who actually ran the state. And this was
despite the Congress’s professed commitment to secularism.125 Then, there were
those who did not believe in the Congress creed of democratic secularism. On 4
November 1949, Ashutosh Lahiry, the General Secretary of the AIHM, told a press
conference in Calcutta that the ‘Moslem problem inside the Indian Union’ involved
‘a work of nationalising the four crores of our Moslem brethren’ (Emphasis
added).126 This attitude of othering the Muslims was widely shared by the
Mahasabhaites. Almost two years later on 19 April 1951, A.K. Sanyal, the
President of the Calcutta Ward No. 1 Hindu Mahasabha, wrote to Lahiry that the
only solution to the Muslim problem was the ‘expatriation of the Moslem public to
Pakistan unless Pakistan merges with the Indian Union.’127
The question of complicity of the Hindu Mahasabha in the Calcutta riot of 1950
is a complex one. On 15 February 1950, when the tension in the city was at its
height, Ashutosh Lahiry, its General Secretary, issued an inflammatory leaflet
from the Mahasabha Office in Calcutta; it was entitled: ‘Appalling situation in East
Bengal. Frightful acts of terrorism, murders, forcible marriages of women, lootings
and conversions – will millions of Hindus be allowed to be liquidated?’ It was
reported by the police intelligence that he was involved around this time in recruit-
ing armed volunteers for creating violence at the Pakistan border. On 12 March the
Working Committee of the West Bengal Provincial Hindu Mahasabha adopted a
resolution which demanded that the Indian armed forces must march into East
Pakistan and the Hindus in the border districts must be armed to defend themselves.
As another report suggests, at another meeting attended by Lahiry, resolutions were
adopted demanding, among other things, the removal of all Muslims from the soil
of India.128
The Working Committee of the Bengal Mahasabha also resolved that it would
recruit its own volunteer corps, the Santan Bahini. By 26 March 1950 it was
reported that about 400 of them had been enlisted, a ‘Council of Action’ had been
formed with Lahiry at its helm, and its professed goal was ‘guarding against
Muslim 5th Column activities in West Bengal’. What subtext lay behind this coded
expression we can only speculate. One report suggests that by June about 1,500 vol-
unteers had been recruited in Calcutta alone by Lahiry’s trusted lieutenant Naren
Das. On 22 March N.B. Khare, the President of the AIHM came to West Bengal and
with Lahiry visited some refugee camps at Bongaon and Habra. According to
Police intelligence, he reportedly told Lahiry to create such a situation in West
Bengal that the Government of India might feel compelled to initiate an armed
intervention in East Pakistan. There is no direct evidence to implicate Lahiry for
any direct involvement in the riots, although during the 1946 riots he was known to
have supplied arms and funding to the so-called Hindu ‘resistance’ groups.129 On 1
March 1950, the IB intercepted a letter addressed to Lahiry from some Hindu
refugees settled in Burdwan. They were upset by the news of the villages of their
relatives being burnt down in Barisal and had formed an Association. They asked
for assistance in terms of ‘funds and arms’ from Lahiry.130 We do not know whether
this assistance was actually provided to this or to any other organization during the
riots. We only know that on 2 April Lahiry was arrested under the Preventive
Detention Act and he remained incarcerated until released by a court order on
20 July.131
It was not surprising, therefore, that on 23 February 1950 the Muslim legislators
stood at the West Bengal Legislative Assembly to reiterate their ‘strict loyalty’ to
the Indian state. Janab Abdulla told the House that the minority community would
serve the country alongside the majority community ‘loyally and faithfully’. The
reiteration would make no sense unless they were viewed as suspects. The two
Muslim MLAs Syed Badruddoja and Khuda Baksh and the Muslim Relief
Society sent fervent appeals to Liaquat Ali to accept in the interest of 45 million
Muslims in India the offer of Pundit Nehru for a joint tour of East Bengal to bring
back peace there.132 Because only peace in the East could ensure their safety in
secular West Bengal.133
One important aspect of the Calcutta riot of 1950 was that it initiated a Muslim
exodus from West Bengal through both road and air, although it is often believed
that Partition-related migration in West Bengal was essentially one-way traffic.134
In February–March 1950 the 16 daily flights between Calcutta and Dacca all
remained fully booked.135 The jute mills and some other factories in Calcutta and
the suburbs, which employed predominantly Muslim workers, had to be closed
down because of the exodus of Muslim workers from working-class neighbour-
hoods. At the height of the riots in the middle of February there were about 25,000
Muslim riot victims in the Park Circus area. By the third week of March they were
all gone, and the British Consulate Office in Calcutta suspected that they had
‘mostly migrated to Pakistan’.136 While this was not true, as many had probably
returned to their homes too, according to an East Pakistani press note, about
1,100,000 Muslims had fled to East Bengal by 22 May 1950.137 The Government
of West Bengal put a much lower figure; according to its reckoning 437,612
Muslims had left West Bengal by 31 August 1950.138 In Joya Chatterji’s calcula-
tion, about one million refugees had migrated to East Pakistan by 1951, and of them
about 70 per cent were from West Bengal.139 Although these figures are not
absolutely dependable, there was no way to deny that outward migration of
Muslims took place in West Bengal at this stage. There were public demands for an
exchange of population – as if Muslims belonged only to Pakistan, and Hindus to
India. Nehru scornfully rejected the idea, although this had happened in Punjab as
an unpreventable catastrophe.140
During the heat of the riot, while one could see only a few handwritten commu-
nist posters condemning communal violence, posters more prominently displayed
all over north Calcutta asked all right-thinking Hindu Bengalis to get rid of beards
(Muslims), tikkis (Bihari Hindus), bangles (Sikhs) and white faces (Europeans).
The latter group courted the disfavour of the rioters for providing shelter to their
Muslim servants – something that the British Consulate Office in Calcutta thought
had never happened before.141 At least in one reported case the houses of Christian
Railway employees were looted in Howrah.142 A prominent English businessman,
A.L. Cameron, the President of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and his servant
were killed by the frenzied rioters.143 In other words, the Hindu Bengalis’ discon-
tent against Partition was vented against the minorities, the Muslims in particular,
who had chosen to remain on their side of Bengal. The anger against non-Bengalis,
though not a major strand in Bengali public life, was not surprising either, given the
way a section of the metropolitan media like Masik Basumati and suburban media
like Pallibasi had been promoting linguistic chauvinism, championing the cause of
the Bengali-speaking areas still in the jurisdiction of Bihar and slandering the non-
Bengali workers for ripping off the provincial economy.144
But anti-Partition sentiments now also had other more overtly belligerent ways
of expression. There were reports that at a private meeting with Nehru, when he
came to visit Calcutta in the third week of March, some Calcuttans, one of them
being Ashutosh Lahiry, tried to convince him that war and military action against
Pakistan were the only solution to the problem.145 Nehru rejected the suggestion
and invited strong criticism for his ‘misconceived Gandhian pacifism and per-
verted democratic secularism’. The results of a Gallup Poll in Calcutta in March
1950 revealed that 87 per cent of the respondents favoured an armed intervention
by India in East Pakistan.146 There was a call for a student strike in Calcutta on
25 March to demand war with Pakistan and to protest against Nehru’s pacifist
policies.147 The anti-Pakistan jingoism, which represented the Hindu Bengalis’ dis-
pleasure with Partition, now came to its head.
Nehru could see that there were now very few takers for the Congress ideal of
secularism, and according to his statement in the parliament, even offered to resign
in frustration. But a ray of hope appeared when Liaquat Ali responded to his appeal
and agreed to come to Delhi for talks, and the result was the Delhi Pact on
Minorities signed by the two leaders on 8 April 1950. Under the provision of the
Pact ministers were to be appointed from minority communities in both Pakistan
and India and at both central and provincial levels. Minority Commissions were to
be formed in West Bengal, Assam and East Bengal. Commissions of Inquiry were
to be instituted in both Bengals to find out what had actually happened in
February–March and to recommend measures to prevent the recrudescence of such
incidents in future. An agency was to be created to recover and rehabilitate
‘abducted’ women, refugees were to be encouraged to return to their original
homes, and measures were to be taken to restore their properties on their return.148
After several follow-up meetings between the two governments, a ten-point
Annexe to the Delhi Pact was announced on 16 August. It provided for further
measures to deal with and prevent communal violence. Every communal incident
was now to be promptly investigated and deterrent actions were to be taken against
the offenders and also government officers were to be punished for dereliction of
duty. Presidents and members of the Union Boards were to be given the responsi-
bility of ensuring communal amity in rural areas. And finally, both governments
were to take steps for the speedy restoration of urban and rural properties to return-
ing refugees.149
However, the Delhi Pact became the target of a major opposition attack in West
Bengal. Opinion on some of its aspects, like the absurd idea of recovering abducted
women, remained divided.150 But the main purpose of the Pact was ‘to speed up the
restoration of confidence among minorities in the two Bengals and Assam’.151 This
primary and most important concern was soon completely lost in the ensuing
debate that centred around the Government of India’s attempt to use the Pact as an
instrument to prevent fresh migration from East Bengal and, more importantly, to
encourage a reverse migration. It was this issue of repatriation which made the
Delhi Pact immensely unpopular in West Bengal, as there was widespread distrust
about the goodwill of an Islamic Pakistan and very few people believed that the
Hindus who had crossed over could ever go back and feel safe.152 The Working
Committee of the West Bengal Provincial Hindu Mahasabha passed a resolution on
23 April, condemning the Nehru–Liaquat Agreement for being only in the interests
of the Muslims and Pakistan.153
However, immediately after the signing of the Pact, the situation improved a
little: all the committees and commissions required under the Pact were promptly
set up and the rioting stopped, apart from some stray incidents.154 The celebration
of Id-ul-fitr on 17 July and a well-attended prayer meeting at Calcutta Maidan
announced the return of normalcy and sanity to Calcutta’s civic life.155
Representatives of the minorities of the two Bengals met several times to discuss
their mutual problems.156 The refugee influx also slowed down and there was some
reverse migration too. But different agencies gave such divergent figures for this
migration that it is impossible to ascertain with any amount of certainty how many
Hindus had actually gone back and how many Muslims returned from East to West
Bengal.157 The Muslims who came back found their properties taken over by Hindu
refugees and their jobs already filled by the locals, and the government could not
help them, not at least in the short run.158 In other words, they found themselves in
situations that were even messier than before. It was no wonder that the same
Muslim MLAs who were so thankful to the government in February 1950 were
fiercely critical of the government for failing to protect the interests of the minori-
ties a few months later.159
The issue of repatriation of refugees became the main reason for the displeasure
of the majority of Hindu Bengalis against the Delhi Pact and the charge was led by
S.P. Mukherji. In his view, the Delhi Pact would not solve the problems of the
minorities in East Bengal, and therefore other methods were needed to be tried. And
these included annulment of Partition, carving out a territory from East Bengal and
planned exchange of population. Nehru, in response, could not conceal his ‘feeling
of great surprise that any responsible person could put forward any of these pro-
posals.’ These would contradict all the secular and democratic principles that the
Congress had ever stood for and would be contrary to the spirit of the new
Constitution. The sense of insecurity that the minorities felt in East Bengal was
more ‘psychological’ than real, Nehru believed, and so repatriation of refugees was
not an absurd proposition. But Nehru’s secularist approach did not even convince
some of his Congress colleagues.160 In a statement on 12 September he expressed
his angst at the ‘distressing’ fact that ‘this spirit of communalism and revivalism
has gradually invaded the Congress and sometimes even affects Government
policy.’161
As a mark of protest over his differences with the Prime Minister, Mukherji, who
was the Minister of Industry and Supply in the central cabinet, resigned from his
ministerial position along with his cabinet colleague and Mahasabha comrade K.C.
Neogy (Minister of Commerce), and returned to Calcutta to a hero’s welcome at the
Howrah station.162 Here, many people shared his concerns and the rumour was,
even the Chief Minister B.C. Roy believed with him that the Delhi Pact would not
be a solution for the minority problem. Roy was seen to be touring some of the
refugee camps with Mukherji, who happened to be his long-time personal friend.163
For all these leaders, if there was any minority ‘problem’, it belonged primarily, or
even exclusively, to East Bengal. The West Bengal Governor Dr Kailash Nath
Katju, in his annual speech to the Assembly on 25 September 1950, pointed out that
the ‘main objective of the [Delhi] Pact’ was ‘the creation of conditions in East
Bengal whereby the confidence of the minorities may be restored’. By contrast, he
pointed out, ‘my Government have been able, by energetic action, to create such
conditions in my state where … large numbers of Muslim migrants are coming
back and are being restored to their normal life.’164
Nehru could see the brittleness of this self-complacency. In his speech in August
on the Bengal debate in the parliament, he had reminded Mukherji that the majority
community congratulating itself on its own good behaviour was not good enough.
It had to apply a test and that was: ‘What does the minority think of the majority’.
And this test was to be applied to both sides evenly.165 Nehru was indeed respond-
ing to a group of leaders who still lived in a state of denial. Mukherji at a Deshbandu
Park meeting (3 September 1950), while referring to the Delhi Pact, asserted that
‘in spite of the gravest provocations India generally did extend to its minorities
the protection due to them.’166 When Jayaprakash Narayan condemned the
Hindu reprisals against Muslims in India, a Hindu Mahasabha leader indignantly
wrote to Ashutosh Lahiry that ‘such reprisals exist only in the imagination of these
fifth column leaders’.167 But in July 1950 Dr A.M. Malik the Pakistani Minister of
Minority Affairs toured West Bengal and observed that although ‘generally’ the
attitude of the majority community was helpful and friendly, in many pockets the
Muslims still felt a certain amount of ‘nervousness’.168 And it was certain that they
would continue to feel nervous as long as their fate remained tied to the conditions
of the Hindu minority in Pakistan. In May 1951, at the Muslim Convention in
Calcutta, Sir Sultan Ahmed in his Presidential Address observed with a note of dis-
appointment that as long as some groups did not accept the finality of Partition, the
Muslims in India and Hindus in Pakistan ‘must constantly defend themselves
against the suspicion that they are at least potential fifth columnists.’169
But it was not just a question of the behaviour and attitude of the majority com-
munity; it was also a question of how the Congress and the state it controlled looked
at the minority question and the idea of common citizenship. As available evidence
suggests, there were still significant differences in understanding. To give just one
example, an All-India Minority Convention was scheduled to be held in Calcutta in
the first week of November in 1950. At a press conference on 28 September Syed
Badruddoza, the chairman of the local Reception Committee, explained the pur-
pose of the convention and how the Muslims in India viewed their position within
the Indian nation-state:
We propose to maintain our cultural identity and religious integrity and the
individuality of Islam, consistent, of course, with the provisions of the
Constitution. We have to remain in India as Muslims and Indians at one and the
same time.170
A few days later the newly elected Congress President Purushottamdas Tandon
came to Calcutta and at the Gandhi Jayanti rally at the Maidan on 2 October he told
his audience:
Under the Muslim League’s influence many Muslims in India had come to
believe they had a culture separate from the Hindus’. This was wrong, for
India’s culture was one and was neither Hindu nor Muslim. … The only solu-
tion of the Hindu–Muslim problem was for both communities to accept Indian
culture.171
This difference in perspectives about the relationship between the nation and its
most important minority group would continue to destabilize communal relations
during the rest of the life of the new nation-state. The demand for uniformity and the
minority’s desire to maintain their difference – both grew in strength over the years,
and the ground for convergence narrowed. Being Indian and Muslim at the same
time became increasingly difficult in secular democratic India.172 It also showed
that despite the belief that the ‘communal’ question had been resolved, the modern
concept of a secular democratic state based on common individual citizenship was
yet to take root in the political culture of post-independence India, where minorities
and majorities continued to be defined by their religious identity. And the minori-
ties were often looked at as potential internal enemies of freedom.
This brings us to the plight of the other minority group defined by caste. During
the last days of the Partition agitation the projection of a more threatening ‘Other’
– the Muslims – had led to the appropriation of another minority, the Dalits, by the
dominant Congress–Mahasabha politics.173 In the immediate post-independence
period this process of appropriation continued through the inclusion of three Dalit
ministers in the provincial cabinet, the offer of other lucrative offices,174 and legis-
lation in September 1948 to remove Hindu social disabilities including untoucha-
bility.175 This was endorsed in the new constitution and in pursuance of that
principle a Government of India order on 14 September 1950 announced the reser-

vation of 12.5 per cent of central jobs for the members of the Scheduled Castes.176
Thus, by addressing the question of social justice the Nehru government sought to
appropriate Dalit dissidence and this worked well until Dr Ambedkar resigned
from his cabinet position in sheer frustration over the orthodox opposition to his
proposed Hindu Code Bill. But this was not well received in West Bengal, and
indeed the mainstream media depicted it as strategic grandstanding for the elec-
tion.177 Most of the prominent Dalit leaders by then had either joined the Congress
or became ministers, or remained in East Pakistan.
On the other hand, the Partition did not help Dalit peasants, many of whom had
to remain in East Pakistan. They began to move in 1950, and among the migrants
from Khulna and neighbouring areas the majority were Namasudra peasants. But
their discontentment would find expression through refugee politics and leftist
movements (see Chapter 6), rather than through any caste-based protests. This cre-
ated an impression that the caste question – like the communal question – had been
resolved in West Bengal. The assumption turned into faith and continued to domi-
nate political discourses in this province for a long time to come.178
The only dissident Dalit voice that opposed Partition and raised the mantle of
Dr Ambedkar’s Scheduled Caste Federation in the last days of pre-Partition Bengal
was Jogendra Nath Mandal. After Partition, he chose to remain in Pakistan and
became a member of the Pakistani central cabinet. On 8 October 1950 he migrated
to West Bengal after resigning from his ministerial position as a mark of protest
against the continuing repression of Hindu minorities in East Bengal. The 8,000-
word letter of resignation which he sent to Liaquat Ali Khan revealed his indigna-
tion at the mistreatment of Hindus more than any articulation of a distinctive Dalit
selfhood.179 His defection to West Bengal did not evoke a fresh wave of enthusiasm
among the Namasudra community which he belonged to. His own party, the East
Bengal Scheduled Caste Federation, condemned him and expelled him. In West
Bengal, his past came to haunt him – his association with the Muslim League and
his nomination by Jinnah to the Interim Ministry to contest the Congress claim that
it alone represented the Scheduled Castes, made him a political persona non grata.
On 15 October he issued a press statement criticizing Dr Ambedkar for resigning
from the Nehru cabinet on the issue of the Hindu Code Bill, with which, he
believed, the welfare of the Scheduled Castes had no connection. In free India their
problems had been addressed by affirmative action policies.180 But even this
condemnation did not endear him to the Congress High Command and his credibil-
ity was openly questioned by B.C. Roy.181 An isolated Mandal could hardly be
expected to re-galvanize the moribund Dalit cultural politics in West Bengal. So the
Dalits in this province for all practical purposes kept up the appearance that they
had accepted the Congress vision of a homogeneous nation. The contradictions
of this apparent integration were only to be exposed in the election of 1952 (see
Chapter 6).
The middle class and its dilemmas

For many Congress leaders in West Bengal the communal and caste problems had
either been resolved or just did not exist. By February 1948, with the winding up of
the Muslim League and the suspension of political activities by the Hindu
Mahasabha, it seemed as if the ‘communalist’ parties had been emasculated and the
Congress vision of secular democracy had already been actualized. At the other end
of the political spectrum, the Forward Bloc had dissociated itself from the Congress
in August 1947 and declared itself a separate political party, but it was not a major
political force yet.182 And Sarat Bose’s Socialist Republican Party did not take off
properly until May 1948.183 So within this context, it seemed as if a pro-Congress
political consensus was emerging within a putative homogeneous nation. The only
problem were the communists, who had a major support base among the educated
middle classes in Bengal, and now since 1946 were mobilizing the peasantry in the
countryside, had made significant inroads into the trade union sector and gained
popularity among the students.
The communists challenged any such possible pro-Congress consensus in a seri-
ous way. In December 1947 the Communist Party of India (CPI) came to the con-
clusion that the Indian independence achieved on 15 August 1947 was a sham –
they invented their new slogan ‘ye azadi jhooti hai’ (this freedom is fake) and a new
enemy of freedom. The Congress had willingly become a stooge of Anglo-
American imperialism and the feudal elements within the country, and therefore, it
needed to be replaced in order to achieve real freedom.184 The CPI held its Second
Congress in Calcutta between 28 February and 6 March 1948, where it adopted its
‘Political Thesis’, which argued that the Congress government had to be replaced
by a people’s government – ‘a republic of workers, peasants and oppressed middle
classes.’ In order to accomplish that goal, the party decided to follow a new strat-
egy, which popularly came to be known as the B.T. Ranadive line, following the
name of its originator, or the ‘Telengana line’, following the place where it origi-
nated. This meant the path of promoting in India a ‘People’s Democratic
Revolution’.185 The details of the communist insurgency, which this new strategy
initiated, will be discussed in greater depth in Chapter 4. Here let us consider some
of the implications of the communist movement for the overall political context of
post-colonial West Bengal.
The Congress government in West Bengal responded to this communist threat
swiftly – in a dramatic move on 25 March 1948 the CPI was banned in this
province, against the expressed wishes of Nehru.186 Immediately after that the
police arrested all the major CPI leaders and pre-censorship orders were passed
against its organ Swadhinata. In a statement to justify the ban, the Police Minister
Kiran Shankar Roy announced in the Assembly that the government had evidence
that the CPI’s ‘object’ was ‘to create a state of chaos and to take advantage of that
situation in order ultimately to seize power by violent means.’187 The middle-class
people of West Bengal were not that convinced. There were letters in The
Statesman expressing the apprehension that: ‘The ban removes the only Opposition
party against the Congress and leaves the coast clear for a Fascist State.’188 Another
letter stated the most obvious: ‘the West Bengal Ministry has apparently confused
its own safety with the safety of the state’. The Statesman brought out an editorial
stating that while the communists were being accused of violence, the actual
reported instances of violence were more against them – such as the recent bomb
attack on the Southeast Asian Youth Conference at Dixon Lane.189 The communists
organized a major protest march in Calcutta on 26 May. But a few days later Roy
came up with a press statement reiterating his claim that the government had ‘evi-
dence’ that the Bengal communists were ‘trying to collect arms at different places’
with a view to stage ‘armed mass risings’.190
What started hereafter was a regime of repression and anti-communist witch-
hunting. But that did not stop communist activities, as the local branch of the CPI
now began to mobilize the masses, both in villages and in the industrial areas, and
organized regular terrorist attacks on various representations of the state, the major
targets being the police and the public transport system. Of particular symbolic sig-
nificance were the incidents of protest demonstrations on the anniversary days of
Indian independence when national flags were pulled down and were replaced by
black flags.191 Every week violent incidents occurred either in Calcutta or in the vil-
lages, the worst-affected districts being those in western and central Bengal and the
tea garden areas in the north (more in Chapter 4).
The government responded with further repressive measures, like the West
Bengal Security Act 1948 which provided for detention without trial for three
months. The bill was passed and subsequently tightened several times despite
vociferous public protests against this curbing of civil liberties (see details in Chap-
ter 3). However, the repression only increased the communist resolve and within a
year it became clear that repression alone would not do, because it was not just the
diehard communists who were discontented; middle-class sympathies had started
shifting leftward. A letter to the editor in Amrita Bazaar Patrika raised the legiti-
mate question: why could the West Bengal Security Act, which had been made
more draconian through an amendment in September 1948, not be used against the
black marketeers and adulterators? Were they not even greater threats to the secu-
rity of the nation than the odd bomb thrower?192 The government clearly did not
have the political will to use the law against businessmen. B.C. Roy defended his
position in a press statement on 10 May 1948 by saying that the government could
not invoke the Security Act to deal with the profiteers because of certain assurances
given at the time of its passage.193 However, the only assurance that the previous
premier P.C. Ghosh had given was that it would not be used against legitimate trade
union or peasant movements.194 As a result, as Amrita Bazar Patrika pointed out,
while the ‘majority of the people have little or no sympathy with the
Communists…they have little or no sympathy with the Government either.’195 On
7 February 1950 Abul Hashem, the former Muslim League MLA, emphasized in
the Assembly:
that brutal efforts for suppression of communism adopted by this Ministry

have created a vicious circle. Violence breeds violence, and violence on both
sides has disintegrated the social, economic and political structure of our life.
This has again created a fear complex in the minds of the people for the
Communist Party and a deep seated contempt for the Congress party.196
The grievances against food prices and cloth shortages that the communists
focused on were indeed shared by a large cross-section of the population. But at the
same time, large-scale disruptions of public life annoyed the middle classes and the
press, and that made the Congress even more complacent, and its Prime Minister
more arrogant and authoritarian. Within the Congress the internal faction fighting
had come to a head by 1949 (see Chapter 3), and B.C. Roy tried to maintain a pre-
carious balance of power through frequent cabinet reshuffling. So he had little time
and limited political manoeuvring power to fix the anomalies of public life. The
government at this stage clearly seemed to be losing touch with the people. A letter
to the editor in the Amrita Bazar Patrika perhaps summed up most aptly how the
middle-class citizens of the new nation-state were looking at freedom and their
national government:
The sweet memory of that memorable day in the history of India, viz., the 15th
of August 1947 must still be fresh in the minds of the people. How proud were
the people then of their National Government and how much they loved their
national leaders and how ecstatic was their newly tasted joy of freedom and
how colourful and enlivening was their dream of the future!
How is it that many people now feel disillusioned and sad? What is this
due to?
There are several important factors, among others, contributing to the
somewhat changed attitude of the people to their National Government, viz.,
(1) very high prices of foodstuff and cloth and other necessaries of life and
acute distress of the people, (2) popular belief, specially among the intelli-
gentsia, that the civil liberties of the people are often interfered with by the
authorities on rather flimsy grounds, (3) wide-spread corruption amongst gov-
ernment servants, high or low, (4) general dislike of the politically conscious
people of the present day economic order of the society.197
This sense of frustration could also be read in various other writings of the period.
For example, on the second anniversary of independence, Dr Srikumar Banerjee
wrote in an article that it was ‘not fair to expect spectacular achievements in the
brief space of two years.’ But while referring to people’s perception, he observed
that: ‘At present a firm, unshakable conviction has seized their minds that
Government is not honestly pulling its full weight to alleviate their sufferings and
that the undeniable difficulty of the task is put forward as a cloak for incompetence
and dishonesty.’198 On 23 July 1950 a letter to the editor in The Statesman reflected
this middle-class frustration in no uncertain words:
During the period India was tied to the chariot-wheels of a foreign Power, the
Congress, because of its anti-imperialist fight and heroic struggle to achieve
freedom, had captured the imagination of the masses. The recent record of the
Congress in power has, however, disillusioned people in this subcontinent.199
On 2 August 1950 another correspondent confirmed this sense of disappointment:

‘The Congress no longer satisfies the growing political, social and economic con-
sciousness of the masses; it is not revolutionary in outlook and can attract office-
seekers only.’200 Debendranath Sen, a Congress labour leader reflected this same
mood of public disapprobation when he observed in March 1950 that the Congress
had reverted to the situation of 1917, that is, before Mahatma Gandhi had made it a
mass organization. This mass support he believed had disappeared with the death
of the Mahatma.201
As for the wider public outside the circle of the literati, writing letters to English
language dailies, an important though limited insight into their perceptions is pro-
vided by a series of letters intercepted by the Police Intelligence. These were letters
written mostly in Bengali to opposition leader Sarat Chandra Bose. We may start our
survey with Ashani Bhushan Majumdar who sent Bose a long poem in Bengali,
called ‘Naya Bharat’ (New India) which none of the literary journals, he regretted,
had the courage to publish. The poem compared free India with a field full of corpses,
with vultures flying above. The middle classes might be impressed by the deceptions
of the white khadi-clad leaders, it warned, but the workers and peasants were not.
Because, while the ‘foreign leeches’ had sucked the blood out of them, what was left
was being bitten off by the ‘indigenous mosquitoes’!202 H.L. Karmokar also thought
that ‘the so-called Congress government is running the administration to the sole
interest of Indian and foreign capitalists.’203 This was a sentiment shared also by a
group of fire servicemen and the anonymous correspondent who described himself
as the ‘One who is waiting for the return of “Netaji” [Subhas Chandra Bose]’.204 We
are frustrated by the failures of the Congress and the miserable state of our country,
wrote Ashutosh Sen, a high school teacher in Hooghly. Was it for this kind of free-
dom, he asked, that we the political workers left our colleges in 1921 and suffered all
kinds of hardships and indignities at the hands of the British?205 It was this frustration
which motivated men like Dwarka Nath Sen of Gidhani in district Midnapur, to
resign from Congress, although he was a Congress volunteer since 1920.206 There are
a host of other letters complaining about corruption, factionalism and the leaders’
love for sycophancy, although they ‘praise[d] Gandhiji at the end of every
speech’.207 We have got freedom, but what kind of freedom is this you know better,
wrote Nirod Baran Das of Ramakanta Bose Street in Calcutta. He congratulated
Bose for his spirited protests against this flawed political situation and for uphold-
ing democracy.208
This perception is also reflected very clearly in the children’s literature of the
day. On the first anniversary of Independence the most popular Bengali children’s
magazine Sishu Sathi (Children’s companion) brought out a special issue, contain-
ing articles and stories on the achievements and challenges of the first year of free-
dom. These were written by adults for the children and the youth, and it would
therefore be interesting to see what the Bengali middle class wanted their progeny
to be concerned about with regard to the present of their nation and the state. There
were many millions of Indians, an article in the special Independence Day issue
claimed, to whom this day did not bring any new message. They were the poor
workers and peasants of this country: ‘What do they care about Independence
Day?’209 Another article ‘Ek bachhar pawre’ (After one year) counted the problems
that the young nation faced in the last year of its existence: first was the Partition,
then communal violence leading to displacement of millions of people, followed by
the assassination of the Mahatma; then came the Kashmir, Junagadh and
Hyderabad affairs; then there was the rampant black market which had started since
the days of the war; but worst of all was the degeneration of and corruption within
the Congress. As the country was now independent, the days of struggle were over;
and this initiated the competition for loaves and fishes!210
This profound feeling of disappointment was also mitigated by an enduring
sense of optimism. The same issue of Sishu Sathi published a series of cartoons by
the famous Bengali cartoonist Saila Chakrabarty, entitled ‘Bharater swadhinata
sishu’ or ‘India’s infant freedom’, going through ten very challenging phases in the
very first year of his life. But in the end the caption under the last picture said,
‘Tabuo cholte hawbe’ (still we have to move forward), depicting the child freedom
with a national flag in his hand marching forward towards a bright horizon where
the sun was gradually rising.211 Chakrabarti was, however, less optimistic in his
grim cartoon ‘Maasir taan’ (Auntie’s love), drawn for the adults in the literary
magazine Masik Basumati – it shows a dark female ghost wearing a white Gandhi
hat with the words ‘Congress Government’ written on it, smothering ‘child free-
dom’ in her firm embrace.212
This note of scepticism coupled with an abiding optimism ran through a number
of essays in the volume. Kalipada Chattopadhyay, a freedom fighter, wrote in a
rather emotive tone that during the freedom movement when an old peasant had
asked him what freedom meant, he had told him that freedom was that state of
affairs where we would eat well, be properly clothed, have a shelter, live with
healthy bodies, there would be no hindrance to knowledge and no restrictions on
speech. One year on, that promise had not been fulfilled. Yet he did not lose hope,
for, as he noted in a concluding remark, one year was too short a time to overcome
the enormous problems that the British had left for us and the two wars had com-
pounded.213 Hence there were attempts to transform this sense of frustration into a
new motivation to struggle and work for constructing a new nation. As another
essayist argued, the enormity of problems that the new national government was
facing only indicated that these were not just the problems of the leaders; every cit-
izen of free India had to contribute to overcome them.214 The significance of being
free was that we were the masters of our own destiny. One year was not long enough
to resolve all the problems that the young nation faced. Even Congress was not to
be cast aside as beyond redemption. As another essayist concluded, Congress was
still the largest organization in the country. It was not that it did not have any weak-
nesses or shortcomings; but these issues were to be resolved through negotiation
and mutual understanding. We must not do anything to weaken the Congress and
lose our hard-earned freedom, as it was through the Congress that the aspirations of
the nation had always been represented.215
In other words, the essays in Sishu Sathi reflected in no uncertain terms the
ambivalence of the Bengali middle-class attitude towards the realities of freedom.
A growing sense of disappointment and resultant bitterness had not yet killed off
the hope that the initial euphoria of freedom had generated. Sishu Sathi’s message
to the nation’s youth reflected this ambivalence. On the one hand, it reminded them
that the cherished goal of ‘kishan-mazdoor-praja raj’ had not been realized – and
‘we have not yet achieved “swaraj”.’216 But on the other, it emphasized that inde-
pendence was not just for celebration, as one essay argued, it also brought respon-
sibilities of nation-building and that was the duty of the young generation.217 But it
was not to be achieved through confrontation and conflict. When the students got
involved in a protest rally at Calcutta Maidan in support of the refugees when
Nehru came to visit Calcutta, the editor of their favourite magazine warned them
not to get involved in everyday politics. Their guardians were already trying to
resolve the problems of the nation; their duty was to focus on studies in order to
develop their personalities.218 And Congress, it reminded its young readers with
limited historical memory, had fought continually for 62 years since 1885 and suc-
ceeded in winning India’s independence.219 So it deserved a chance.
This was a sentiment that resonated in popular literature for adults as well.
Sanibarer Chithi, a popular Bengali magazine, published articles that represented,
first of all, this middle-class frustration – even a sense of ‘crisis’.220 The high hopes
that the people had about freedom, as one article argued, had been dashed and this
had given rise to much frustration, anguish and protests. But the real issue was that
everybody thought that it was somebody else’s responsibility to fix the problems of
the country. In other words, we all had been shirking our own responsibilities and
blaming the government for all the maladies that the nation was currently afflicted
with.221 The middle classes were suffering, another essay argued; the peasants were
at the ultimate threshold of endurance. But the success of any social or economic
planning would in the end depend on all of us – not just on the government.222 No
one remembered, as another essay pointed out, that in the past the strength of the
Congress was in the fact that it was not a party with an identifiable ideology or fixed
membership roll. It was rather a movement, and more people followed its lead in
the struggle for freedom, than there were actual members of the party. It was
because of this openness that Congress succeeded in bringing about freedom and
ensuring the unity of the country. It had committed mistakes in the past; but it
was everybody’s responsibility to help it rectify those errors, not bring it down;
because if the Congress broke up, the country would lose its cohesiveness as
well.223 This was history reconstructed not simply to justify the present, but also to
safeguard a preferred future for the nation – preferred, because it was known and
tested. On 24 December 1949 at a cultural and literary conference in Cooch Behar,
on the eve of its merger with India, Tushar Kanti Ghosh, the editor of the Amrita
Bazar Patrika told his audience exactly that:
In our country, the future must be rooted in the past. We cannot cut ourselves
off from our moorings and start aimless voyages on uncharted seas. True
nationalism implies continuity of development … . In these days of confusing
ideologies and clashing cultures, let us not press forward without looking to the
past.224
This was surely constructing ‘the past as future’225 – a future with the Congress, an
institution that in middle-class memory and imagination was still integrally associ-
ated with the idea of freedom.
At this stage, in the context of such widespread frustration and protests there was
an idea in the public domain that if the experience of freedom could not unite the
nation or guide it into a peaceful future, the memories of the freedom struggle
could.226 This notion of history was represented in both adults’ and children’s liter-
ature where the history of the freedom struggle was presented as a grand narrative
of harmony and homogeneity. Two essays serialized in tandem in 1948 in Masik
Basumati, a popular Bengali literary magazine, presented such idealized and
mythologized histories of freedom struggle, with the Congress taking the centre
stage.227 In Sishu Sathi too a number of essays presented this history as a story of lin-
ear progress, under the guidance of the Congress, from the revolt of 1857 through
the Swadeshi movement (a political movement of 1905–08 that involved the boy-
cott of foreign-made products and the use of indigenously produced goods) and the
Gandhian movements into the dawn of freedom on 15 August 1947. This narrative
did not mention any of the dissenting voices – of the Dalits or the Muslims, for
example – that could potentially rupture this convenient story of integration. If con-
flict was mentioned, it was due to ‘Mr Jinnah’s demand for a separate state for the
Muslims’, which led to violence starting from 16 August 1946, constituting the
only ‘dark chapter of our national history’. If there was anyone else to be blamed for
this communal divide, it was the British government.228 This no doubt sounds like
an ‘appropriation of national history’ for the purposes of nation-building. This
process inevitably entails an attempt ‘to make the past harmless’.229
This ‘public use of history’requires the services of the mediators and the mass
media.230 It is not surprising that this teleological history of the freedom struggle
presented as a narrative of national integration abounded in popular films of this
period.231 Record companies like HMV brought out audio records on plays and
songs based on themes of the freedom struggle,232 and the All-India Radio had spe-
cial programmes of patriotic songs and special issues of its magazine Betar Jagat
in February 1949. It was not until the 1960s that an alternative cinema – such as
Ritwik Ghatak’s Partition trilogy (1960–62) – began to subvert this mythologized
history with the stories of struggles of refugees and the pains of Partition.233 On the
Bengali stage a new intervention came with the founding of the Bohurupee
troupe in 1948 and the beginning of the Naba Natya Andolan (the new theatre
movement).234 But in 1951–52, this critical popular culture was still in its infancy,
and the media commentators were still lamenting the lack of ‘progressiveness’ on
the Bengali stage.235
However, this mythologized past, marshalled in the service of the nation in pop-
ular culture, also came into conflict with a fractured present, as it did, spectacularly,
in the case of the film 42. Produced and directed by Hemen Gupta, it depicted the
valour and pain of non-violent resistance to British rule through the glorious history
of the Quit India movement in the district of Midnapur in the year 1942. The film
did not even make any secret of its overt political purpose of advocating national
integration. As the story ends, with the tricolour national flag taking possession of
the whole screen, a background voice tells the audience:
Wait! Please do not leave your seats. The story is over, but we have not yet told
you the purpose of telling it. We should never lose the freedom earned through
sacrifice and blood-bath. Some might say that we have not achieved real free-
dom. That might not be totally untrue. But we have at least got the chance to
achieve it. The third party has gone, but is still waiting outside the borders, to
pounce upon our country, if we make it weak by internal feuds. Who can say
that we will not be enslaved for another 200 years? But if we are united and
organized we can and shall give shape to Gandhi’s dream – the Ramrajya236 –
and make India lead the world to the path of peace and welfare again. Long live
democracy. Long live free India.
(Translation mine)
We may perhaps situate the film at the interstices ‘between memory and history’,237
where it tried to connect two temporalities, one that had gone and the one that had
just arrived. But such invocation of historical memory in post-independence India
was never unproblematic, because the past was never homogeneous, and this het-
erogeneity came to be manifested in its fractured present. The film was banned by
the West Bengal Censor Board on grounds of ‘incitement to violence’. It showed
excessive police violence – but this was violence by the colonial police. Yet, it was
alleged that it might still ‘bring the Police into disrepute’, because the same police-
men who were shown to be taunting, tormenting and torturing the Gandhian satya-
grahis were now in the service of the government of free India – and allegedly
dealing with the communist insurgents in the same way. In November 1949 the film
was passed by the Bombay Board of Censors and the Amrita Bazar Patrika in an
editorial strongly urged for its release in West Bengal as well. ‘A film like “42”’, it
argued, was ‘likely to go a long way in reminding our countrymen of what the
Congress has done and suffered for them and inspiring our young hopefuls with the
Congress ideals of service and sacrifice.’238 The West Bengal government finally
released the film in August 1951 shortly before the election, as the compulsions of
electoral mass politics, under universal adult franchise, made it necessary to invoke
that glorious past of resistance and sacrifice. History was now in great demand to
invent a homogeneous past for a pluralist nation.
Therefore, it was also the period when we find the beginning of the ‘public life of
history’.239 On 26 December 1951 the Education Minister Maulana Azad told pro-
fessional historians at the twenty-second session of the Indian Record Commission
at Jaipur that it was necessary to write a ‘true history’ of the nation, for all its previ-
ous histories had been written either by the ‘protagonists of empire’ or by ‘patriots’.
But this ‘dispassionate and objective’ history which he envisaged240 could hardly
afford to be value free. For, nationalism had made it absolutely imperative that the
shared cultural heritage had to be ‘congruent with the organizational form of the
state’.241 In other words, the nation-state had to deploy historical scholarship into
public use to construct a past or a ‘true history’ of the nation, which indeed had a
heterogeneous past and still lived in heterogeneous time.
To sum up our discussion, during the initial years of independence what we wit-
ness in the public life of West Bengal is an animated dialogue between the colonial
past and the post-colonial present. The pluralist nature of that past, that is, of the
struggle for freedom, came to manifest itself in the contested history of post-
colonial politics of nation-building. As different groups of people participated in
the battle against colonial rule, they had different expectations about freedom. And
when freedom did not fulfil their hopes, they responded differently to the unfolding
realities of post-colonial India, and invented different enemies who were endan-
gering their freedom. The responses of various groups of people, informed by their
diverse understandings of citizen’s rights and varying perceptions of freedom,
often collided openly. What seemed like a legitimate protest in the eyes of the work-
ers and peasants, became disorderly behaviour in the parlance of a new national
government led by the Congress. Suddenly catapulted into the role of a ruling party
and beleaguered by problems that it was ill-prepared to handle, the Congress pre-
ferred to use the same tools of repression borrowed from their previous colonial
masters.
This meant a continuity of colonial modes of governance. The colonial notion of
sovereignty was based on the idea of its indivisibility – it could not be shared with
anyone else – and therefore, the government was unassailable, morally or politi-
cally. In 1947, with the coming of freedom, this was supposed to have been
replaced by the notion of popular sovereignty. Yet, in the Congress understanding
of its principles, it did not necessarily mean public accountability; it meant that the
people’s government was beyond criticism or reproach, except during the election
year. Having created a constitutional democracy in 1950, it expected – nay,
demanded – a ‘constitutional patriotism’242 from its citizenry, which entailed
unquestioned loyalty to the nation-state, with the right to criticize the national gov-
ernment only through the legitimate method of a quinquennial election.243 This
made everyday democracy – or what Nehru described as ‘satyagraha over day-to-
day problems’ – unacceptable, although this was quite a legitimate form of protest
during the days of the freedom struggle under the leadership of the Congress.244
Freedom in India thus seemed to have delegitimized the right to democratic
protest.245
Yet, the Congress was still the mantle bearer of the legacy of the freedom strug-
gle and the beneficiary of its inheritance. So there was a lingering optimism, par-
ticularly among the middle classes, that the nation could still achieve its desired
consensus through its leadership, as it had successfully fought against foreign rule
in the past. But the problem of the Congress was in dealing with its own hetero-
geneity and in transforming a broad-based liberation movement into a disciplined
political party, capable of providing a stable government and running the country.
The growing discontentment of the middle class against the indiscipline and dis-
honesty of the Congress leaders and their yearning for ethical good government
ultimately pushed them towards the Left. But that leftward drift took quite a while.
We will discuss that history in the next chapters.
3 Congress Raj in a ‘problem
province’
Congress in Bengal
On the second anniversary of Independence on 15 August 1949, Shankarrao Deo,
the then General Secretary of the Indian National Congress, in an article in the
Calcutta daily Amrita Bazar Patrika expressed his hope that: ‘Future historians
while writing about this period of “transition” and the part played by the Congress
during these crucial times in the history of the nation will, I am confident, give the
Congress its due.’1 Historians writing on this period have agreed with him, as
indeed it is difficult to ignore the crucial role played by the Congress during this
important time. Bipan Chandra and his colleagues have acknowledged that: ‘The
Indian National Congress was then the most important political organization in
India at independence … . It enjoyed immense prestige and legitimacy as the leader
and heir of the national movement …’2 But this was a broad-based liberation move-
ment, incorporating people with different political ideologies and expectations,
united by the common objective of driving out the British. So when that common
foe was removed and India achieved independence, the Congress faced the chal-
lenge of reinventing itself as a political party. From the 1930s onward, it has been
pointed out by many historians, two distinct trends were emerging within the
Congress, envisioning freedom in two different ways. One was the Gandhian trend
which expected freedom to take the shape of an ethical and moral transformation of
the polity through social service, self-help and a village-based economy. And the
other was the Nehruvian concept of modernity that reposed its faith in the state as
an agent of change through democratic secularism, scientific innovation and active
social engineering for the welfare of the people. It is often believed that there was
eventually a synthesis of the two resulting in a consensus – often retrospectively
identified as the ‘Nehruvian consensus’ – which spoke of a new hybrid Indian
modernity that was rooted in Indian tradition.3
This chapter will look at the role of the Congress in West Bengal, which many at
that time considered to be a ‘problem province’.4 It will argue that this consensus
was never without its internal tension as the negotiations between the two trends
mentioned above were not over yet, although the Congress was already being
claimed as the ‘party of consensus’.5 It was this internal ideological battle – in addi-
tion to personal and regional rivalries for power and position – that led to intense
faction fighting which featured so prominently in the post-independence history of
72 Congress Raj in a ‘problem province’
the Congress. It will also argue that, beleaguered by problems of internal hetero-
geneity and the challenges of transforming a broad-based freedom movement into
a disciplined political party, the Congress chose to rule with coercive power. Partha
Chatterjee has argued that at the ‘moment of arrival’ of the nation-state, Congress
nationalism through Nehruvian leadership expounded a ‘discourse of order’.6 This
chapter will show how that discourse was also vehemently contested from within
the nationalist frame and beyond.
It is true that ever since the Government of India Act of 1935 opened up possi-
bilities for the Indians to rule in the provinces, the Congress, by forming govern-
ments in eight provinces, learned the art of ruling. But the Congress was never able
to form a government in Bengal, which was a Muslim-majority province. It was

only when the Partition was voted by the Legislative Assembly on 20 June 1947,
creating a Hindu-majority province in West Bengal, that it was decided that for the
western part of the province a ‘Hindu Ministry’ would take charge and accordingly
on 3 July a new ministry under the stewardship of the Gandhian Congressman Dr
Prafulla Chandra Ghosh took the oath of office. Its formation was surrounded in
controversy, as Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherji of the Hindu Mahasabha was not taken
in. But it also generated a lot of interest and enthusiasm among the Hindus of West
Bengal – it signified to many of them the ‘elimination of Muslim League domina-
tion from West Bengal’. Others were sceptical about its effectiveness, given the
enormity of the tasks, and its limited power.7 Nevertheless, the ministers received a
warm welcome in the districts wherever they went.8
As for the administrative structure, the Governor of Bengal, F.J. Burrows, wor-
ried about the repercussions of the decisions of the Boundary Commission, and
about the future of his servicemen in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and the Police.
He was however reassured by Ghosh that the services of some of the European
police officers would be retained at ‘existing terms’. Burrows found it heartening
in view of what he described as the ‘continuous struggle to prevent the cauldron of
Bengal from boiling over’.9 He was certainly further pleased when the Government
of India decided to retain the steel frame of the ICS. The Deputy Prime Minister
Vallabhbhai Patel described the ICS officers as ‘patriots’, without whose services
it would be difficult to maintain the freedom of the country. Some of his contem-
poraries found such platitudes hard to swallow!10 In Bengal all the European offi-
cers chose to retire and Ghosh absorbed into his administration all the 59 Hindu ICS
officers who had opted to stay on in West Bengal.11
As freedom arrived on 15 August 1947, Ghosh took a fresh oath of office and
within a few weeks hand-picked the members of the Congress Assembly Party and
his cabinet.12 All of them were his trusted comrades and most of them had no prior
administrative experience, as the Congress had never been in the government
before. The Congress High Command later recognized the fact that since there had
been no fresh election, these ministers had ‘no direct mandate from the people’ and
were in fact ‘the legatees of the British’.13 Yet, this ministry-making and allocation
of portfolios caused great dissension within the Congress ranks – not just in West
Bengal, but in every other province of India. The Congress President Pattabhi
Sitaramayya noted with angst:
Congress Raj in a ‘problem province’ 73
It is widely noticed that with the formation of Ministries the unity of the
Congress organization and its harmony have been disturbed and those who
have been left out of Ministerships have formed themselves into opposite
groups in the organisation itself.
He described this scramble for the ‘gadi’ (chair) as both ‘morally reprehensible and
politically dangerous’.14
In West Bengal there were three main contending groups within the Congress:
the Khadi (or Abhoy Ashram) or the Gandhian group, the Jugantar group consist-
ing of former revolutionaries, and the Hooghly group which also incorporated the
Burdwan and Midnapur groups.15 This situation was further complicated by the
arrival from East Bengal of a number of prominent Congress leaders, who wished
to continue their previous dominance and staked their claim to be rehabilitated in
suitable positions of leadership within the West Bengal Congress.16 Rumours about
a possible reshuffling of the Ghosh ministry were rife within a week after the swear-
ing-in ceremony and one of the ministers, Nikunja Behari Maiti – a Mahishya
leader from Midnapur – resigned within a fortnight.17 Ultimately, as a result of
these factional rivalries, on 15 January 1948 Ghosh – an East Bengali leader from
the Khadi group – had to resign as 25 members of the Congress Assembly Party
wanted a change of leadership.18 He was replaced by Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy – not
associated with any particular group. He promised ‘a more dynamic administra-
tion’;19 yet the nature and experience level of the new cabinet remained the same.
Nalini Ranjan Sarkar, the Finance Minster in the Roy cabinet, admitted in the
Assembly in 1951:
Suddenly called upon to shoulder responsibilities which practically bore no

link with our past experience, we were, so to speak, amateurs in the art of
Government. If we have at times faltered, may I claim, that we have never
lacked the zeal to succeed.20
The government did indeed falter and did not know how to cope with the situation
and formulate its own policies that would be different from those of the previous
regime. Gandhi, in one of his regular prayer meetings in October 1947, had cau-
tioned the Congress ministers that the policies they so detested during the British
period should not be repeated in their own regime.21 But faced with civil unrest
from almost day one of its rule, the Congress government in West Bengal under
P.C. Ghosh chose to follow the familiar and well-trodden path of its colonial pred-
ecessor. In the very first session of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly, while
responding to a peasant rally of 21 November 1947, Ghosh laid down the new rules
in a language of discipline and order:
Under the altered conditions of today, old mental habits and thoughts must be
abandoned. The state is ours and it is for us to build it afresh on new founda-
tions. We have won our independence through a long disciplined struggle; we
have to preserve, cherish and develop our hard-won liberty through even
stricter discipline. Let our young men and political workers of all shades
remember that every act of indiscipline, every flouting of the authority of the
nation’s own Government, every violent act, however small and insignificant
it may appear at first sight, is a blow on our new-born freedom …’22 (Emphasis
added)
In this very first session of the Assembly he introduced the Bengal Special Powers
(Second Amendment) Ordinance, 1947 and the Bengal Disturbed Areas
Ordinance, 1947 – both of which gave the authorities extraordinary powers to deal
with the law and order situation.23 In November 1947 in a notification the govern-
ment banned all ‘sit-in’ strikes or satyagraha. And then it introduced what became
notorious as the West Bengal Special Powers Bill – later renamed the West Bengal
Security Bill – proposing detention without trial for up to six months. It actually
intended to legitimize the previous ordinance, originally issued by an earlier
Muslim League government, under which, between June and December 1947,
1,486 people had already been arrested.24
The Legislative Assembly proceedings of this period provide interesting read-
ing, as the Gandhian premier Ghosh introduced and defended the bill and a com-
munist Jyoti Basu opposed it clause by clause. ‘It seeks to perpetuate’, Basu
cautioned the Assembly, ‘the hated Defence of India Act of an alien Government.
It is contrary to democracy and is in clear violation of all that Congress has stood for
and fought for so many years.’ He even quoted from Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery
of India to extol the values of democracy in a free India. But when he reminded the
premier that ‘detention without trial is contrary to the proclaimed policy of the
Indian National Congress’, the latter’s cryptic reply was that it was ‘irrelevant
here’. By way of responding to Basu’s invocation of the past, Ghosh said: ‘I want
to forget the past. I want to live in the present and in the future.’ After independence
many people did ‘not differentiate between independence and license’ and wanted
to have their way through violence. If that happened, ‘what is the remedy for
me,’ said the self-professed Gandhian, ‘except meeting that violence with greater
violence?’25
Indeed, Ghosh was selectively forgetting and remembering his past. While for-
getting the challenges and ideologies of the Gandhian non-violent nationalist strug-
gle of which he was a proud hero, he was invoking the familiar colonial modes of
governance, which he had so long opposed. The days of the Congress as a party in
opposition were now over, and the days of Congress as a party in power had begun;
the Congress therefore had to speak in a language of discipline and order. Abul
Hashem, the former Muslim League leader, cautioned the government against
exactly such a mentality. He too wanted to live in a future mode, but in a different
way:
If by independence we simply mean the stepping into the shoes of the past
administrators and rulers, if by independence we simply mean a change from
the White to the Brown, then we think we shall be very much mistaken … .
Therefore if ordinances, extraordinary measures or violence, guns and atom
bombs have been used in the past for maintaining law and order, it does not go
to prove conclusively that in future also these things will have to be used.26
Outside the Assembly, the main opposition to the bill came from Sarat Bose. In a
number of public meetings he promised to fight to end this ‘indigenous despotism’,
or threat to civil liberties, which he argued was a device to muffle all critical voices
against the Congress government. There were two major public meetings in
Calcutta, one on 5 December at Hazra Park and the other on 6 December at
Shradhdhananda Park, where prominent opposition leaders including Sarat Bose,
Jyoti Basu, Anila Debi (Communist Party of India) and Tridib Chhaudhuri
(Revolutionary Socialist Party) spoke vehemently against the bill.27 There were
violent student protests against the bill in front of the Assembly on 8 December and
then again on the 10th when the police opened fire, killing one person and injuring
30 others.28 The person killed was a paramedic waiting inside an ambulance and the
people injured were ‘innocent’ people, according to the Prime Minister’s own
statement in the Assembly. For the opposition leaders this was enough evidence of
the fact that the police were shooting indiscriminately. Such an incident, that is, the
police firing from the Assembly building on an unarmed group of protesters during
the very first session of the Legislative Assembly, had never occurred even during
the worst days of repression under the British. The Prime Minister, however,
defended his police, who he thought had to open fire as ‘a last resort’, and despite
these unfortunate casualties, in his view these very acts of defiance and unruly pub-
lic protests provided ‘sufficient justification … for bringing this Bill before the
House.’29 But on 11 December, in view of the mounting public protest, the
Assembly was adjourned till early January. The Congress then launched a vigorous
campaign to generate public support for the bill. Nehru came to Calcutta as a part of
this public relations campaign, but his meeting at the Maidan could not proceed
because of a stampede and the following disturbances.30 Later in a press conference
at the Governor’s House on 17 December he lent his support to the bill in view of
West Bengal’s position as a frontier province, arguing that this bill was in fact much
milder than the ones proposed in other provinces.31
But a more interesting defence of the bill came in the form of a tortuous argument
about popular sovereignty. As mentioned above, Ghosh thought that ‘every flout-
ing of the authority of the nation’s own Government’ was ‘a blow on our new-born
freedom’. At a press conference on 15 December Vallabhbhai Patel argued in the
same vein that the Congress ministry in Bengal was elected by the people; ‘so any
attempt to launch a satyagraha against that ministry appeared to be “duragraha”’
(a bad or negative force or desire).32 This was indeed a novel concept of popular
sovereignty that delegitimized everyday protests, and the idea was homogenized
by a nationalist press. Anandabazar Patrika wrote an editorial arguing that our own
national government should not be evaluated in the same way we scrutinized and
judged the British government. The citizens of the country had a duty to come for-
ward with an attitude of cooperation to help and rectify its mistakes.33 This concept
was again emphasized at a public meeting in Maddox Square in Calcutta on
22 December 1947, where the main speaker Benoyendra Prasad Bagchi, while
speaking in support of the Security Bill, argued that people should not look at any
act of this government with suspicion. Because it was not a foreign government; its
interests were also the interests of the people.34
On 17 December Suresh Banerji, the deputy leader of the Congress in West
Bengal, claimed that he had an interview with Gandhi in New Delhi and that he had
given his blessings to the bill.35 It is difficult to verify the truth of this claim; but if
it was true, then Gandhi must have changed significantly from the days when he
launched his nationwide satyagraha against the Rowlatt Bill. ‘It is impossible for
me or the West Bengal public to forget that Gandhiji’s opposition to the Rowlatt
Bill was uncompromising’, Sarat Bose expressed his confoundedness at a press
conference on 15 December.36 Five days later at a public meeting at Deshbandhu

Park he reminded his audience – about 3,000 strong – of that history of resistance
and vowed to defy Gandhi, Nehru and their fiat to force a withdrawal of the bill.37
There were a series of public meetings in Calcutta in December organized by vari-
ous opposition parties to persuade the government to withdraw the ‘undemocratic’
bill. Attendance at these meetings varied from 75 to 3,000. Leaflets were distrib-
uted describing the government as ‘fascist’ and the bill a ploy to secure the ‘minis-
terial guddies’ (chairs).38 There were also various protest meetings in the districts,
but as a political worker from Murshidabad complained to Sarat Bose, these were
never reported by a partisan press.39 A ‘Security Bill protest day’ was observed on
3 January 1948, with public meetings held at various places.40 But a general strike
called on that day by the communist-controlled Bengal Provincial Trade Union
Congress was a failure, except in some jute mills.41 On the other hand, a meeting
was held at Calcutta Maidan on that same day where the main speaker Vallabhbhai
Patel spoke in support of the bill.42
In spite of all the opposition, the bill was passed on 15 January, with the only con-
cession to the opposition being a reduction of the period of detention without trial
from six to three months. But within these three months, the government could take
the papers related to any particular prisoner to a High Court judge and ask for fur-
ther detention not exceeding a period of nine months. Police officers were given the
power to search or arrest any person without a warrant on mere suspicion of their
being involved in subversive activities.43 The Gandhian Prime Minister assured the
House that: ‘As a believer in non-violence I do feel that this kind of legislation is not
good, but it is a necessary evil.’ He promised that this act would not be used against
‘legitimate trade union movements and kishan [peasant] movements’.44 On the
same day he resigned from Prime Ministership, which was taken over sometime
later by B.C. Roy. According to one report the rift occurred on the two amendments
allowed by Ghosh to the Security bill – one reducing the period of detention from
six to three months, and the other allowing review of the cases of Security prison-
ers by a High Court judge. Those who did not like the amendments – deemed as
concessions to opposition, but regarded by many as the only safeguards for civil
liberties – withdrew their support for Ghosh. He lost the leadership battle to Roy –
known as more of a hardliner – by four votes.45
What emerges from the debate over the Security bill is that the Congress leaders
and the press that supported them had been trying to normalize a discourse of
freedom in which there was a conflation of the party, nation and the state. In other
words, the Congress was the inheritor of the legacy of the nationalist movement,
and therefore whoever opposed the national government run by the party became
by definition an enemy of the nation and an enemy of the state. Critiquing the gov-
ernment thus meant endangering the hard-earned freedom, i.e. the sovereignty of
the newly born nation-state.
It is interesting that this urgency to deal with the opposition with a heavy hand
came at a time when the Congress was internally very weak because of bitter fac-
tion fighting. There were charges of corruption and in-fighting, as the resignation
of P.C. Ghosh remains a testimony to that state of affairs. His ministry was vulner-
able from its very inception, as its existence was threatened by factional rivalry.
First of all, Ghosh being a leader from East Bengal faced the hostility and jealousy
of those from the West.46 Secondly, the Jugantar group under the leadership of
Surendra Mohan Ghosh from around September 1947 sought to destabilize his
ministry in order to take over power from the Khadi group.47 The Hooghly group,
under the leadership of Dhirendra Narayan Mukherji and Prafulla Chandra Sen,
was also unhappy with the Ghosh ministry, which they alleged had been packed
with the Prime Minister’s ‘personal team’ and did not include any prominent mem-
ber of their group, except only two, Kalipada Mukherjee and Bhupati Majumdar,
who were loyal to Ghosh. So they too planned to get rid of the ministry dominated
by the Khadi group and the East Bengalis.48 It was widely rumoured, testified by his
own personal secretary, that Ghosh became a victim not only of factional rivalry,
but also of corruption and the pressure of black-marketeers and ‘big business’.49
Ghosh himself made an allegation that he was removed from office through a con-
spiracy because he refused to include Gajanan Khaitan, a Marwari businessman, in
his cabinet, although the latter had the backing of Delhi.50 In the end, B.C. Roy won
the leadership race as he got the support of the Hooghly group, the Jugantar group
and a section of the Khadi group – the latter repenting the decision within a
few days.51
Public opinion in West Bengal was astounded by this change of government. The
Statesman wrote an editorial with the caption: ‘A Good Man Goes’.52 A frustrated
‘Commoner’ in a letter to the editor in The Statesman wrote in despair:
Living in Bengal many of us know of Dr Ghosh and Dr Roy. Dr Ghosh belongs

to the common man, Dr Roy to the other group.
During these days of crises when food is scarce, public health deteriorates,
profiteering is rife and the strife between capital and labour is acute, we the
common people cannot but look upon the change with misgiving.53
Referring to the change of government, in a private conversation with the British

Deputy High Commissioner in Calcutta, Sir B.L. Mitter, a Judge of the Calcutta
High Court, offered an apt summary of the situation: ‘The relatively honest but
inefficient group are being replaced by a relatively efficient but dishonest group.’54
There can be no better description of the affairs of the Congress party and its gov-
ernment in 1948.
Roy expanded his new cabinet from nine to twelve members; four members of
the old cabinet were retained, while Ghosh, though invited, refused to join the new
ministry. Roy promised to give West Bengal a ‘dynamic’ administration, and char-
acterized the previous government as ‘static’.55 There was an important change in
the constitution of the cabinet in March, when Kiron Shankar Roy, who was until
now the leader of the Congress in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, was taken in
as the Minister of Police, much to the disappointment of certain factions within the
West Bengal Congress.56 But greater trouble for the Roy cabinet was brewing, as
factional alignments were recast within a few months. On 23 April the media
reported that 25 members of the Congress Assembly Party had written to Roy,
demanding a reconstitution of the ministry. 57 Its signatories included three minis-

ters, three Parliamentary Secretaries and Amar Krishna Ghosh, the Chief Whip.
And it demanded a leadership change:
As the present Ministry, which includes outsiders, is not essentially Congress

in character and as the Congress cause and ideals are suffering, … and as, fur-
ther, it is not sufficiently broad-based, we consider it essential that it should be
reconstituted under the leadership of Mr S.M. [Surendra Mohan] Ghosh,
President, BPCC.58
Roy had to convene a meeting of the Congress Assembly Party on 5 May at his
Wellington Street residence; this venue, of course, the dissidents did not like.59
But the ministerial crisis was resolved at this meeting, as 22 of the original sig-
natories to the letter60 decided to withdraw it, because, as Debendranath Sen, the
Secretary of the Congress Assembly Party, said in a written statement, ‘the
Congress Assembly Party … [was] almost equally divided and no stable and strong
Ministry … [could] function effectively in the circumstances’. This conciliatory
gesture was followed by 30 members of the party submitting a statement express-
ing full confidence in Roy’s leadership. However, the situation was not without its
anomalies. Two of the thirty supporters of Roy, Maharajah Sir Uday Chand Mahtab
Bahadur of Burdwan and Prabhudayal Himatsingka (Minister) – a wealthy non-
Bengali businessman – were not members of the Congress, while four other minis-
ters, Nalini Ranjan Sarkar, Kiran Shankar Roy, Prafulla Chandra Sen and Rai
Harendra Nath Chowdhuri were not elected members of the Legislative Assembly,
and therefore were not legitimate members of the Assembly Party.61 But these
constitutional niceties were of importance only to the dissidents. On the following
day, Roy announced his new cabinet, which included all the previous ministers
except three: Bhupati Majumdar, Hem Chandra Naskar and Mohini Mohan
Burman. Majumdar had resigned earlier, was offered a seat, but he declined to
accept it. Naskar and Burman, both representing the Scheduled Castes, paid
the price for signing the letter of no-confidence. Roy also received the resignation
of A.K. Ghosh as Chief Whip, and so the humbling of the dissident group was
complete.62 But this became a ministry without any representation of the Scheduled
Castes; so a month later both Burman and Naskar had to be taken in.63
This was the third time in eight months since August 1947 that the West Bengal
Ministry was reconstituted. The defeat of the rebellion, it was widely expected,
would strengthen the ministry and give more stability to West Bengal politics.64 In
August 1948 there was a change of guard in the West Bengal Provincial Congress
Committee (WBPCC) as well, with S.C. Banerji being elected the new President,
defeating S.M. Ghosh; and Atulya Ghosh of Hooghly becoming the new Secretary.
But by this time the factional formations had changed, for Banerji’s name was pro-
posed by P.C. Sen (of the Hooghly group) and seconded by P.C. Ghosh (an East
Bengali of the Khadi group) – the former a B.C. Roy loyalist and the latter his arch
opponent. On the other hand, Ghosh’s name was proposed by Sushil Chatterjee of
West Dinajpur and seconded by the Police Minister Kiran Shankar Roy.65 In other
words, arguably it was not just the ideology, but personal equations, which played
a large role in these Congress group politics. And in this game of politicking the
Hooghly group was not the only villain and the East Bengalis innocent victims –
every group was participating with adroit dexterity.
It became evident that as the Congress came to power, people who were not so
prominent or were at best peripheral to the Congress leadership structures during
the days of the freedom struggle began to take on more powerful roles in matters of
governance. This brought in clashes of personalities as well as ideology. With
many non-elected ministers, the representative character of this cabinet and its alle-
giance to Congress ideals became suspect even in the eyes of the ordinary
Congressmen. The popularity of the government was certainly waning, as ‘the
party in power proceed(ed) to make and unmake Ministries, like the Praetorian
Guards of Rome’, as a letter to the editor in The Statesman put it.66 Another letter
reminded the government that it ‘should rise above faction[s] and exercise its pow-
ers for the welfare of the people at large, and not in the interests of a particular group
or party.’67 The Congress leadership remained in a state of denial for a long time,
and refused to recognize its internal problems or accept its growing unpopularity.
But it was soon to get a serious wake-up call.
South Calcutta by-election

The Gandhian Congress backbenchers often tried to remind their leaders in the
Assembly that Congress was moving further away from its ideal of a ‘krishak-
praja-mazdoor raj’ and this made the Congress unpopular.68 The continuous
arrests of political opponents without trial and heavy-handed dealing with political
protesters raised legitimate concerns about the absence of civil liberties. On 26 May
1948 a group of women demonstrators congregated in front of the Secretariat build-
ing in Calcutta and demanded the release of political prisoners and restoration of
civil liberties. They wanted to see the Police Minister who refused to meet them,
and then the crowd was dispersed by firing tear gas and repeated charges by the
mounted police.69 Such high-handed treatment of political protesters, the most fla-
grant example of which was the firing incident of 27 April 1949, involving the
death of seven protest marchers, including five women,70 brought in a stream of
criticism, and this time not just from the left-wing politicians whom the Prime
Minister could conveniently dismiss as part of a communist conspiracy. So now, in
early May, Roy had to announce the long overdue by-election in the South Calcutta
constituency, which was to be held on 12 June 1949 and this election eventually
proved to be an important benchmark in the political history of those early uncer-
tain years of freedom.
During the initial years of freedom the popularity of the Congress was never
properly tested. As we have mentioned already, not all members of this government
were elected. It did face two by-elections, but those were in the very early months
of freedom, when it could still cash in on the memories of the nationalist movement.
In November 1947, the new premier Prafulla Ghosh had a landslide victory in the
by-election in Birbhum rural general constituency, where he polled 80 per cent of
votes, convincingly defeating his Hindu Mahasabha rival, Sibkinkar Mukherjee.71

In this by-election even the communists supported Ghosh against a Mahasabha
candidate.72 The next premier Bidhan Roy also took office when he was not an
elected member of the Assembly, and later he was returned not through a general
constituency, but through the Graduate constituency vacated by Shyama Prasad
Mukherji.73 Next, his non-elected Home Minister Kiran Shankar Roy faced an
uphill task in a by-election in September 1948. He won from the Malda-
cum-Dinajpur constituency, but a large number of votes were also cast against the
official Congress candidate. To a large extent this was the result of Congress fac-
tionalism, as a local candidate had been ignored in favour of Roy for nomination.
So during the election campaign, even the President of the Malda District Congress
committee was found campaigning in favour of the rebel candidate Ramhari Roy.74
The third by-election in South Calcutta proved even tougher for Congress from
the very beginning, as Sarat Chandra Bose, a veteran Congress leader now turned
its bitterest critic, announced his candidature, representing his newly formed
Socialist Republican Party. The Congress on the other hand nominated Suresh
Chandra Das, the President of the South Calcutta District Congress Committee as
its official candidate. There were in total six candidates, but one of them, an inde-
pendent, later withdrew in favour of Das.75 In reality however, it became a direct
contest between Bose and Das.
All the leftist parties, including the communists, decided to support Bose. For left-
ist politicians this election became a ‘National issue’, and as Leela Roy wrote to
Forward Bloc High Command, much depended on its outcome.76 Letters intercepted
by the Police intelligence suggest that there was a groundswell of support for Bose as
a leader who could stem the rot set off by a corrupt and autocratic Congress. One of
them wrote: ‘It is a great joy to all countrymen that the only spotless leader is decid-
ing to get to Assembly.’77 Bose was then ill and convalescing at a nursing home in
Switzerland, and there was a suspicion that Congress had possibly taken advantage of
his absence by announcing the election at precisely that time. Yet from Switzerland,
Bose issued his election manifesto giving a call for battle against those whom he con-
sidered to be the prime enemies of freedom. The concluding paragraph of his mani-
festo clearly indicated what he meant by freedom and who its enemies were:
The very existence of West Bengal is at stake; her economy is in perilous

condition. If West Bengal is to live, if we of and in West Bengal have to win
freedom of speech, freedom of association and assembly, freedom from the
galling restrictions on civil liberties, freedom from want, freedom to live
cleaner, healthier and happier lives, freedom from the yoke of domestic fac-
tions and of capitalist and vested interests, if we are to build a New and Greater
Bengal and a New and Greater India, the fight has to be carried on all fronts,
including the legislative front. … I could leave my candidature and its success
entirely in your hands in the fullest confidence that you would do all in your
power to defeat the reactionary forces that might be arrayed against me in my
absence, backed though they might be, by ‘big business’.78
Even in his absence a vigorous election campaign was launched. His candidature
was supported by a wide range of social and political organizations and a ‘People’s
Election Campaign Committee’ was formed. It issued a joint statement, which
reflected a widely shared sense of loss of freedom and therefore will be worth quot-
ing here at length:
The Roy ministry is on the dock in the South Calcutta by-election and we con-
sider it the task of the masses to express their clear verdict by defeating the
Congress candidate in this election. The shooting down of women, children,
workers and peasants, the illegalization of strikes, struggles and working-class
organizations, the mass retrenchment of workers and employees and the attack
on their standard of life, the unashamed support to profiteering and blackmar-
keting by allowing soaring of prices and inflation, the denial of land and ade-
quate wages to peasants and agricultural labourers, the transformation of
universities and educational institutions into police-controlled prison-houses –
in short the naked rule of the capitalist class through the Roy Congress
Ministry of West Bengal has roused the indignation of every freedom-loving
citizen of Calcutta.79
Public meetings were held at various places from Ballygunge to Tollygunge, with
middle-class and working-class participation, where the speakers harped on the fal-
tering promises of ‘krishak-praja-mazdoor raj’.80 A public meeting at Calcutta
Maidan on 4 June attracted a crowd of 10,000, despite the rain; other meetings were
addressed by such front-ranking leftist leaders as Soumyendranath Tagore.81 A stu-
dents’ meeting at Hazra Park on 8 June adopted a resolution condemning the ‘so-
called nationalist Press’ for its ‘slanderous propaganda’ against Sarat Bose and the
people were urged to boycott such newspapers.82 This is significant, because the
leftist propaganda also imaginatively used nationalist history by frequently using
the names of Netaji and the Indian National Army, and General Mohan Singh’s
statement was used to endorse Bose’s candidature against the Congress, ‘the party
that betrayed the people’.83
On the other end, all the Congress stalwarts intervened on Das’ behalf, issuing
statements and invoking the past glory of the Congress, reminding the electorate
how this party had contributed to the achievement of freedom for the country.
Atulya Ghosh, the President of the WBPCC, reminded the voters in a press
statement that Congress itself symbolized freedom and Das was a self-sacrificing
freedom fighter. Vallabhbhai Patel condemned Bose for trying to destroy the tree,
that is the Congress, which had once given him protective shelter. He should have
learnt lessons from the experiences of China, Malay and Burma.84 The
Anandabazar Patrika was openly partisan in the South Calcutta by-election in
favour of the Congress candidate. It published all the various statements of
Congress stalwarts in favour of Das’s candidature, and in the form of news items
published reports overtly preaching why people should not vote for Sarat Bose.
From 9 June onwards it carried a front page notice every day – not a paid advertise-
ment – urging voters to vote for the Congress in order to stop indiscipline and
destruction. One important aspect of the Congress electioneering was that, while
there were numerous public meetings in favour of Bose’s candidature, there were
hardly any for the Congress candidate. The Congress propaganda was almost
entirely through the media and this spoke hugely about the state of the party
organization.85
The only important election meeting that the Congress organized at Deshapriya
Park on Sunday 5 June was broken up by the leftists, allegedly because disparaging
remarks were made about Netaji and here a national flag was also reported to have
been burnt. There were, however, conflicting reports as to whether it was a national
flag or a Congress flag. It was followed by attacks on Congress party offices and on
one occasion – it was alleged – Sucheta Kripalani was ‘abused, beaten and deliber-
ately insulted’.86 The communists were mostly blamed for the violence at
Deshapriya Park. After breaking up the meeting they set fire to cars and trucks
belonging to the Congress; and later at night a furniture shop owned by the
Congress candidate was burned down.87 The following day a statement issued with
the signatures of ‘six leftist leaders’ condemned the violent action; whoever was
responsible for disrupting the meeting, it said, ‘have done the greatest disservice to
the cause of the people.’88 The tide of violence did not end there. On Wednesday (8
June) the Presidency Jail became the site of serious disturbances when the political
prisoners held under the Security Act refused to go inside the lock-up. The jail
authorities opened fire and used tear gas and lathis, injuring 20 prisoners; one of
them died later of his injuries.89 In Dum Dum jail too, there was firing on 10 June,
killing three prisoners and injuring eight others.90 The day before the election, that
is 11 June, 356 communist political prisoners started a hunger strike inside differ-
ent jails in the province to draw public attention to the absence of civil liberties
under the present regime.91
The violence, however, does not take away the significance of the result of the
South Calcutta by-election, as Bose, still in his sickbed in Switzerland, won a spec-
tacular victory, getting 19,030 votes as against 5,780 for Das.92 Surely the old myth
that even a lamp-post could win an election with a Congress ticket had passed its
use-by date. Sarat Bose sent his acceptance message from Switzerland, vowing to
build India as ‘a sovereign socialist republic, independent of the influences of the
British Commonwealth’.93 Later, on his return from Europe, at a press conference
in Poona on 29 July he lamented that not even during the British regime was there
such a blatant suppression of civil liberties in India.94 For him, the real freedom
was now to be achieved through united leftist action, a theme we will return to in a
short while.
Congress factionalism
This electoral defeat was a shock to the Congress, but not entirely out of the blue for
many. As a letter to the editor in The Nation pointed out, while the Congress candi-
date and his supportive media harked on the past legacy and sacrifices of the
Congress, the voters attached ‘much greater importance’ to their ‘present activities
than to those [sic] of the past’.95 As another correspondent wrote in Amrita Bazar
Patrika, this defeat was inevitable because, ‘those in charge of the Congress organ-
ization of this province are only thinking of office and power …’96 There is a file in
the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) papers containing numerous letters of
complaint about the composition of district and subdivisional Congress commit-
tees, charges of defalcation of funds and forgery of papers by local Congress lead-
ers in West Bengal, all dated in the second half of 1948.97 But the Congress High
Command chose to ignore them, and B.C. Roy in a sharply worded letter to Nehru
refused to take the defeat as a mandate against his government,98 and on the eve of
his departure for Europe to treat his failing eye-sight blamed internal sabotage by
the East Bengalis inside the Congress leadership for this electoral debacle.99 Nalini
Ranjan Sarkar even complained to Nehru against ‘Surendra Mohan Ghosh and his
group, who were in charge of the election’.100 Nehru was less complacent and not
interested in the blame game. Although he accepted his friend B.C. Roy’s argument
that the South Calcutta result was not the people’s verdict against the Congress, he
emphasized the need for more mass contact campaigns in order to ‘make the
people more conscious’.101 In a letter to Sarkar, who was then the Acting Premier,
he expressed his anguish over the present state of things in West Bengal: ‘There is
obviously a feeling of utter frustration among many people in Calcutta, including
of course Congressmen. We cannot allow this to continue and must get a grip of this
situation.’102
However, the problems of the West Bengal Provincial Congress were too deep-
seated to be rooted out so easily. The electoral debacle indeed exacerbated faction
fighting within the Congress. Its executive committee was reconstituted on 14 June
at a meeting requisitioned by 107 ‘rebel’ members. In the new Executive, Surendra
Mohan Ghosh took the Presidential chair, while the former Civil Supplies Minister
Charu Chandra Bhandari was elected Secretary. While the leaders were engaged in
bickering over committee membership inside the Kumar Singh Hall, their support-
ers got embroiled in violent clashes on the street outside with exploding bombs.103
Atulya Ghosh in a press statement charged the new President with partisanship and
described the new Executive as a ‘packed house consisting of a large number of
opted-out members of East Bengal’. The East Bengalis protested and complained
that this differentiation was unhelpful – ‘mischievous and inimical to harmonious
and united action’ – as all East Bengalis were now citizens of India.104 In a press
statement on 5 July, Surendra Mohan Ghosh condemned Roy’s divisive tactics and
described ‘the South Calcutta verdict definitely as a vote of no confidence on the
Cabinet.’105 On 10 July the new WBPCC met again and passed a resolution ascrib-
ing the electoral defeat to the ‘unpopularity of the West Bengal cabinet’.106 The
bickering between the two groups went on openly and unabashedly through press
statements and in the letters to the editor column of Amrita Bazar Patrika – each
group blaming the other of ‘interminable wranglings and shifting political loyal-
ties’, which had nothing to do with ‘ideology or principle’.107
Even a friendly Amrita Bazar Patrika had to warn in an editorial that any revival
of the Congress could not be ‘adequately undertaken so long as there are groups in
the Congress at loggerheads.’ It could not deny the existence of a ‘regrettable polit-
ical tendency: the people of West Bengal are apparently losing faith in the
Congress.’ It was ‘forced to admit’ that there ‘are grievances against local
Congressmen who are not doing their duty to the people.’108 There was some self-
criticism within the Congress as well. Mr Kala Venkatarao, the General Secretary
of the Congress, received 40 representations from various Congressmen in
Calcutta regarding the present state of their organization in the province.109 Suresh
Chandra Das, the defeated Congress candidate in South Calcutta, demanded that
Prime Minister Nehru should initiate ‘an inquiry into the misdeeds and corruption
of the administration …’. ‘We are not so much frightened of the Communist
goondaism, arson and loot’, Das told Nehru, ‘as Government’s omissions and
commissions, which create a greater gulf day by day between the Congress and the
people.’110 But what these dissidents received was only a weak-kneed response
from the central leadership.
The rival faction led by J.C. Gupta submitted a list of charges of corruption and
misuse of power against the Roy cabinet to Nehru who dismissed them as ‘vague
charges’, arguing that it was ‘not easy to draw a line between improper favouritism
and nepotism on the one hand and proper exercise of one’s discretion’ on the other.
It was interesting that the responsibility to investigate the charges mostly against
B.C. Roy was given to the Acting Prime Minister Nalini Ranjan Sarkar. It was
therefore not surprising that all the charges were found to be ‘vague’. Sarkar later
released Nehru’s letter to the press, and advised the people ‘never [to] chase a
lie’.111 But what he did not tell the people was that in another letter Nehru expressed
his grave concerns at the fact that there was a ‘great deal of resentment against the
West Bengal Government for a variety of reasons’.112 Many prominent
Congressmen also believed that the party had been driven far away from the people
and what it needed for a revival was ‘fresh blood’.113
The Congress High Command could hardly keep their eyes closed to the fact that
there was ‘some basis for the widespread resentment’ against the Congress regime.
It sent circulars to all provincial committees to see that the discomfiture of South
Calcutta was not repeated anywhere again. And Nehru in a communication to all
provincial governments asked them to ‘overhaul’ and ‘revitalise’ the Congress
organization, as the repetition of such defeats would threaten the reputation of the
‘premier national organization’.114 He came to Calcutta on 12 July 1949 on a three-
day visit to reconcile the warring factions. At a meeting with the members of the
Congress Assembly Party he expressed his worries about the ‘rapidly deteriorating
situation’ in West Bengal. Both the Ministry and the Congress had become
unpopular, he emphasized, and they must do something ‘to regain the confidence
of the people’.115 Then on 14 July at a mammoth public meeting at the Brigade
Parade Ground he told an estimated crowd of one million people that India needed
the services of the Congress for some more years to come. For, if Congress went
down, small groups and parties would come to power and India would break up into
pieces. But the Congress could enjoy the people’s confidence, he conceded, only
if Congress workers truly served the country as they did during the struggle for
freedom.116
On 17 July the Congress Working Committee met in New Delhi to discuss the
West Bengal situation. It decided that a general election would be held in the
province so that the people could express their views on the political future of their
province. In the meanwhile an interim government would be formed and steps
would be taken for a reorientation of the Congress and the formation of a
Composite Provincial Congress Committee.117 But there were differences of opin-
ion within the High Command. While one group thought it would clear the air, oth-
ers thought it would further exacerbate factional rivalries. And some like Dr
Sitaramayya believed that if an election were to be held, it would have to be based
on universal franchise and that needed fresh electoral rolls. So an early election was
considered to be ‘not only absurd but impossible’.118 But despite all these reserva-
tions, in another lengthy meeting on 28 July the Working Committee decided that a
general election would be held in West Bengal at the end of the year on the basis of
the Government of India Act of 1935, that is, not on the basis of universal adult fran-
chise. An interim government would be formed soon and the WBPCC would be
reconstituted.119
But B.C. Roy, still in Paris, continued to deny that there was any problem in his
province. The present ‘unsettled state of affairs’, he noted, was due to a series of
‘calamities’ that afflicted the province over the last few years.120 It seems at this
stage there had developed a hiatus in perceptions about the nature of the problems
in Bengal. While Nehru after his three-day visit in July thought that it was mainly
‘psychological and political’, caused by a ‘tremendous feeling of frustration’
among the people, Roy on the other hand believed that ‘it was a purely economic
question’ for which the central government was equally responsible.121 While there
was an element of truth in both these observations, Roy’s opponents in West
Bengal threw a challenge to his leadership in late July, proposing to replace him
with Dr P.C. Ghosh. But it did not ultimately go ahead, as the majority of the
Assembly Party insisted that no leadership change should take place before Dr Roy
returned from Europe.122
Roy on his return denied all the charges levelled against him and his government.
He was summoned to New Delhi along with other important leaders of the two rival
factions. There was a patchy compromise, but no permanent formula to reconcile
the rival factions emerged. The Congress Assembly Party reiterated its confidence
in Roy’s leadership and adopted a resolution requesting the Working Committee to
reconsider its decision to constitute an interim ministry. Of the 55 members of the
Party 50 attended the meeting – a notable absentee was P.C. Ghosh. Of them 34
voted in favour of the resolution and 14 opposed it. In other words, the division was
hardly patched up, as the opposing group of Surendra Mohan Ghosh continued its
dominance over the Congress organization. Ultimately, the idea of an interim min-
istry was dropped. The present cabinet was slightly expanded to accommodate two
members of the rival faction.123 At a press conference on 13 September Roy
announced that a general election would be held in West Bengal in January after the
harvesting season on the basis of the existing franchise and the current electoral
rolls.124 But it was later postponed as the arrangements could not be completed by
the beginning of January, and since fresh elections under the new constitution and
on the basis of universal adult franchise were due in a year’s time (winter of
1950–51), Nehru in a press statement on 8 January announced with ‘deep regret’
the reversal of the earlier decision of the Congress Working Committee.125

The major problem of the Congress at this stage was in reorienting itself as a dis-
ciplined political party. In the words of Judith Brown, it ‘was not only the dominant
party within the polity but almost within itself an ideological party system.’126
Historically, the Congress was more a movement, which incorporated myriad
groups of people with varied ideological orientations and strategic inclinations – all
united on a common anti-colonial platform under Gandhi’s umbrella-type leader-
ship. Hence Gandhi had advised the Congress to disband after independence and
suggested that its members form a Lok Sevak Sangh, maintaining its high moral
standards and keeping away from power rivalries of party politics. The contempo-
rary media reports suggest that public opinion remained divided on this issue. Some
thought the Congress should either reinvent itself or disband, while others believed
that after independence its responsibilities had increased manifold.127 In the end,
the Congress was not dissolved, as Shankarrao Deo, its General Secretary, later jus-
tified, because the party stalwarts felt that power had been transferred to them by
the British and they represented the only organization that could offer stable gov-
ernments at the centre and in the provinces. So there was no question of having ‘a
clean sweep of the past’.128
Congress therefore decided to transform itself into a compact party, with a new
constitution that prohibited any lobby group or party from functioning from within
the Congress. In April 1948 the four anna (one-fourth of a rupee) membership fee
was abolished and every adult in the country was encouraged to become a member
of the Congress. Every member had to fill in a form and sign the Congress pledge,
ensuring their undivided loyalty to the party.129 But in the absence of proper party
discipline, rivalries among factions vying for power continued. Some held democ-
racy responsible for this unhappy consequence that ‘made us familiar with groups
and cliques.’130 In reality, however, this factionalism became so apparent because
on the one hand the Gandhian ideal of moral public service was conveniently for-
gotten and on the other the transformation of the Congress into a proper democratic
organization remained incomplete. At the AICC meeting in Ahmedabad in January
1951 a new constitution was adopted and it reimposed a membership fee of one
rupee. But Nehru reminded all those present that Congress membership was not a
mere matter of the Gandhi cap, the flag or the membership fee. The Congress was
for the service of the people and if it failed to provide that it was bound for a certain
demise.131
The work of democratizing the party in West Bengal progressed haltingly.
Congress was always ‘a platform for all groups and sub-groups’, observed
Sasadhar Kar at a Howrah meeting in August 1949; but today ‘a grave situation’
had arisen because one particular group had wrested the control of this institu-
tion.132 Hence others complained about the ‘majority group’ trying to retain its
stranglehold on the organization by putting restrictions on fresh enrolment of new
primary members. This rival faction on 20 November 1949 held a ‘workers’ con-
ference’ at Singhee Park in Ballygunge to protest against ‘coterie rule’ in the
Congress organization and demanded further democratization of the party organi-
zation. The meeting was attended by about 1,200 delegates from different districts
and was addressed by Atulya Ghosh and several ministers like Prafulla Chandra
Sen, Kalipada Mukherjee and others.133 The most important resolution it adopted
was about the enrolment of new primary members to tilt the balance in their favour.
It was decided that at least five million members would be enrolled by 30
November and for this purpose the week beginning 24 November would be desig-
nated as the ‘Congress Enrolment Week’. The leader of the majority faction,
Surendra Mohan Ghosh, the then President of the WBPCC, sent a message of warn-
ing from New Delhi. He supported the enrolment drive, but warned that no group in
the organization should interfere with the work of others in this regard.134 In other
words, the most important work of democratization of the Congress party began on
a note of factional competition for a support base.
A report in The Statesman on 10 September 1950 indicated that there were two
changes in the group alignments within the Congress in the past 18 months.135 The first
was an alliance between the ministerial party and the Khadi group, and the second
being a coalition between the Khadi and Jugantar groups. But eventually, the ministe-
rial group emerged as the most powerful, and in the new WBPCC that was formed
through an election in September 1950, they emerged as the majority group. Atulya
Ghosh became the President and Bijoy Singh Nahar the General Secretary, and it sig-
nalled a final takeover of the provincial Congress by the Hooghly-Midnapur fac-
tion.136 Two months later the Khadi group under the leadership of P.C. Ghosh and S.C.
Banerji left the Congress and formed their own Krishak Praja Mazdoor Party (see
Chapter 5, susbsection ‘Opposition from within’). It is necessary to emphasize here
that the differences that ultimately led to this defection were not just personality
driven, or due to attempts to establish factional supremacy, or a response to any anti-
East Bengali conspiracy. While all these factors were at work, ideological hetero-
geneity within this organization was too deep-rooted to give it any semblance of unity.
Ideological heterogeneity
On 27 September 1948, in response to a fiery verbal attack in the Assembly from
the communist leader Jyoti Basu, the Congress Police Minister, Kiran Shankar Roy
came up with a self-righteous statement:
The Congress has freed India from foreign domination. But this is only
preliminary work. [A m]uch more difficult task is ahead of us. To make
independence a real independence there must be not only political freedom,
but freedom from want, freedom from unemployment and freedom from fear.
The Congress has a plan and has a programme and has necessary leadership.137
However, as the situation was unfolding since the first day of independence, the
Congress in West Bengal seemed lacking in many of these areas. The economy
started spinning out of control and the ideological differences within the Congress
about the management of the economy – encoded in contending rhetorical seman-
tics about the future progress of the nation – had become much too obvious from the
very beginning of freedom. In his first budget speech in February 1948, the Finance
Minister Nalini Ranjan Sarkar started by paying homage to Mahatma Gandhi, just
assassinated a few days ago. He described Gandhi as his ‘guide and mentor’ and
promised
at this turning point of our history, to try to translate into our policy and actions
the lessons which he has left behind as our heritage – to serve the common man
and to bring into his life the bracing air of peace, prosperity and happiness.
There were two factors, he reminded the House, that were crucial for raising the
standard of living of the masses; one was the production of more wealth and the
other was its equitable distribution. But in terms of priorities, he thought: ‘The fore-
most emphasis should, of course, be laid on the first of the factors at this stage of our
economic development.’138 Later on 4 August 1948 in a letter to Nehru, Sarkar
explained and defended his economic policy: ‘The industrial labour forms only a
small percentage of the population’. And therefore, ‘placating labour alone does
not make for general contentment in the country.’ ‘Mere concessions to socialistic
ideology will neither increase national wealth nor, in the end, help those whom such
ideology seeks to bring into prominence.’ So to ensure economic development it
was necessary to assure the business classes that ‘the scope of possible profits will
not be limited unduly either by taxation or forced concessions to labour of an
uneconomic kind’.139
These priorities of the Finance Minister failed to impress the Gandhian back-
bench members of the Congress. Implementation of the Congress ideal, responded
Bina Das, remained a ‘pious wish’ in the budget, which provided all the encour-
agement to the capitalists to increase their wealth. There was only lip service to the
issue of zamindari abolition, complained Sibnath Banerjee. The Congress labour
leader S.C. Banerji gently reminded him of what Gandhi meant by his ideal of
‘krishak-praja-mazdoor raj’ – a state of the economy where there would be little
difference between rich and poor, where exploitation would be completely elimi-
nated, where everyone would have sufficient food and clothing, housing, health
and education – in short, an ethical and moral transformation of the polity. Two
steps were necessary for achieving that goal, he argued, one was the abolition of
zamindari and the other was the establishment of industrial tribunals. None of them
were in the priority list in the recent budget. J.C. Gupta therefore had to reiterate
again that ‘we have won the first round; we have got the political freedom … but we
have yet to achieve real freedom and real independence.’140 None of these speakers
were overtly critical of the budget, as they all belonged to the Congress bench; but
they were visibly unhappy with the first budget of their own government, which
was clearly deviating from the Gandhian notion that did not see development as
merely economic or material growth.141
The unhappiness of the Congress backbenchers almost burst into an open rebel-
lion when Sarkar presented his second budget on 24 February 1949, with an open
advocacy of a free enterprise economy, with an increased role for the private sec-
tor. He started by stating the problems that the province was facing as an aftermath
of the Partition and freedom. The economy was functioning badly at all levels, he
admitted; while population rose, production fell below the pre-war level. The
decontrol of food and cotton cloth had failed to stem the rising tide of inflation; so
it had to be revoked in the middle of the past year. The wholesale price index for
food reached the ‘record high figure of 397.7’ in August, jumping from 347.7 at the
beginning of the year. Overall in 1948, the food index had risen by 82.5 points over
the 1947 figures, the Minister admitted. So what was his remedy? The main prob-
lem of the economy, in his diagnosis, was the ‘scarcity of indigenous capital’. So
the buoyancy in the economy, which had suffered a setback in 1947, could be
revived again only by providing tax incentives to private business, thus bringing
back business confidence and more investment. He resented the ‘current prejudice
against businessmen’ and advocated ‘that private enterprise should be given the
encouragement it needs if the present stalemate is to be ended.’ As for black mar-
keteering and tax evasion, he thought ‘social conscience’ was the ‘most potent cor-
rective’, because it was ‘ultimately the problem of improving the basic human raw
material.’ He made a fervent appeal to the House that ‘at this nascent stage of our
freedom we shall be restricting the scope of our doing good to the people if we were
to be tied to the apron-strings of “isms”’. And which specific ‘ism’ that he was so
concerned about was also made clear. As he went on: ‘One such dogma – if I may
also call it an illusion of our age – is the false dogma of equality.’ ‘In this country,
as in others’, he noted with regret, ‘the drift towards socialism is unmistakable’;
‘the attack on wealth is now fairly widespread’. So his policy priorities were laid
down in unambiguous terms: ‘If, therefore, the choice lay between an excessively
progressive income-tax with its chilling effects on business condition and slightly
lower-level of income-tax with improved business condition, the path of public
policy should be clear.’142
It will be worthwhile to mention here that in February 1949, at a meeting with the
Governor of West Bengal just before the budget session, Mr Benthall, the President
of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, blamed the government for its taxation
policy and threatened that if it did not revise its policies, ‘dire consequences would
follow, that is, capital would be withdrawn from the industries.’143 And after the
budget speech of 1949 the British Deputy High Commissioner wrote to his superior
that investment opinion in Calcutta was impressed by the Finance Minister’s state-
ments. What they particularly liked was the Minister’s desire to help investors and
industrialists by reducing taxes.144 So was it, then, the government succumbing to
European – and Indian – business pressure or was it the businessman Finance
Minister trying to steer the government their way? Indeed, the influence of the busi-
nessmen in Congress’s economic thinking and their sensitivities towards any rhet-
oric of socialism propagated by the left wingers were not new – this was evident in
the debates of the National Planning Committee (1938) and in the programmatic
statement of the ‘Bombay Plan’.145 Those unresolved battles of the colonial period
assumed greater significance in the new days of freedom as the Congress was now
in the driving seat to actually steer the nation to a desired state of progress. It was all
the more urgent now to define what that progress would mean and what would be
the preferred trajectory to arrive at that destination.
It is interesting that the major attack on the ideological statement in the budget
speech of 1949 came not from the Opposition, but from Congress’s own back-
benchers, who could not reconcile the priorities of this budget with the utterances
of other top Congress leaders like General Secretary Shankarrao Deo, who were
promising to bring in ‘a classless democratic society in a peaceful manner’.146
Debendranath Sen first took up the cudgels: ‘this year the quintessence of his [the
Finance Minister’s] general remarks and his philosophy is this: that the rich shall
remain rich and the poor shall remain poor.’ What he feared was that it was going
to be ‘a permanent philosophical attitude’ in contravention to all that Congress
stood for in the past. The ‘theory of equality’, he reminded his own Finance
Minster, ‘has come to us through the Congress ideology, through Mahatma Gandhi,
through the various resolutions taken by the Congress in its various sessions.’
Indeed, the recent Jaipur session (1948) of the Congress, he mentioned, had passed
a resolution stating that its future objective would be the ‘establishment of a class-
less democratic society’.147 Sen’s diatribe was followed by that of the feisty Bina
Bhowmik (formerly Das). While listening to the budget speech of the Congress
Finance Minister, she said, one could mistake it to be a speech of a spokesman of
the industrialists and the business community. It was hard to believe that the poli-
cies of the Congress now reflected only the interests of the rich of this country. The
taxes that had been imposed were only on the workers and the peasants, while the
current policy of inaction with regard to black marketeering had been justified by
blaming the decline in human character. Kanailal De stood hereafter and lamented
once again that there was nothing in this budget to realize Mahatma Gandhi’s
dream of ‘krishak-mazdoor-praja raj’ or a non-exploitative classless society.
Pramatha Nath Bandyopadhyay, the next speaker, also reminded the Finance
Minister that the people of this country observed with keen interest what the
Congress government was doing to realize Mahatma Gandhi’s ideal and the poli-
cies initiated at the Jaipur session. The absence of any real policies to implement
those high principles put the Congress leaders in embarrassing situations when they
faced the public. So he appealed to the minister to reconsider those taxes, which
particularly affected the poor people, because otherwise the critics of the Congress
would take advantage of the people’s discontent.148 This sense of frustration
and criticism was voiced by several other Congress legislators, like Haripada
Chatterji, Hemanta Kumar Basu, Charu Chandra Bhandari and Satish Chandra
Chakrabarty.149 The discussion was rounded off by the previous Gandhian Prime
Minister Dr P.C. Ghosh:
we are a thousand miles away from Krishak-Mazdoor raj; we were nowhere
near it and unless we follow the ideology of Gandhiji which is based on non-
violence and truth and non-violent socialism, unless we follow that I can assure
you this country will have communism.150
So much criticism of the budget from the treasury bench was indeed unprecedented
– ‘against the parliamentary convention of a party’, the Opposition leader Abul
Hashem pointed out.151 Yet, B.C. Roy refused to take the criticism on board and used
the communist disturbances to justify a budget which many of his colleagues clearly
thought was against the ideology of the Congress. He chose to ignore what he
described as ‘irresponsible and reckless criticisms’, which he warned would only

encourage the ‘subversive elements’.152 The Finance Minister too seemed intolerant
of criticism. A few months later in his broadcast to the people of West Bengal on the
second anniversary of Independence on 15 August 1949, he reminded them that:
‘Political antagonism and ideological differences can wait for a more propitious
times [sic], but to make the present critical times the occasion for wanton splitting of
ranks and division is to retard the progress of the country.’ The struggle for freedom,
he admitted, was characterized by ‘strife and bitterness’, with ‘criticism and pas-
sion’; but that phase was now over. ‘With the achievement of freedom a new era has
started and arms have been laid to rest. A new revolution has begun … . It requires
little of [the] feverish passion and excitement of the old struggle.’ ‘Slogans, catch-
phrases and clap traps’ would no longer work; [a] ‘mere socialistic touch will not’,
he cautioned, [cause the country to] ‘over-flow ... with milk and honey’.153
The dominant ideology of this proposed revolution – which by now seemed to be
disavowing socialism as a desired goal and defined progress as only economic
growth (flow of ‘milk and honey’) – was being spelled out by B.C. Roy in and out
of the Assembly House; it was to ensure individual freedom, not to initiate social
engineering. This was his reading of Gandhi’s philosophy. While paying tribute to
Gandhi in the Assembly shortly after his assassination, he observed:
Today in the name of democracy freedom of the individual is suppressed – the

people, the individual is forgotten. … We have neglected to develop the moral
concepts of the individual. We have denied him the freedom that is his birth-
right. We have to restore to him his individuality even.154
A few months later on 11 April 1948 at a meeting of the Indian National Trade
Union Congress, he told the labour leaders that: ‘Differences between man and man
in their individual capacities would always exist, but what was needed was to pro-
vide all with equal opportunities so that everybody could give of his best for the
development of the country.’155 Two years later, on 8 February 1950, while
responding to the criticism of the Governor’s speech by his own party men, who
read Gandhi differently, Roy revealed his ideological position more candidly:
I am perhaps one of the heretics of the Congress Party. I do not understand

what is [a] classless society. … how can you remove the classes from the
society? … Capital does not consist merely of [the] money that [one] possesses
in the bank. It consists of brain[s]. How does Mr. Walker make his millions –
not by his hand, because he has got better brains.156
So in his ‘opinion’ equality would only mean ‘equal opportunity for all’ – nothing
less and nothing more: ‘… we want social freedom, that is to say, a society – not a
class-less society … a society which would ask for and get all the protection, all the
resources available to the State for the protection of the individual and of the com-
munity.’157 This professed dictum of laissez-faire conservative liberalism was at
best giving mixed signals to a confused public and to the befuddled Congressmen,
for Prime Minister Nehru and the Congress Working Committee around the same
time were talking about ‘a Welfare State’ and ‘a planned and more or less con-
trolled economy’. And a newly elected Congress President Purushottamdas
Tandon was telling the nation to build the country on the basis of Mahatma’s
ideals, with an emphasis on service to humanity and development of the village
economy.158
In his next budget speech in the Assembly on 16 February 1950 Sarkar once
again admitted that: ‘Neither the psychological nor the material fruits of freedom
have come to the people of West Bengal with any message of hope and good cheer.’
But for that he blamed the legacies of the past, the Partition and refugee influx; and
the injustice of the central government in the form of the Chintaman Deshmukh
award that provided for ‘highly iniquitous’ allocation of income tax and jute duty
to the province of West Bengal. He further reminded the people of the province that
‘prosperity does not pour like the gentle rain from heaven in benign abundance’. To
generate prosperity he advocated the same formula: ‘proper incentive to capital to
play its part in the productive process.’ The economy, he thought, had the potential
for development and expansion, but only if ‘backed by private capital and enter-
prise’. ‘To obscure this clear path of natural economic well-being of the people by
ideological obsessions would be the height of folly at this stage.’159
A number of dissident Congress backbenchers in the Assembly, like
Debendranath Sen, Khagendranath Dasgupta, Kanailal De, Bepin Behary Ganguly,
Umesh Chandra Mandal and Satish Chandra Roy Singh Sarkar, stood one after
another and expressed their concern about the budget being pro-capitalist and anti-
poor – a budget that clearly failed to fulfil the common people’s dream about their
new-found freedom. But it was Suresh Chandra Banerji and Bina Bhowmik who
exposed the ideological rift within the Congress. As Banerji pointed out, at the last
Jaipur session of the Congress (1948) it was decided that between ‘communist total-
itarianism’ and ‘Anglo-American capitalism’, Congress would choose a third path,
and that would be the path prescribed by Gandhi, the path of establishing a demo-
cratic classless society in India – the ‘krishak-praja-mazdoor raj’. But there was no
mention of that ideological position in this budget. Bhowmik was even more direct:
the internal ideological conflicts within the Congress, she announced, had been laid
bare by this budget speech. During the freedom struggle diverse classes of people –
the rich, the workers, the landlords, the peasants and the middle classes – all fought
together against British rule. But now that they had freedom, all those diverse groups
were finding it difficult to carve out their places within the same institution of the
Congress. However, these differences could be overcome through allegiance to the
pivotal Congress ideal of ‘classless society’. But unfortunately, those who did not
truly believe in that ideology – like the Chief Minister and the Finance Minister –
now ran the government in the name of the Congress. And this put the true
believers in the Congress and Gandhian ideology in embarrassing positions before
the public.160
In other words, the ideological fissure within the Congress – which could trace
its genealogy to the debates over national planning in the late 1930s and the early
1940s – was now fairly obvious. On the one end of this conceptual divide were
those in charge of the government in West Bengal who chose the path of capitalist
development and free private enterprise. On the other end there was a sizeable
group of Congressmen in whose thinking the Gandhian notion of progress with
morality and the left-wingers’ vision of socialism had now collapsed into an idea of
a third indigenous path of development, which would be modern but not western161
– a ‘classless society’ to be achieved through non-violent methods, avoiding both
industrial capitalism of the Western model and the class struggle of the Soviet vari-
ety. And there was no sign of this increasing chasm ever being bridged. In the
budget speech of 1951 – the last budget before the election – the Finance Minister
once again admitted that the ‘common man is now labouring under great privation’;
but removal of poverty, ignorance and illiteracy must ‘take many years of sustained
and co-operative effort’. ‘Economic development is hindered by the lack of
capital’, he diagnosed. And his remedy was the old elixir, that is, generating indige-
nous capital through savings and tax inducements and wooing foreign capital by
providing for full repatriation of profits.162 This could hardly satisfy his detractors,
as P.C. Ghosh branded the budget as ‘framed from the capitalists’ outlook’.163 This
ideological battle virtually brought the government to a stasis. It was the other
Gandhian MLA Khagen Das Gupta who was perhaps most apposite in his observa-
tion: ‘Our state is economically doctrineless. Like our philosophy which revels in
the negative aspect of everything our national state is neither capitalistic, nor
socialistic, nor communistic. It is a shapeless structure.’164
This ideological flux was being observed even by the friends of the government.
On 5 October 1949 an editorial in the Amrita Bazar Patrika noted exactly the same:
The mind of the Government seems to be torn between two conflicting ideals,
one of socialism, and the other of free, private enterprise. What the
Government has attempted is an adjustment between the two. The conclusion
is irresistible that the attempt has failed.
No doubt, this ideological rift and the dilemmas and uncertainties that it generated
put the provincial government in a state of paralysis. And the consequences were
predictable; as the Patrika noted: ‘A policy of vacillation can have only one result,
and that is disaster.’165 Even though it was not a complete disaster yet, the problem
of the Congress government was that, as an article in Sanibarer Chithi in 1950
pointed out, it was following policies which were neither sufficiently radical to
satisfy the leftists, nor sufficiently effective to generate economic growth or to
make the rightists happy.166 This was hardly a Congress consensus, and being cor-
nered by all, the ruling elite within the Congress chose to govern with coercive
power.
The custodians of freedom

In the first few years of freedom, in the name of protecting the freedom of the state,
the Congress government sought to curb the civic freedom of its citizens. In
1949–50, along with a concerted attempt to plant the idea in public discourse that
the communists were the major enemies of our freedom, there was also another
campaign – that it was the Congress which alone could protect our freedom from
enemies, internal as well as external. Nehru, addressing a meeting of local
Congress workers at Allahabad on 4 September 1949, said: ‘The country needs the
Congress. There is no other party that can replace the Congress in these difficult
times.’167 While Nehru kept on repeating this doomsday scenario,168 B.C. Roy also
echoed the same view. At a press conference in Calcutta in September 1949 he said:
‘If the freedom we have won is to endure, it is imperative that we of India should
say nothing calculated to destroy the Congress prestige ...’169 On 15 January 1950,
Sardar Patel repeated the same advice while addressing a public rally at the Brigade
Parade Ground in Calcutta.170 Indeed, his confidence was even more robust; at a
meeting with the Hyderabad Congress workers, he predicted that there was no pos-
sibility of a rival organization to Congress springing up in the next 10 or 15 years.171
On 14 February 1950 Shankarrao Deo, the General Secretary of the Congress, pub-
lished an article in the Calcutta daily Amrita Bazar Patrika in which he argued that:
‘In spite of the fact that the Congress does not now enjoy the same degree of confi-
dence of the people as before, it is the only party which is organized on a nation-
wide basis and can keep all disruptive forces in check and preserve the unity and
integrity of the country for some time to come.’172 And such views were promptly
disseminated by a partisan press, like Anandabazar Patrika and Amrita Bazar
Patrika, which brought out editorials to argue that ‘freedom was won and can be
preserved, only by the Congress.’173 It also had a particular notion about the role of
political opposition in a democracy. Its role ought to be ‘to help the Government
through constructive criticism’ and not constant vilification of the ‘Congress lead-
ers’, which was unlikely ‘to contribute to the prosperity of the masses.’174
In other words, the Congress and a patronizing press consistently endeavoured to
universalize their own version of freedom by inventing reasons to stifle criticism.
This was done by resorting to ideological propaganda and scare-mongering about
external enemies and above all, by promoting a new civil religion of the state of
which the national flag became the most sacred emblem and the ruling party sought
legitimacy through association with it. It will be pertinent here to refer to the flag
burning incident of 6 June 1949 at the Congress election meeting at Deshapriya
Park, which we have already mentioned. But we need to point out also that it was
Nehru who first picked it up and made it a propaganda issue. In a message to the
electors of south Calcutta he charged Sarat Bose of aligning with the ‘antinational’
forces and referred to the flag burning incident in a rather emotive language: ‘Under
which flag does Mr Bose stand, to which flag do his associates give allegiance?’175
However, according to The Nation, the flag that was burned was a Congress flag,
not a national flag. Even the pro-Congress Anandabazar Patrika in its first report
on the incident also indicated that it was a Congress flag. So it was Nehru’s imagi-
nation – or perhaps political ingenuity – which made it into a national flag and it
points unmistakably to the anomaly involved in this emblematic representation of
the deliberate political conflation of the party, nation and the state. A letter to the
editor in The Statesman on 15 June 1949 underscored this anomaly in no uncertain
words:
… one can hardly share his [Nehru’s] wrath at the burning of a flag. If it was
the Congress flag, his fury was unfounded; and if it was the State flag, the
blame should lie with those who used it in an election meeting of the Congress
party.
It is not a feature of democracy to identify the party in power with the
State.176
And this correspondent was not the only person who could see the danger of such
political tendencies. In a hard-hitting article, ‘West Bengal Today’ in Amrita Bazar
Patrika, the highly respected linguist and academic Dr Srikumar Banerjee noted
with a sense of frustration that ‘everybody who does not see eye to eye with
Government is treated as a potential enemy suspected to harbour sinister designs.’
As for the alleged communist action of insulting the national flag, he had the fol-
lowing observation:
The conduct of the Communists in having trampled and insulted the national
flag certainly deserves the strongest condemnation from every right-thinking
and patriotic Indian. But is their conduct more odious and reprehensible than
that of thousands of so-called Congress men, who while paying lip-homage to
Congress ideals, are every day by their practical conduct desecrating and trail-
ing along the dust the exalted idealism for which the national banner stands?
To betray righteous indignation over the one and to shut one’s eyes to the other
is an anomaly of conduct bordering on hypocrisy.177
However, this emotional campaign was not the only tool that the Congress leaders
used to universalize their vision of the nation’s future. In West Bengal, the more
they faced public criticism the more they chose to rule with coercive power, which
was often legislated to circumvent the opposition of a vigilant judiciary trying to
protect the civil liberties of the citizens. In 1948 the Congress government issued a
new Ordinance called the West Bengal Security (Amendment) Ordinance, which
sought to tighten the Security Act by removing the provision of ‘reasonable
grounds’ for imprisonment, which could be reviewed by a High Court judge. It was
an important safeguard for civil liberties, which the Select Committee had inserted
into the original bill when it was passed and it often resulted in acquittal of
detainees in habeas corpus appeals.178 The government obviously did not like it.
The Advocate General Sir S.M. Bose contended that the decision of the govern-
ment to detain a man on reasonable grounds was final and courts of law could not
go into that question.179 The Justice Minister Niharendu Dutta-Majumdar made it
clear to the House: ‘It was not meant that the administration of the Act would be
done by the High Court or by any other court of law. For in that case there need not
have been any talk about detention without trial.’ The purpose of the amendment,
he announced, was that ‘the power for detention of people without trial … is not to
be exercised by the High Court, but is to be administered by the executive
Government.’ Jyoti Basu condemned the ‘rule by ordinance’ destined to ‘set up a
Police state with the help of old and new administrators.’ But the resolution approv-
ing the Ordinance was passed as the government had the numbers.180
A few days later the Ordinance was presented as a bill, and the Home Minister
Kiran Shankar Roy tried to defend it as a safeguard against an international com-
munist conspiracy; and furthermore, such a law, he argued, was necessary also to
deal with the black marketeers and smugglers, as ordinary laws had been found to
be inadequate to deal with them. Jyoti Basu once again, in a futile parliamentary
exercise, tried to oppose the bill clause by clause. It was passed on 28 September
1948, and the Home Minister announced without any moral qualm: ‘Our con-
science is absolutely clear in this matter. The responsibility for this Act must lie on
those who are preaching hatred and practising violence against the State.’181 He
invited public cooperation so that – as The Statesman put it – ‘not a single innocent
person suffered and no Communist or Communalist escaped’.182 The last two cate-
gories thus became criminalized by definition – the black marketeers or smugglers
got no mention in this public appeal.
The West Bengal Assembly on 5 March 1949 passed a resolution extending the
life of the West Bengal Security Act by another year. The opposition complained
about the continued ‘misuse’ of the Act by the government to harass innocent peo-
ple. But B.C. Roy dismissed such allegations, and expected that everyone having
‘their eyes and ears open’ would see the reasons behind such legislation. He
‘assured’ the House, like his predecessor, that if any such case of misuse was
brought to the attention of the government, it would be ‘properly looked into and
proper measures taken’.183 But the High Court refused to accept such an extension
of the Act by a resolution and declared the Security Act ultra vires; charges against
important communist leaders had to be dropped.184 Hence on 8 July 1949 the
Governor of West Bengal by a Gazette Extraordinary promulgated an Ordinance,
known as the West Bengal Security Ordinance 1949, embodying all the provisions
of the Security Act.185
By this time even many of the Congress leaders had become sceptical about this
unrestrained use of repression. Because by now it was widely known how ram-
pantly the Act was being misused by interested parties and vested interests to intim-
idate their business competitors and creditors, to harass political rivals in District
Board elections or to hassle family members in disputes over land and property.186
In February 1950 in response to the Governor’s speech outlining government poli-
cies, in which he referred to the ‘anti-social elements’, Haripada Chatterjee
reminded his own government that victory against the communists would not be
achievable with only repression; what was needed was an ‘ideological victory’, and
that could only be attained through the establishment of the krishak-praja-mazdoor
raj, which had always been the professed ideology of the Congress. Suresh
Chandra Banerji, the Gandhian labour leader, also argued in the same vein that if
we ‘succeed by constitutional means to have classless democracy in [the] near
future’, only then would the ‘menace of communism ... rapidly disappear’. And
P.C. Ghosh pointed out that the communists were not the only ‘anti-social ele-
ments’ in the country; ‘blackmarketing and corruption is [sic] as much anti-social
as the other.’ Unless such activities were also declared ‘subversive activity’, the
government would not be able to score a victory against its other foe. The Security
Act would only become ‘a sufficient weapon in the hands of the Government’,
Bimal Ghose pointed out, when it would ‘actually harness the active cooperation of
the people.’187 As some available reports suggest, Congress organization and ini-
tiative in the rural areas, necessary to counteract communist mobilization by polit-
ically confronting its challenge, was practically non-existent at this stage.188
Yet, despite all that criticism from his own party men, on 25 February 1950 Roy
placed before the Assembly the West Bengal Security Bill 1950, which was meant
to replace the Ordinance of July 1949, which had ceased to operate after the prom-
ulgation of the new constitution.189 On that very day, 25 February 1950, the central
parliament also passed the Preventive Detention Act, 1950, which replicated all the
main provisions of the provincial legislation and took precedence over it. The
provincial law therefore had to be amended again in March.190 The law as it stood
now gave extraordinary powers to the government to deal with political dissent. A
High Court ruling summed up the situation:
The weapon given by law into the hands of the Government is a very powerful
one … the scope left to courts to protect the liberty of the subject either by the
present Act or by the Constitution is a strictly limited one. The protection of the
citizen in this respect rests mainly on honesty, care and reasonableness of the
authority entrusted with the weapon.191
Then on 5 October 1950 the government had another amendment to the Security
Act passed, stopping the press from publishing any ‘prejudicial report’, the publi-
cation of which might be deemed to be ‘an incitement to the commission of a sub-
versive act’. This was presented as a response to the recently concluded Delhi Pact
between Pakistan and India, which enjoined both governments to prevent publica-
tion of any press report that might incite communal hatred and violence (see Chap-
ter 2). But the critics of the government, like Sibnath Banerjee or Ratan Lal
Brahman, suspected that the amendment had nothing to do with the Pact, but was
designed to curb whatever little freedom our press enjoyed after independence.
Indeed, as we have already noted in the previous chapter, during the riots of 1950
both the Bengal Chief Minister and the Indian Prime Minister were actually prais-
ing the Calcutta press for its self-restraint and responsible behaviour. Yet, as the
Congress had the numbers, the amendment was passed without any difficulty.192
So far as press freedom was concerned, it needs to be mentioned here that on 15
June 1948 the British Acting Deputy High Commissioner in Calcutta wrote to his
superiors that with regard to the communist disturbances in Calcutta there was in
place a ‘blackout of the news in the press’. It was not because of any ‘secret gov-
ernment ban’, but was largely self-imposed by the media for fear of the Security
Act. At least one paper, he observed, ‘makes it a policy to publish nothing which
has not received the written approval of the Secretary, Home Department.’ And the
government did not want publicity to be given to these occurrences, in case it cre-
ated public sympathy for the communists.193 But apart from such an unspoken fiat,
the government was also using colonial laws like the Indian Press (Emergency
Powers) Act, 1931, to gag critical newspapers like the left-leaning Dainik Saptaha.
In an appeal case hearing against the government order forfeiting its security
deposit, the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court described the Act as anachro-
nistic in present-day circumstances, since in a democracy criticism of the govern-
ment in power was a legitimate right of the free media. But not just that, it was also
reported that the government had instructed the district magistrates to invoke
another draconian colonial law, the Dramatic Performance Act, 1876, to prevent
dramatic performances or any other cultural programmes by the communist-
influenced organizations like the all-India People’s Theatre Association or the All-
India Progressive Writers’ Association.194 The fears of Banerjee and Brahman were
thus not totally unfounded after all.
It might also be worthwhile to mention here that in June 1951 the Nehru govern-
ment tabled a bill in the parliament suggesting an amendment to the new constitu-
tion, restricting – in the interests of the security of the state and its foreign relations
– the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression.195 On 6 October 1951,
amidst loud protests of the Opposition, the Press Bill was passed and it was to be
valid for two years.196 Two days later Kafi Khan drew a cartoon for Jugantar with
the title ‘Bejoya Dasami – 1358’, depicting the immersion of a Durga image in the
river Ganges, with the words ‘freedom of press’ inscribed on her.197
In this environment it was no wonder that when on 3 October 1950 B.C. Roy pre-
sented a supplementary budget for an additional grant of Rs. 486,200 to expand his
police force in the Assembly, he once again had to listen to the Opposition harangue
about his coercive style of governance. By proposing a cut motion, the Socialist
leader Sibnath Banerjee alleged that the only function of Roy’s police was to sup-
press legitimate labour movement, while failing to curb the black marketeers and
profiteers. He was supported in his contention by another Congress member
Kanailal De and the former Muslim League leader Syed Badruddoza, who also
alleged the failure of the police to protect the minorities during the recent riots. An
independent member Sheo Kumar Rai described the police as the most corrupt of
all government departments. The cut motion was defeated, once again as the gov-
ernment had the numbers.198 But to everybody’s surprise, in the regular Budget of
1951–52, the allocation for the Police department rose again, to Rs 54.6 million –
from Rs 36.6 million in 1948–49. To P.C. Ghosh this only indicated that West
Bengal had ‘become a police State and not a welfare State.’199
This steady increase in the police budget was not surprising because in
independent India the police remained a trusted instrument of governance for the
Congress government, reminiscent of the days when it was a sharp sword of repres-
sion for the colonial regime. By way of defending the supplementary demand in
October 1950, Roy told the House:
I am one of those who was a critic of the police in the past, but there is a differ-
ence between criticism and administration. … If you want to protect this State
from known and unknown enemies it will be impossible for you to do so unless
you have an adequate police force.200 [Emphasis added].
In other words, for the Congress in power, the police was an invaluable tool for
enforcing discipline. In 1950 the government had added significantly to its police
force. A new armed battalion for the Calcutta Police was raised, a women’s wing
was recruited,201 and a National Volunteer Force (NVF) was trained. At the first
passing out parade of the NVF, Roy described them as the ‘ambassadors of disci-
pline’. ‘Our independence has brought newer responsibilities on us in the shape of
discipline’, he said. For enjoying this freedom what was required was control over
thought and action.202 It was therefore not surprising that Finance Minister N.R.
Sarkar at a parade at Barrackpore would tell the policemen that the fortunes of the
nation depended on their efficiency, for they protected the country from the ills
arising from the first flushes of freedom, despite the unfortunate fact that public
opinion in general was unkind and severely critical of the police.203 At a meeting of
the officers of the Calcutta Police, the Police Minister Kiran Shankar Roy advised
them that: ‘One has to be courteous, pleasant and helpful to the public, but one must
also be firm with the breakers of [the] law. The public and the lawbreakers are not
the same.’204 The problem however was about maintaining a distinction between
the two – and also maintaining a distinction between ordinary lawlessness and civil
disobedience as legitimate political protest. In a speech on ‘Indiscipline’ at the
Howrah Rotary Club on 25 August 1948 the Deputy Commissioner of Police,
Calcutta HQ, seemed to be blurring this very distinction:
During the national struggle for independence [he said] people had been
encouraged to break the law. This might have been necessary because the law
was that of the foreigner from whom liberation was sought. But, unfortunately,
this had resulted in a large number of people becoming habituated to breaking
the law, and respect for authority had completely vanished.205
The same concern was shared and endorsed by his Chief Minister as well.
Unveiling a memorial column at Howrah, commemorating the birth of the Indian
Republic, Roy cautioned his countrymen not to be carried away by slogans, for no
nation could progress without discipline and self-restraint. In this discourse of dis-
cipline, the responsibilities of the people were emphasized; but there was no men-
tion of rights.206
Indeed, the notion that the West Bengal Police in general resented civil disobe-
dience as a mode of political protest and had become an instrument of repression
and were trigger-happy, was shared in many quarters. A number of incidents of
police firing – for example, on the students at College Street on the Indonesia Day
on 18 January 1949, on the women demonstrators at Duberbheri on 10 February
1949 or on the women processionists of the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti at
Bowbazar on 27 April 1949 – became subjects of public condemnation and official
inquiries. Even the pro-Congress press, like Amrita Bazar Patrika, had to note in an
editorial: ‘The police in independent India is no longer the repressive machinery it
used to be … . This change of attitude must come over to those in whose hands lies
the responsibility of maintaining the law and order of the State.’207 The subtext of
this statement was perhaps that freedom had not yet changed the way the police
administration was organized in the country or how police dealt with political
opposition.
The Intelligence Branch (IB) records at the West Bengal State Archives clearly
indicate that as in the colonial past, the Opposition leaders were still being closely
watched by the police, their correspondence was being read and their speeches
were monitored by the police intelligence. Although the IB department was sup-
posed to have burnt all records at the time of independence,208 it seems files for all
opposition leaders were kept alive and added to, with copies of intercepted letters
they wrote or received. The IB approval order for interception of letters of Sibnath
Banerjee of the Socialist Party shows that the police was using the provision of spe-
cial powers in the Indian Post Office Act 1898. Under section 26(1) of this act, such
an order initially given for one year could be extended if the police could argue that
incriminating letters could be found in future, although none had been found so
far.209 To put the situation in proper perspective, the state machinery in independ-
ent India was using a nineteenth-century colonial law to keep secret surveillance on
a sitting MLA of a bona fide opposition party. This exasperated M.N. Roy, whose
letters were also being regularly intercepted – although he was not a communist,
and in fact at this stage was regularly writing against communism in his newspaper
columns. In a letter to the editor in The Statesman he protested against this crass
violation of civil liberties. ‘The most remarkable feature of the practice is that’, he
exclaimed, ‘it is utterly unabashed.’210
However the government had other problems with regard to discipline and civil
liberties. Since the new constitution had now been promulgated, it incorporated the
Fundamental Rights of the citizens. So in another verdict on 13 October 1950 the
Calcutta High Court declared sections 21 and 22 of the Security Act ultra vires, as
they contravened the fundamental rights protected by the constitution.211 The gov-
ernment had to accept it. But the government did not want to part with its extraor-
dinary powers and, hence, in September 1951 it again came up with the West
Bengal Security (Amendment) Bill, 1951, designed to give another lease of life to
this hated law. The fear of a police state reverberated loudly again in the chamber
of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly. Jyoti Basu as usual took up the cudgels:
this had nothing to do with the communists or the black marketeers, he claimed, but
to ensure ‘the security of the Ministers themselves’. And he was not alone this time.
The frustrated Gandhian Congress members by now had left the Congress and
formed the Krishak Praja Mazdoor Party and all of them lent him supportive voices.
Suresh Chandra Banerji expressed the most important concern that the renewal of
the Security Act so close to an election (due in four months’ time) was really prob-
lematic, as numerous reports indicated that the political workers of the opposition
parties were being intimidated and threatened with imprisonment under the
Security Act. In other words, it was meant to create an environment of fear and
intimidation on the eve of an election. The most interesting intervention was that of
Dr P.C. Ghosh, the architect of the original 1948 Security Act. The original bill, he
pointed out, was introduced because it was felt that it ‘would be necessary for some
time, but one must remember that some time is not all time.’ And then a repentant
Ghosh conceded that ‘after four years I do say that if it was bad then it is worse
today’ because elections were round the corner and there were regular reports from
villages as well as cities that political opponents of the Congress were being con-
stantly harassed by the police on false or no charges.212 Indeed, some of the letters
of complaint sent to opposition leaders and intercepted by the IB also reveal that in
district towns and municipalities Opposition leaders who won local body elections
against the Congress candidates or college lecturers suspected of being involved in
trade union activities were being arrested on false charges of being communists.213
However, these complaints mattered little to B.C. Roy whose response to this
opposition tirade could only add to their fear, not abate it: ‘The speeches I have heard
today in this chamber,’ he said, ‘are themselves proof and are sufficient reasons for
the enactment of an Act of this type.’ This statement could hardly allay the fear that
the bill was meant to silence critical voices. And his use of medical metaphors spoke
clearly of pre-emptive strikes. As a medical practitioner he believed in cures, but he
‘believe[d] more in prevention of diseases’! The bill was passed, as the government
had the numbers. But the list of people who voted against it is worth mentioning. The
original bill in 1948 was opposed only by the two communist legislators Jyoti Basu
and Ratan Lal Brahman along with the Muslim League MLAs; but this time they
were joined by a whole array of former Congress stalwarts.214 These men had by now
defected from the Congress, as it was no longer the party of their dreams that could be
trusted with the task of fulfilling the promises of freedom.
In the mirror of public opinion

At this stage we should perhaps ask the question, did the people of West Bengal see
the government’s reasons behind such unrestrained use of coercive power, or did
they also dread the coming of a ‘police state’ and fear for the future of democracy?
Referring to the banning of the communist party in late 1949, a columnist in the
Bengali literary magazine Masik Basumati wrote: ‘Communists are the enemies of
the Congress; the Congress is now the ruler; is it democratic to ban the communist
party? What is the reason to assume that the whole country thinks in the Congress
way?’ Three months later the same columnist noted again with anxiety that Home
Minister Sardar Patel was not prepared to accept that the communists were only
taking advantage of the current situation of food and cloth shortages. Quoting
Chittaranjan Das, he argued that repressive policies would not bring about
lasting peace, they would only lead to ‘a police state’ and more bombs.215 Such
apprehensions continued to rancour in the minds of the middle-class in the follow-
ing months, and we may attempt here to look at the middle-class opinion around
this time by analysing some of the letters to the editor that appeared in local news-
papers. We focus on the middle class because with an election looming on the hori-
zon, this class had become most important to the government as the maker of public
opinion. The Finance Minister Nalini Ranjan Sarkar admitted in his February 1951
budget speech, that:
The task of the Government is made more onerous by the existence, in a large
measure in the State of West Bengal than in others, of a politically conscious,
but economically unemancipated middle class to whom ultimately the

Government must look up for either approbation or censure.216
We have previously seen middle-class dilemmas reflected in creative writing and

popular culture (Chapter 2). We may take here as a case study the letters that
appeared in The Statesman, remembering the fact that similar letters were appear-
ing in other newspapers as well. Indeed, letters about the communist movement and
terrorist activities were appearing in local newspapers ever since the Security Act
was passed and the so-called ‘communist menace’ became a subject of public
debate occupying headlines in newspapers every day. But initially the opinions
were clearly divided. On the one hand, there were a handful of letters, which sup-
ported the government position. ‘The political freedom which India has achieved
after long struggle’, one correspondent wrote, ‘should not be squandered because a
small minority wants to introduce a certain economic system by questionable
methods. For the maintenance of freedom, people should be prepared to forego
some civil liberties until such time as India has consolidated her position.’217 ‘The
Communist Party of India have been a positive nuisance since the transference of
power’, thought another correspondent, because they frequently disturbed public
peace by taking out noisy processions and hindered the production process through
their ‘indiscriminate strikes’ on ‘frivolous grounds’. So the B.C. Roy government
seemed justified in dealing with them with a heavy hand.218
On the other side there were a large number of letters that expressed suspicion
about the government’s ulterior motives. The well-known litterateur Manik
Banerjee and 69 other members of the Calcutta District Progressive Writers’ &
Artists’ Association in their letter expressed their view that ‘the Security law has
been used to suppress the Government’s sole political opponent, the Communist
Party of India’. If the communists were guilty of planning an armed insurrection,
they demanded, ‘concrete proof’ should be placed before public eyes. Otherwise, it
would seem merely as a cover for undemocratic measures against innocent com-
mon men.219 A number of prominent members of the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti,
like Rani Mahalanobis and Ila Bose also wrote in the same vein.220 But if these peo-
ple had marked Left leanings, there were correspondents who were politically unat-
tached but who also expressed the same sentiments. Some of the barristers of
Calcutta thought that the arrest of the two communist MLAs who constituted ‘the
only tangible opposition in the Legislative Assembly’ could not be justified ‘on
usual democratic grounds’.221 This was indicative of the fact, as another correspon-
dent suspected, that ‘the Congress is trying to silence all opposition and to create a
really monolithic state.’222 Another correspondent wanted to see ‘tangible proofs’
that the communists were planning violent disorder to upset society.223 Another let-
ter raised the most pertinent question: if the communists could be arrested on mere
suspicion of being terrorists, why could the profiteers, blackmarketeers and corrupt
officials not be apprehended in the same way and under the same law?224
By 1950, however, the tone of these letters changed significantly – as the
ambivalence was now almost completely gone, as the middle class had now
formed its opinion about the communists. We may look here at a series of letters
that appeared in January 1950 in response to an anti-communist editorial in The

Statesman. There were of course some letters which thought that the ‘Government
has shown infinite patience with misguided youths’; or that there was ‘a dangerous
tendency to question established Authority in disrespect of national interest’ and it
was ‘dangerous to allow this to continue’.225 But another correspondent wrote:
The terms ‘Communists’ and ‘Communism’ were until only the other day
repulsive to most people. Why not now to the same extent? When ordinary
people are constantly told (by the subversive group) that the Government are
not seriously concerned about removing the causes of their discontents, evi-
dently some find it rather difficult not to believe what they are told – an ideal
condition for the spread of Communism.226
In other words, Communism was seen not as a problem in itself, but rather as a
symptom of more deep-seated social and economic maladies. ‘Disturbances in
Calcutta’, wrote another correspondent, ‘are manifestations of widespread discon-
tent … . I feel that the Government’s economic policy, which has failed to satisfy
many people, is a cause of present discontents …’227 However, this did not neces-
sarily mean a sympathy wave for the insurrectionist strategy of the communists: ‘A
political party is tabooed not because of its ideology, but because of its disruptive
activities, such as throwing acid bulbs and bombs …’228 But an answer to the com-
munist menace was not ‘strong precautionary measures’, wrote another correspon-
dent; for ‘if the price of containing Communism … [was] denial of fundamental
rights,’ then the people were in ‘more danger … [than] in a totalitarian State such as
the Communist ones …’229 There was, in other words, a growing concern for what
another correspondent described as ‘the present regime’s increasing encroachment
on civil liberties. Taking advantage of this mood, the Communists are playing
havoc.’230 This public discontentment about the dominant political culture of the
day perhaps comes out most unequivocally in an other letter:
The public may not like [the] Communists … but it hates Fascism, as well as the
measures taken by the Government in trying to eradicate subversive activities …
Communism, a foreign ideology, cannot be fought to a finish by the foreign
ideology of anti-Communism. Unless a genuine Indian, i.e., Gandhian way is
found, one cannot foresee what troubles may await the country.231
In this post-colonial perception of freedom, the term ‘Gandhian way’ possibly
stood as a metaphor for an indigenous – or even non-modern – way of perceiving
and achieving freedom, as opposed to the foreign or imported ideologies of libera-
tion. Another letter to the editor in The Statesman a few months later expressed this
sentiment with greater clarity:
To achieve racial equality and general uplift of the masses of the world is a stu-
pendous task; the whole outlook of life requires reorientation. Perhaps, the
Father of the Nation had some such object in view when he urged the modern
age to turn back from its course of extreme materialism to that of the village,
the charkha and God.232
This yearning for a non-Western or indigenous model of development was meshed

with the middle-class preference for orderly transition or anxiety about a possible
breakdown of authority, which we saw through the writings of Birupaksha at the
onset of freedom. They were assured from time to time by the vanishing tribe of
Gandhian Congressmen who told them that Congress could bring in equality, a true
‘Krishak-praja-mazdoor raj’, through a non-violent way – the third way – by
avoiding the painful path of class struggle.233 And therefore, there was more talk of
bringing the Congress back to the Gandhian way, rather than throwing the baby
away with the bath water. Another correspondent wrote to the editor of The
Statesman on 26 February 1950: ‘… if the Congress is defeated, there will be chaos
in the country. It is therefore imperative that the Congress remains the supreme
party.’ But it was meant to be a reformed Congress, free of ‘the stigma of selfish-
ness and corruption’.234 These mixed emotions – hardly any reflection of any con-
sensus – were also reflected in the popular culture of the period, as we have seen in
the previous chapter.
Amrita Bazar Patrika frequently published cartoons that depicted the West
Bengal Congress as a trouble-prone organization – either it ‘Needs Thrashing’ or it
‘Wanted New Blood Transfusion’.235 But it was never thought to be beyond
redemption. The academic D.N. Sen, in an article ‘The Present Crisis And Our
Duty To The Nation’ published in Amrita Bazar Patrika, admitted that perhaps the
government could have followed ‘an alternative – and a better – policy’; but one
had to remember ‘the limitations under which they are working’.236 As communist
leader Manikuntala Sen noted in her autobiography, a similar ambiguity prevailed
among the peasants and the workers as well, even in the so-called ‘liberated’ areas,
where responses to communist mobilizing efforts gradually became less and less
enthusiastic and attitudes to the Congress showed more signs of ambivalence.237
However, while many people thought that a radical reorientation of the Congress
was necessary, this optimism was also mixed with profound scepticism. Dr.
Srikumar Banerjee concluded his article (referred to earlier) on that sceptical note:
‘Can Congress rise to the height of its great responsibility and help this great coun-
try to play its historic role in the community of nations? History pauses for an
answer.’238
4 The communists
From insurgency to electoral politics
Communists and decolonization

If Congress was torn by its own internal debates in the early days of freedom,
around the same time another serious political alternative was being offered by the
communists, but their story has not been told by historians as yet. West Bengal in
the late 1960s and the early 1970s witnessed a violent communist insurgency,
which became known as the Naxalite movement, and a significant literature now
exists on this.1 However, what is less known is that the events of the 1960s and the
1970s had a historical precedent in 1948–49 in the early days of independence. But
except for some brief references, this story has remained by and large untold. Of the
two recent general histories on post-colonial India, Bipan Chandra and others think
that the communists decided to opt for this adventure because of intense factional-
ism within the party and their inability to understand ‘What is the political situation
in India?’2 Ramachandra Guha, on the other hand, thinks that, emboldened by the
success in Hyderabad, the leaders of the Communist Party of India (CPI) mistook
the ‘scattered disillusionment with the Congress’ as revolutionary potential and
thought that Telengana ‘would be the beginning of Red India’.3 These observations
reflect the earlier interpretation of T.J. Nossiter, who argued that this decision to opt
for revolutionary insurgency was partly because things were moving too fast after
independence for the CPI leaders to formulate a coherent policy, particularly in the
absence of any clear guidance from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
(CPSU). And it was also partly because a section of the communist leadership
‘truly believed that a revolutionary situation existed in Bengal, if not the country as
a whole.’ So they did not want to let the opportunity slip out of their hands.4
This chapter will argue, however, that the CPI’s decision to launch a violent peas-
ant movement in West Bengal in early 1948 arose out of a deep sense of crisis aris-
ing out of their inability to take a meaningful position in the last tumultuous days of
the Raj, marked by communal violence and the Partition, and their lingering sense
of insecurity in the new political realities of independent India. The communists
had begun to come out of their self-created political quagmire once the Quit India
movement was over; this comeback trail was initially through relief work in the
wake of the Bengal famine of 1943 and then through heightened activities on the
trade union front and peasant mobilization. There were also attempts to ensure
communal harmony, but this happened more at the picket lines. The effectiveness
106 The communists
of its mobilization among the urban working class and the students and youth was
demonstrated in the riots in Calcutta between 21 and 24 November 1945, in protest
against the trial of the prisoners of the Indian National Army (INA), where demon-
strators were simultaneously flying the Congress, Muslim League and communist
flags.5 Another explosion was sparked off in Calcutta between 11 and 13 February
1946 to protest against the imprisonment of Captain Rashid Ali, an INA prisoner. It
was called initially by the student wing of the Muslim League, but was later joined
by the members of the communist-led Student Federation and industrial workers.
Once again demonstrations followed, with Congress, League and Red flags flying
simultaneously, and large meetings were organized, where League, communist and
Congress leaders addressed the crowd. A general anti-British sentiment pervaded

the city, which was paralysed by transport strikes, industrial action and pitched
street battles with British troops. Another major success was the Post and
Telegraph strike on 29 July 1946, supported by the communist student organization
and all other trade unions. The whole city of Calcutta came to a halt, as a mammoth
meeting at Calcutta Maidan indicated the imminent arrival of freedom.6
The CPI now moved towards a more belligerent line. In a resolution adopted
on 5 August 1946 it declared that the ‘Indian freedom movement has entered its
final phase’. So what was needed was a ‘joint front of all patriotic parties’ to stage
a ‘national democratic revolution’ that would ensure ‘all power to the people’.
Against this backdrop, in September 1946 the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha
(BPKS) decided to launch the Tebhaga movement (to demand a two-thirds
share of the produce for the sharecroppers) and soon it spread to a wide region
where peasants harvested the paddy and took it to their own khamar (storehouse)
and then invited the landlords to come and take their one-third share. Although
the north Bengal districts were the worst affected by this sharecroppers’ agitation,
contrary to a popular notion, as Adrienne Cooper has shown, the Tebhaga
movement touched a much wider region, covering almost every district in eastern,
central and western Bengal. But the movement did not ultimately achieve much,
as the Muslim League government came down heavily with repressive measures,
and the BPKS ultimately decided to abandon this uneven battle. It achieved noth-
ing, as a pro-sharecropper bill proposed by the government was later abandoned
under the pressure of landlord lobbies within both the Muslim League and the
Congress.7
The communists faced a deep moral quandary as the country plunged into com-
munal violence initiated by the Great Calcutta killings starting from 16 August
1946. Their existing political aim to unite the Congress and the League in a united
struggle against the British Empire ultimately ended in what Shashi Joshi and
Bhagwan Josh have called ‘an exercise in absurdity’. By deploying their secularist
theories they could not grapple with the communal situation of the late 1940s, and
consequently failed to evolve an appropriate strategy to arrest the violence.8 When
the Hindu Mahasabha in early 1947 started a campaign for the partition of the
province, the communists opposed it, but could not actively resist it. The two com-
munist leaders in the Bengal Legislative Assembly voted against the Partition res-
olution, but that did not count for anything. When freedom came with Partition, the
The Communists 107
communists were hardly in a mood to rejoice, as the veteran communist leader
Abani Lahiri told us in an interview with the historian Ranajit Dasgupta.9
The Partition riots had put the CPI in a political crisis that forced upon it a policy
of cooperation with the Congress and the Congress governments at the Centre as
well as in the provinces. The Calcutta session of the party in September 1947 advo-
cated the formation of an All Party Committee for the protection of the minorities.
For this purpose, it also gave a call to all Leftists to unite after sinking their past dif-
ferences and bitterness over the ‘People’s War’ slogan and rally behind the
Dominion Government to stop the riots across the country. And not just that, the
CPI through its leaders and volunteers also participated in the West Bengal gov-
ernment’s food procurement drives and actions against black marketeering.10 The
provincial committee decided not to resort to any radical action, such as launching
the Tebhaga movement in the coming harvesting season, and instructed its local
units, particularly in the kisan front, not to incite the peasants into any such direct
action and to take recourse to such legitimate methods as arbitration and amicable
settlements in guarding the peasants’ rights.11 Even in some CPI meetings in the vil-
lages the Congress flag was hoisted side by side with the Red flag.12
However, this spirit of cooperation was short-lived, as by the end of the year,
when the riots stopped and the general law and order situation evidently improved,
the CPI leadership began to feel that they were losing their political initiative and
were being gradually marginalized in the emergent political power structures of
independent India. They began to withdraw their support for the Congress govern-
ments both at the centre and in the provinces and thought of steps to replace it with
a ‘progressive people’s government’.13 From late November to early December
they began to organize meetings in villages where they raised the demands for abo-
lition of the zamindari system without compensation, redistribution of land, fair
wages for agricultural labourers and of course the demand for tebhaga (two–thirds
share of the produce) for the sharecroppers.14 To many of their middle-class and
intellectual leaders the Telengana movement at this stage provided a model to seize
the initiative as they felt a violent revolutionary movement could also help them
surmount the timidity of middle-class intellectualism.15 This activism could shift
the focus of public attention away from community to class – in other words, this
could be their answer to the politics of communal conflict.
This change of policy received further endorsement from Moscow, which
sought to revive the Cominform and announced in September 1947 (in a confer-
ence in Poland) its ‘A. Zhadanov thesis’ of encouraging more activism on the part
of the international communist parties – Moscow’s answer to the Marshall plan.16
The news of the communist movement in eastern and central Europe, but more
importantly in Asia – in China, Malaya, Indonesia and closer at hand in Burma –
grabbed the headlines in the daily newspapers in India and inspired the Indian com-
munists. Indeed, after the success of the Chinese communists the congratulatory
message that B.T. Ranadive (General Secretary of the CPI) sent to Mao Zedong
clearly indicated how the Indian communists felt ‘inspired by it to fight more deter-
minedly and courageously their battle for ending the present regime and establish-
ing the rule of People’s Democracy [in India].’17 In December 1947 the CPI
108 The communists
declared that the Indian independence was fake – as their new slogan was ‘ye azadi
jhooti hai’. The Congress and its leader Jawaharlal Nehru became the stooges of
Anglo-American imperialism and the feudal elements within the country, and
therefore a movement had to be started to replace it and thus achieve real inde-
pendence.18 Against this background, the CPI held its Second Congress in Calcutta
between 28 February and 6 March 1948, where it adopted its ‘Political Thesis’,
which formally endorsed this position by formally declaring that the national gov-
ernment established on 15 August 1947 was indeed the major enemy of freedom for
the Indian people and therefore needed to be replaced.
Its [Congress government’s] establishment does not mean that the Indian
people have won either freedom or independence, nor does it ensure that they
will be moving in the direction of democracy and freedom for the people.
On the contrary, the government has already made a big move in the oppo-
site direction – against the interests of the freedom of the people. It is linking
itself with the Anglo-American bloc of imperialist powers – a bloc which seeks
to crush all democratic revolutions and to create satellite states. It is manoeu-
vring to find an advantageous position for itself in the Anglo-American bloc.19
So to prevent this situation the party decided to follow what popularly came to be
known as the ‘B.T. Ranadive line’, or the path of promoting in India a ‘People’s
Democratic Revolution’. Within the specific political context of India, its aim
would be
to bring about those fundamental changes in our political and social structure
without which there can be no freedom and no prosperity for our people. The
present state will be replaced by a people’s democratic republic – a republic of
workers, peasants and oppressed middle classes.’20
However, the actual beginning of the proposed ‘revolution’ in West Bengal took
some more time. This thesis was further developed by the West Bengal provincial
committee in the specific context of the province. This was based on analyses of the
agrarian and industrial situations in the province and was accompanied by detailed
plans of action. A ‘Political Statement’ of the provincial committee stated that ‘On
the 15th of August, 1947, a myth was created that freedom had been won and that the
Congress leadership had earned this freedom by an original non-violent method.’
In reality the Nehru government’s policies represented a ‘national betrayal’, as
their own promise of ‘Krishak-praja-mazdoor raj’ had become an anathema to
themselves. On the other hand, the Communist Party was the ‘most consistent
fighter for complete independence’.21 A ‘Draft Thesis on the Peasant Situation in
Bengal’, issued on 26 May 1948, argued that the gradual ‘accumulation of poverty’
in the province was a consequence of the zamindari system, which had resulted in
the proletarianization or semi-proletarianization of about 75 per cent of the tillers,
while only ‘14.3 per cent of zamindars, jotedars and rich peasants’ controlled ‘a little
less than two-third of the total acreage of land’. To remedy this situation, the thesis
The Communists 109
advocated ‘a thorough going agrarian revolution’, involving abolition of zamindari
without compensation, redistribution of land among the tillers, the existing system
of rent being replaced with income tax, price control and liquidation of peasant
debt. ‘An agrarian crisis is bursting out’, the thesis said. So the poor as well as the
middle peasants had to be organized into ‘revolutionary peasant committees’ and
be led into the ‘fight for Tebhaga’, which would go on side by side with the ‘full
programme of the agrarian revolution’.22
As for the industrial situation, a resolution of the West Bengal Provincial
Committee of the CPI argued that the majority of the workers have not yet been
won over because of the ‘tremendous freedom demagogy’ of the Congress. But
they were getting disillusioned day by day and should therefore be more exposed to
the terrors of the government. So what was advocated was a ‘hit-and-run’ policy, to
replace any long-drawn-out industrial strike.23 For the purposes of mobilizing the
working classes, major focus was to be maintained on the five main industries,
namely, jute, engineering, plantation, mines and the railways, where, it was
expected, ‘discontent may burst forth anytime’.24
Another circular, ‘unanimously passed by the West Bengal P.C. Secretariat’ on
26 June 1948 outlined ‘the most salient features of the present situation’. It argued
that the ruling class was in crisis, although the masses were still in a state of linger-
ing illusions and passivity. Hence there should be more efforts to mobilize the
masses on issues which directly affected them. ‘That Telengana is the new form of
people’s struggle must be driven home into the minds of the masses.’ This could be
done through ‘secret Shock Brigades composed of most militant workers, secret
Factory Committees, revolutionary Peasant Committees, secret Factions inside the
mass organiation’. There had to be more propaganda through posters and handbills
‘to tell in a convincing manner the truth to the people … that there cannot be any
peace and prosperity until power is seized by the toiling people, fighting together
under the banner of the Communist Party.’25
The perfecting of strategy and finalization of plans were also accompanied by
purges in the party organization. The moderate leader P.C. Joshi, who had been the
General Secretary until January 1948 and who advocated cooperation with the
Nehru government, was suspended. Other important leaders expelled from the
party were Ananta Singh, Sudhanshu Acharya and Sunil Chatterji. Those party
members, both men and women, who had come away from East Bengal, defying
party orders to stay put, were also expelled. When communism was entering the
phase of its direct encounter with the bourgeoisie, the High Command explained
the expulsions in a resolution, ‘many of these elements, coming from the bourgeois
intelligentsia and petit-bourgeoisie are bound to waver and betray and find ideo-
logical, tactical and other excuses to cover their cowardice.’26 With these wavering
elements gone, the party was now ready for the fight.
The Congress government, as we have already noted in an earlier chapter, moved
swiftly with the familiar tools of repression to deal with a situation which it per-
ceived to be the gravest threat to national security. The West Bengal Security Act
was passed on 15 January 1948, with the provision of detention without trial for
three months. P.C. Ghosh was replaced as Chief Minister by Bidhan Chandra Roy,
110 The communists
known to be a staunch anti-communist ideologue. Then, on 25 March 1948 the CPI
was banned in this province, and immediately after that all major communist lead-
ers were arrested and pre-censorship orders were passed against their organ
Swadhinata. Soon afterwards in a dramatic statement in the Assembly on 30 March
the Home Minister Kiran Shankar Roy announced that the government had evi-
dence that the CPI was planning ‘to create a state of chaos … in order ultimately to
seize power by violent means’ (see Chapter 3 for details).
What started in West Bengal after the banning of the CPI was a regime of repres-
sion and anti-communist witch-hunting. The government reacted with repressive
measures reminiscent of the colonial days. Under the West Bengal Security Act of
1948, as many as 582 persons were arrested by 17 June 1949. Then the Act was
found ultra vires, and an older 1930 Act was invoked and 515 persons were put
under detention under that act. By the end of that year 953 persons were arrested
and of them 589 were put under detention, the majority of them being CPI mem-
bers.27 And as some of the security prisoners complained after being released, they
were not treated very well inside the gaol.28 Particularly hard hit was the trade union
movement, as a number of union leaders were arrested and union offices loyal to the
left-controlled Bengal Provincial Trade Union Congress (BPTUC) were sealed.29
There were other repressive measures as well; the worst incident of high handed-
ness was that of 27 April 1949, when the police opened fire on a communist pro-
cession in Calcutta, killing seven people, including five women volunteers.30
Calcutta hereafter burst into flames.
Urban insurgency
Indeed, Calcutta had become a battlefield since the early days of 1949. On 21
January that year the leading Calcutta daily Amrita Bazar Patrika described the
situation in the central College Street area in the following words:
Troops and armed police guarded the University area, the scene of the last two
days’ trouble. Four truckloads of Gurkha troops under the command of a cap-
tain and two armoured cars with mounted machine guns patrolled the univer-
sity area from 2 in the afternoon. Troops also were posted on the roofs of
Presidency College and other high buildings commanding the view of every
lane and by-lane to guard against any behind-the-scene attack.
This is the scene of a battleground that will remind many readers of College Street
in the early 1970s. This particular series of events had started on 13 January 1949
when Prime Minister Nehru visited Calcutta and there were attempts to disrupt the
visit. Then on 14 January there was a massive rally, in which about 3,000 refugees
participated; they wanted to take their grievances to Nehru. They were stopped by
the police and were subjected to a lathi-charge and tear gas. There was also a mas-
sive rally at Sealdah station, organized by the Nikhil Banga Bastuhara Karma
Parishad, a refugee organization which was increasingly coming under communist
influence. At Sealdah station there was police firing causing injuries and some
The Communists 111
arrests. This was followed by a successful student strike on Monday 18 January
organized by the CPI student wing of the Bengal Provincial Student Federation
(BPSF). On the following day students at Calcutta University held a meeting under
the auspices of the BPSF in support of Indonesian independence and proposed to
bring out a procession in violation of section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code
(CrPC) banning all public meetings. They were stopped near Medical College in
the College street area, followed by showering of brickbats and bombs. The police
opened fire after this, killing five demonstrators and wounding 50 others. The stu-
dents tried to retaliate by attempting to set on fire the residence of Labour Minister
Kalipada Mukherjee. The following day again, some members of the BPSF
congregated at the Medical College and proposed to take out a procession with the
bodies of the victims of the previous day’s police firing. When they were forbidden,
they attacked the car of the West Bengal Congress president Suresh Chandra
Banerji, who had come to visit the injured in the Medical College Hospital. And
then some of them attacked the police morgue in the hope of rescuing the bodies of
their fallen comrades.31
This particular outburst finally stopped by 23 January and in four days of trouble,
bombs were thrown at 15 places and the Tramways Company lost 19 cars.32 This of
course did not mean that peace returned to Calcutta after this. A Police Intelligence
Report recorded 57 incidents – described as ‘C.P.I. outrages’ – in Calcutta in eight
months between 1 May and 31 December 1949. To understand the intensity of this
urban insurgency and the typology of violence we may classify these incidents into
three categories, namely, industrial strife, student protests and public demonstra-
tions, and discuss some examples.33
To give some examples of the first, on 14 May 1949 a strike was organized at
Lipton & Co. under the leadership of the CPI and loyal workers were prevented
from going to work; one person was injured in the fracas. Then on the following
day, as a sequel to the strike, workers threw bombs and crackers at public vehicles
in Mission Row, three people being injured as a result. After a few days, unrest
broke out at the Bengal Potteries, where on 3 June the workers attacked the police
party with bombs and crackers, injuring two officers and 12 constables. As the dis-
pute continued, on 12 July the communist workers attacked the Congress workers
willing to go to work. Again on 2 August and on 24 August loyal workers and fac-
tory guards were attacked with bombs, soda water bottles, acid bulbs, etc. The dis-
pute did not end so easily. Some communist workers were discharged and on 9
October when a lorry was transporting loyal workers to their respective quarters,
the discharged workers attacked them with bombs. But even worse affected was
Allenbury & Co, where as a sequel to the unrest, some workers alleged to be com-
munists forcibly took possession of the workshop on 16 June, murdering the
Security Officer of the company. The trouble in this concern continued for months,
as in October the Sales Manager, while being escorted by the police, was again
attacked with crackers by the striking workers.
Meanwhile, even more serious troubles broke out when strikes were organized
in some of the public services. The Tramways workers loyal to the CPI went on a
protracted strike in July 1949 and at several places in Calcutta bombs and acid bulbs
112 The communists
were thrown to create panic in order to prevent other employees from joining their
duties. This went on for several days damaging several tramcars and the tin roof of
the Kalighat tram depot. When on 29 July crackers were thrown at a tramcar on
Wellesley Street, two peoples received injuries. Closely after the tramway workers,
the Calcutta Corporation Workers’ Union dominated by the CPI went on strike on
25 August and here too violence was resorted to. Acid bulbs were thrown at a cor-
poration lorry in south Calcutta and loyal workers were assaulted in order to pre-
vent them from joining their duties. One corporation lorry was damaged. As the
strike went on for months, loyal workers found to be cleaning garbage at different
parts of the city were regularly assaulted or attacked with crackers. While this strike
ended with the dispute being referred to the Labour Tribunal, there was another all-
out strike in October by the Corporation workers in demand for interim relief pend-
ing the Tribunal decision. And when the Congress leader and the BPNTUC
President, Dr Suresh Chandra Banerji, came to talk to the workers in Tollygunge
bustee (workers’ slum), he was seriously beaten up by women chanting ‘Lal jhanda
ki jai. Dalal ko hatao’ (victory to the Red flag; drive out the agent).34 In December
the nurses at Lady Dufferin Hospital in Calcutta went on strike and prevented the
doctors and other nurses from entering the hospital and when the police intervened
they were attacked with missiles.35
Apart from violence in relation to labour unrest in specific industries, the CPI
dominated BPTUC was regularly involved in violent incidents. For example, the
May Day observance on 1 May 1949 at Bowbazar Street in defiance of section 144
of the CrPC ended in bomb-throwing at the police party. On 28 October a proces-
sion of about 400 BPTUC members entered Wellington Square and attacked a
meeting of the Congress-influenced Indian National Trade Union Congress
(INTUC). When the police intervened, bombs were hurled at them. Again on 6
November, when a BPTUC procession at the foot of the Calcutta Monument in vio-
lation of section 144 of the CrPC was asked to disperse by the police, bombs were
thrown at the police party. On 10 December a BPTUC procession observing ‘anti-
repression day’ came into conflict with the police party near the Medical College.
The worst incidents of this type took place on 24 and 25 December. On the 24th
following a meeting at the foot of the Monument, a procession organized by the
BPTUC and the BPSF marched towards the western side of the Presidency Jail and
began to shout slogans. They were joined in shouting by the political prisoners
inside the jail. As the police intervened and asked them to disperse, bombs were
hurled at the police party. A lathi-charge followed, tear gas was used, and the
protestors retaliated by setting a state-owned bus on fire. The following day, vol-
unteers of the same organizations, and also the Civil Liberties Committee, congre-
gated at Park Circus. Following the meeting the nearest police party was attacked
with bombs and brickbats, street lights were switched off, and barricades of dust-
bins were placed on roads. A state-owned bus and five tramcars were set on fire;
several policemen were injured in the process. Again on 31 December following a
meeting of the BPTUC at the foot of the Calcutta Monument, a procession was
taken out, bombs were thrown at the following police party, three buses were
attacked, barricades were laid on the streets and crackers were thrown at a police
The Communists 113
picket injuring several policemen. One bus was burned and a police wireless van
was damaged. A few days later on 7 January 1950, the BPTUC organized a meet-
ing at the Maidan. Again, the police force on duty was attacked with brickbats and
bombs; one state-owned bus and a tramcar were set on fire and the police had to use
tear gas to disperse the unruly mob.
Along with the BPTUC, the members of the BPSF contributed their fair share to
the violent environment of the city of Calcutta. To give some examples, on 28 June
1949 – repeating the patterns of the troubles of January mentioned earlier – com-
munist students near the Calcutta University buildings threw bombs and acid bulbs
at public conveyances; two tramcars and three state buses were set on fire; one per-
son was killed and seven were injured. On 19 September, the BPSF members, after
a meeting at the Maidan, attacked Chief Minister B.C. Roy’s residence at
Wellington Square with soda water bottles and acid bulbs. On 7 November the
BPSF boys, after holding a meeting at the university lawn, took out a procession,
encountered a police party and threw bombs at them. Three days later, on 10
November two BPSF workers were arrested for carrying bombs to Muhammad Ali
Park where a BPSF meeting was about to be held. They were soon forcibly rescued
from police custody by their comrades. The meeting was declared unlawful and the
people were asked to disperse. This led to bombs and soda water bottles being
thrown at the police injuring three policemen on duty; two private cars and a state
bus were damaged by fire. The next day, in protest against police action the BPSF
brought out a procession in the College Street area. When it came to Central
Avenue near the Medical College, a fight with the police ensued and bombs were
thrown injuring a policeman and a rickshaw puller. Several police vans and a state-
owned bus were also damaged. Other than these specific incidents, the student
volunteers regularly participated in the CPI-sponsored public demonstrations,
which almost routinely ended in violence against the police and attacks on the
public transport system.
Some examples of such public demonstrations will be worth mentioning here.
On 29 May 1949 a public meeting at Sraddhananda Park sponsored by the CPI was
followed by the throwing of soda water bottles and acid bulbs at the police party,
injuring nine people. A few days later on 1 June, following a CPI-sponsored meet-
ing at Swinhoe Street, bombs and soda water bottles were thrown at the police,
injuring two policemen. On 8 June the political prisoners in the Presidency Jail
attacked the jail staff with brickbats, iron rods, broken chairs and tables and the
police opened fire to control the situation. In protest against the firing, CPI volun-
teers threw bombs at a police party at the crossing of Kabir Road and Mudiali Road
on 10 June. The following day one tramcar was set on fire in Ballygunge; bombs
were thrown inside Kalighat tram depot and at the junction of Ashutosh Mukherjee
and Ramesh Mitra Road. Then on 15 June, after a communist-sponsored meeting at
Hazra Park, the houses of two local Congress leaders were raided by the mob. On
22 June a procession was brought out in south Calcutta to protest against firing in
Presidency Jail. Near Lake Market on Rashbehari Avenue the processionists
attacked the office of the South Calcutta Congress Committee and threw acid bulbs
at a police party. On 12 July Prime Minister Nehru visited Calcutta; at Shyambazar
114 The communists
a few communist volunteers threw brickbats and shoes towards his car. Then on
14 July when Nehru was addressing a public meeting at the Brigade Parade
Ground, a high explosive bomb was thrown at the police, killing one police consta-
ble and injuring three others.
Similar incidents, such as processions – in which women volunteers of the
Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti often participated – bomb throwing and pitched battles
with the police continued at regular intervals in different parts of Calcutta. The
crescendo of such activities reached the climactic point on 26 January 1950 – the
day the Indian Republic was announced and the new constitution was adopted. To
protest against the inauguration of the Indian Republic, the communists held a
meeting at Deshapriya Park in south Calcutta. When the police approached, the
meeting dispersed and a small group attacked the police party with brickbats,
bombs, soda water bottles, etc. Two tramcars were set on fire at nearby Triangular
Park; a mail service van was also set on fire and a furniture shop belonging to the
President of the South Calcutta Congress Committee was looted. The Kalighat tram
depot was subsequently attacked and here the police opened fire; 25 people includ-
ing five policemen were injured. Then at around 9 p.m. the trouble spread to north
Calcutta, where five bombs were thrown at the Maniktala Police Station, injuring
eight policemen, one of whom later died of his injuries. In view of all these inci-
dents, it is not an exaggeration to say that Calcutta was burning in 1949 and in the
early months of 1950 – the main targets of this violence being the police and the
public transport system, representing an allegedly oppressive state.
However, we should also remember that a series of fragmented pictures of spo-
radic violence involving myriad social groups – from industrial workers to middle-
class students and women volunteers – does not allow us to reconstruct a coherent
history of ‘communist violence’. However much the police intelligence officers
might try to detect the invisible hands of the communists or a grand communist con-
spiracy behind everything that happened in Calcutta, it is difficult to establish
empirically this web of connections between street violence and communist inter-
vention. The working-class behaviour towards strike breakers or oppressive man-
agers was often a spontaneous response to provocations and not premeditated, and
much less communist-orchestrated. This violence and confrontational propensities
were imbricated in an industrial environment that was marked by a long history of
continuing retrenchment, increasing unemployment and high prices. In other
words, it was a harsh, insecure and fiercely adversarial environment within which
the workers negotiated their actions; violence in such situations was often
inevitable. This does not of course imply that the communist-led trade unions had
no role to play. For, as Rajnarayan Chandavarkar has suggested, in an industrial sit-
uation where the trade unions often had ‘no more than an ephemeral and evanescent
existence’, it is futile – and perhaps methodologically unsound – to try to separate
the organized from the spontaneous.36
On the other hand, so far as student and BPTUC demonstrations were concerned,
the violence was often provoked when the police tried to break up or suppress
peaceful democratic protests against the loss of civil liberties and incarceration
of their leaders for months without trial. In other words, the intervention of a
The Communists 115
repressive state machinery was often a constitutive element in defining and deter-
mining these moments of violence. One could argue, that this official ‘discourse of
violence’ – to use Chandavarkar’s expression again37 – that presented every inci-
dence of urban violence as a part of a larger jigsaw puzzle representing the grand
communist plan of a violent revolutionary upsurge, was to legitimize a regime that
preferred to suppress rightful protests against the failings of the government and its
policies. While communist involvement was undoubtedly there, these reports also
tend to exaggerate the extent of their influence or effectiveness of their control over
mass behaviour.
Rural insurgency
It was, however, in the countryside that the communist activities increased mani-
fold between 1948 and 1949, that is, after the banning of the CPI. Although this
movement came to be known in official parlance as an attempt to re-launch the
Tebhaga movement, the demands of this rural upsurge were much broader and
included such other demands as abolition of the zamindari system without com-
pensation and land to the tillers, which appealed to a large section of poor peasants
and landless bhagchasees or sharecroppers. The movement became more effective
in some inaccessible areas of rural West Bengal, like the Kakdwip police station
area in the Sundarban region of the 24-Parganas district, Domjur and
Jagatballavpur in Howrah; Bora-Kamalapur and Chanditala areas in Hooghly,
Jaypur and Vishnupur police station areas in Bankura; Agradwip and Raina areas
in Burdwan and the Tamluk, Ghatal and Sadar sub-divisions in Midnapur district.
Some incidents like those in Bora-Kamalapur, Duberbheri, and Kakdwip became
more prominent than others in communist legend. But apart from these more well-
known cases, in general, extensive areas of rural West Bengal were reeling under
extreme forms of peasant agitation during this time.
In Hooghly the movement was concentrated in the villages of Bora and
Kamalpur in the Singur police station area, where clashes with the local zamindar
and the Congressmen and violent incidents like ‘dacoities, house breaking and riot-
ing with deadly weapons’ were regularly reported.38 As the Home Minister Kiran
Shankar Roy told the Assembly, the communists were powerful in this area for
‘almost five or six years or more’; the situation only came to a head around
February 1948. On 22 February in the village of Bora a Congress worker and his
elderly father were assaulted; about 400–500 communist volunteers attacked their
house and ransacked it. They then attacked the local library and destroyed it. This
was followed by attacks on two other houses, also belonging to Congress workers.
In the subsequent days the tension spread to neighbouring areas. On 10 and 11
March a few Congress workers in village Kamalpur were attacked and their houses
were ransacked by communist villagers. The police intervened and arrested four
people. But when the police party was returning through the village with the pris-
oners, they were attacked from both sides, the front and rear, by mobs numbering in
hundreds, including both men and women, armed with such ‘deadly weapons’ as
lathis, daos (a large knife with a sharp single–edged blade) and broomsticks. They
116 The communists
tried to rescue their comrades, and the police ‘after due warning … had to open
fire’, killing two people.39 The reverberations of the incident were soon heard in the
Writers’ Building. On 20 March a large gathering of women from Kamalpur
demonstrated in front of the main gate of the Writers’ Building, demanding the
removal of the police camp and an inquiry into the police atrocities. They dispersed
only when the Minister of Police promised an inquiry and agreed to withdraw the
police force.40
In Duberbheri, also in Hooghly district, on 22 January 1949 a local watch and
ward staff was attacked and when a wealthy villager came to his rescue, his gun was
snatched. When the police arrived, they had to face an irate crowd of women vol-
unteers armed with ‘all kinds of deadly weapons’. When the mob injured three con-
stables, the police opened fire, killing two women and injuring several others.41
Then, again, on 19 February when a police party came to Duberbheri in connection
with their inquiry, they were confronted by a large crowd of about 200 women,
armed with sticks, daos, brickbats, fish knives, hashua, katari (sharp-edged curved
knives used to cut crops and bamboo), etc. They refused to disperse and attacked
the police party, injuring the officer-in-charge. The latter then opened fire, killing
four kisan women and injuring six others. An official inquiry later put the casualty
figure at three and reported that the Inspector who had given the firing order had
been suspended and was to be prosecuted. 42
If these incidents got more publicity, there were other similar incidents in
Hooghly that remained unreported in the media. For months to come this large area
remained outside the control of the government and the communists had their com-
plete sway. As a jotedar lamented in May 1949, there was no way they could col-
lect rents, no one would till the lands of pro-Congress or non-communist landlords
and if labour was hired from outside, the local communist marauders would loot or
destroy the harvest. Normal cultivation was allowed only if the landlord became a
member of the party and paid subscriptions. ‘Wherever they [communists] had
some influence, they introduced these rules’, complained the elderly suffering
landlord whose dreams about swaraj were bitterly shattered by the realities of a
revolution he did not want.43
In the 24-Parganas district, too, the communists had been building strong bases in
several police station areas mainly in the south, such as Sonarpur, Bhangor, Haroa,
Sandeshkhali, Baduria, Jaynagar, Canning and of course, Kakdwip since early 1947.
In these areas the grievances of the poorer peasantry against the government procure-
ment system and their demands for tebhaga and possession of land were used to
mobilize them for armed conflicts with the local jotedars and the police.44 Local peas-
ants were organized into Krishak Samitis, which continued to operate openly even
after the CPI was banned. Particularly the Kakdwip area, and within it specifically
Lyalgunge became their principal area of operation because of its inaccessible loca-
tion in the Sundarbans. According to the description of a police report, it was a ‘diffi-
cult terrain full of thick jungles, tidal creeks and rivers inhabited by long-exploited
low-class peasants.’ The area directly affected was not very large – about ‘seven vil-
lages spread over an area of 40 square miles’.45 Large numbers of pamphlets and
posters were distributed here urging peasants to resort to armed insurrection to take
The Communists 117
forcible possession of land. To back up that programme, large amounts of arms and
ammunition also made their way into this area, and peasant volunteers were trained in
their use. A series of incidents involving incendiarism and arson followed, and one of
the pamphlets distributed in the area described Lyalgunge as ‘Sishu Telengana’
(infant Telengana) or Telengana in the making.46
The situation became tense in this area in early January of 1949 when a local
leader Ganesh Sahu, alias Kumud, was arrested under the West Bengal Security
Act. When a police party was escorting him through village Budhakhali in the
Kakdwip police station area, a mob of about 300 men and women attacked them
with bows and arrows, spears and lathis. They rescued the prisoner and took a Sub-
Inspector as hostage. The police then opened fire to rescue the officer and in the
process three people were killed.47 Then in early June, the local Kisan Sabha mem-
bers attacked the kutcheribari (a zamindar’s outhouse where rent was collected
from the peasants and other official transactions were carried out) and the residence
of a zamindar, and kidnapped a member of his family whose body was never found.
This brought in harsh police action, followed by more atrocities against those vil-
lagers who collaborated with the police. Then in October the kutcheribari of a local
jotedar was attacked in Lyalgunj. A mob of about 30 people broke open the door of
the house, looted the paddy and other household articles and kidnapped one of the
employees of the jotedar, whose body was found about a week later.48
After this escalation stern police action was taken: several police camps were
posted; village defence parties or sevadals were organized with local villagers loyal
to jotedars and zamindars, and they were armed with guns – two guns to each party.
To stop the infiltration of outsiders, identity cards were issued to all inhabitants in
the area and they were asked to carry them all the time. As a result of these steps the
police claimed to have contained the communist influence to a relatively small
region, as the latter found it difficult to organize any ‘large scale or open opposition
to the police or jotedars’ in the next two months, and took to sporadic terrorist activ-
ities. According to police intelligence reckoning, such active communists in the
area numbered only ‘about twenty local desperadoes led by three outsiders from
Calcutta’. Indeed, the harvesting season started peacefully and the paddy was put in
the jotedars’ khamars and then shared according to the existing customs. But the
tension escalated again when, as a precautionary step to maintain peace during the
harvesting months, armed police was brought into the region on 15 December. This
was interpreted as the jotedars’ cunning move to crush the peasants and take away
all their shares of the paddy.49 As the troops arrived and the news and rumours
spread, the peasants mounted attacks on the local jotedars, looting their granaries,
setting their houses and persons on fire, attacking the local police outposts with
bows, arrows, bombs and in one case with a sten-gun.50
According to one report, between 15 and 31 December there were 22 cases of
arson in an area covering about seven villages. Four school huts and nine zamin-
dar’s cutcheries (courts) were among the places burnt. At this stage it turned into a
conflict between the rebel peasants and the village sevadals loyal to the jotedars;
three people were killed and five wounded in such violent clashes between the two
groups. The worst incident took place on 2 January 1950. On that night a group of
118 The communists
peasants set fire to the houses of four members of the village defence party in
Rajnagar and attacked the inmates with firearms and other weapons. A 70-year-old
man and a woman were killed; two other women were wounded. After this incident
the tension gradually subsided because of police repression and arrests of the main
leaders; about 70 people were arrested in connection with these incidents.51
In Midnapur, attacks on landlords started from the early months of 1949, when
the local jotedars became targets of looting and acts of arson and armed police were
posted in the affected villages in Nandigram police station area.52 According to one
report, by April 1949 about 600 people, including both men and women, were
arrested in Tamluk alone.53 This repression could not stop the peasant unrest, as in
the ten months between April 1949 and January 1950, in five police station areas of
Garbeta, Kespur, Panskura, Daspur, Tamluk and Chandrokona, the peasants organ-
ized by the CPI were responsible for at least 17 major violent incidents. These
included attacks and looting of houses and granaries of zamindars, attacks and mur-
der of local Congress workers and village watchmen allegedly collaborating with
the police; groups numbering up to 1,000 attacking police parties and outposts and
snatching away prisoners. No less than 21 temporary police camps were opened in
the district to handle such ‘lawlessness and subversive activities’.54 Reports were
being received as late as January 1950 – when troubles had subsided in other
districts – about peasant mobs setting fire to the houses of jotedars and their
political opponents, and attacking police camps with bombs and other weapons in
Nandigram, Tamluk and Panskura.55
In Bankura, the rural insurgency had another dimension, as its participants
included the Santhal and other low-caste peasants, such as the Bauris, Layeks and
Khairas etc. in the villages of Patrasayer, Sonamukhi, Salotra, Jaypur, Vishnupur
and Bankura police station areas. Here, along with the abolition of zamindari and
tebhaga, the additional demand was for raising the daily wages and fixing the max-
imum hours of work for the agricultural labourers. The villagers were organized
into large groups that raided and looted the houses of their jotedars, attacked those
who were suspected of collaborating with the police, marched to nearby Vishnupur
town in support of their demands, and pulled down national flags on the anniver-
sary of independence day on 15 August 1949. The situation came to a head on
18 August in a village called Bandgaba near Vishnupur town, where a crowd of
about 2,000 Santhal men and women clashed with the raiding police party, leading
to firing and the death of three volunteers – one female and two males.56
Santhal peasants were also involved in the Gazole Police Station area of Malda
district, where the Krishak Samitis mobilized the tribal peasants around the demand
of tebhaga. Volunteers of the Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti mobilized the Santhal
peasant women and organized protest marches with them to the district headquar-
ter demanding food and clothes.57 If the situation in these districts was most critical,
other districts like Burdwan and Howrah also witnessed sporadic outbursts of rural
agitation, often instigated by the communists. From Burdwan there were reports
that in some areas field labourers had stopped agricultural operations and held
meetings demanding tebhaga. And when the police came to the villages to arrest
absconding communist leaders, they had to face irate crowds of sharecroppers and
The Communists 119
agricultural labourers attacking them with locally available weapons.58 In July
1949 there were reports of clashes and violent attacks on railway stations from vil-
lages of Howrah district.59 In September 1949 in village Hatal in Howrah a crowd
of about 1,000 men and women looting paddy could be dispersed only when the
police opened fire, killing four people and wounding two – all of them women.60 In
January 1950 in village Dakshinbari in Howrah, the communist activists killed
two constables and wounded another and got away with three rifles of theirs and 15
rounds of ammunition.61 A police intelligence report listed 170 such incidents,
described as ‘C.P.I. Outrages’, in the districts of West Bengal except Calcutta, in
the span of nine months from the beginning of May 1949 to the end of January
1950.62
Without going into the details, we may mention here some of the noticeable
features of this rural insurgency of 1948–49. D.A. Low argued some years ago that
in contrast to China, Vietnam or Malaysia, the weakness of the communist move-
ment in India lay in its inability to ‘go rural’. And when it tried to penetrate the
countryside in Telengana or Bengal around 1946, there had been no major break-
down of rural authority, and hence the communists did not get access to the ranks
of rural leadership.63 This was true in 1948 as well, when the communist movement
relied mostly on marginal peasants like sharecroppers or tribal peasants, and
encountered difficulties in entering large parts of rural West Bengal with settled
peasant communities. As a result, apart from some sporadic incidents, communist
activities were most intense only in some remote and mostly localized areas of four
to five districts.
In these strongholds of rural unrest, unlike the Tebhaga movement of 1946, this
communist-led insurgency, with its various demands, had no specific focal point.
The grand communist scheme of bringing about a ‘People’s Democratic
Revolution’ had little meaning for the peasant rebels, who were motivated mostly
by local grievances. The initial leadership and the initiative for mobilization, of
course, came from the educated bhadralok leaders from outside, performing their
supposed pedagogic role; but this was not a movement entirely mobilized from
above either, as in every area a local leadership from among the peasantry emerged
and seized the initiative. Also there is no reason to believe that these peasants were
entirely untouched by the ideologies of the literate world of their urban middle-
class leaders. Evidence from Bankura suggests that extensive pamphleteering was
resorted to for mobilizing the Santhal peasants. Bhupati Ghorui, a bhagchasee
confessed to the police that he knew ‘something of reading and writing in Bengali’
and that he came to be aware of the whole movement from a ‘Bengali leaflet’.64 Yet,
there were also elements of ambiguity, as another report suggests that the Santhals
used to call the communists ‘Coma Congress’, suggesting some amount of haziness
in their understanding of the distinctive ideologies and nomenclature of organized
politics. And they agreed to participate in the movement only when Bimal Sarkar,
an urban leader from outside, managed to convince them that they had driven out
the police and the magistrate and had established their supremacy in the area.65 In
other words, the peasants’ support for a communist-sponsored revolution was often
on their own terms.
120 The communists
The other interesting aspect of this rural insurgency was the active participation
of women, which was also a hallmark of the first Tebhaga. In this the West Bengal
premier Dr. B.C. Roy saw the degradation of Bengal’s womanhood. In a press con-
ference he noted: ‘women are much to the forefront in Communist organizations.
They have become heartless and cruel. They defy the law, and throw acid bombs.
This is the most distressing activity of the Communist programme in Bengal.’66
However, rural women were never in the leadership position in this communist
insurgency. The evidence from Bankura again suggests that the CPI leadership
actively solicited this participation; but they wanted women only in auxiliary and
supportive roles, such as for blowing the conch shells to signal the arrival of search-
ing police parties.67 But almost everywhere – from Duberbheri to Bandgaba –

women took a far more active role, engaging in open encounters with the police and
jotedar’s men, their kitchen utensils often becoming their weapons of resistance.68
Heuristically what this situation suggests is that while we must not understate the
historical significance of communist mediation in channelling the pent-up rural
discontent into organized protests, we must not also forget the limits of their peda-
gogic and mobilizing role. The peasants’ notions of liberation were often different
and divergent.
Losing momentum
Despite the initial intensity of the movement, it soon became apparent that the com-
munist strategy of insurgency was losing popular support. As bomb-throwing and
police firing gradually became regular features of Calcutta’s public life, this caused
the loss of innocent lives and major disruptions in the normal day-to-day lives of the
average office-going newspaper-reading middle-class and lower middle-class
Bengalis. After some time, many of them began to feel that they had enough of it.69
Even the working classes became disinterested in violent movements, as
Manikuntala Sen noted in her autobiography.70 The proposed railway strike on 9
March 1949 was withdrawn when the government showed a conciliatory attitude to
the Socialist leadership of the All India Railwaymen’s Federation, which not only
withdrew the strike notice, but decided to take disciplinary action against its com-
munist Vice President Jyoti Basu and his other comrades who wished to carry on
with the strike. The government now decided to crack down and arrested the front-
ranking communist leaders involved in this sector; about 118 of them in West
Bengal. Troops and police were mobilized on 8 March to prevent any attempt at
sabotage or subversive activities by renegade communist-influenced union mem-
bers. But nothing happened and the strike, which the communists wanted to go
ahead with, was a failure.71 By this time it was reported that the communists,
because of their primary focus on rural insurgency, were losing their hold over the
industrial working class, as about 20 communist trade unions were reportedly taken
over by the INTUC over the early months of 1949.72
The government also came up with further repressive measures, as seven of the
allied organizations of the CPI were banned on 4 January 1950, on the ground that
they ‘constitute(d) a danger to public peace’.73 By February 1950, 683 persons had
The Communists 121
been arrested and detained without trial under the Preventive Detention Act of
1950, passed in this month. More arrests were made during the year and a few were
released, so that by the end of the year there were 450 political detainees, of them
398 belonging to the CPI and 52 to the RCPI.74 By this time the CPI leadership real-
ized that the movement had remained localized and was not going anywhere. Abani
Lahiri, one of the top leaders of this time, reflected in 2001 with the wisdom of hind-
sight: ‘We called for the overthrow of the Congress government without waiting
for the people to come to that conclusion.’ As a result, ‘the strategy adopted was
beyond the consciousness of the mass of the peasantry.’75
Put into proper perspective, what this admission of strategic failure means is that
mass support for this communist-instigated movement was localized or wavering.

In Kerala, as Dilip Menon has observed, the support for the communists increased
in inverse relationship to the decline in support for the Congress.76 The same could
be argued for West Bengal, where price rise, shortages and retrenchment pushed
some of the marginal groups like the industrial workers, sharecroppers and tribal
peasants to the threshold of their tolerance. The middle class was upset too, as the
Congress failed to tackle the economic problems of the time, neglected to rein in the
black marketeers and resorted to repression to curtail civil liberties (see Chapters 2
and 3). Protests were taking place even before the CPI gave a call for revolutionary
insurgency and these local webs of protest meshed with the communist movement,
in many cases without any direct intervention. And where the movement acquired
intensity, it was often because of local initiatives, prompted by local grievances and
buttressed by networks of local social relationships (as in the tribal areas).
By the beginning of 1950 there were clear signs of disquiet among the rank and
file and a section of the leadership of the CPI. Between 1948 and 1950 its member-
ship had declined from 90,000 to 20,000.77 Those who remained in the party were
frustrated by the lack of direction and progress of the movement and felt exasper-
ated by the intolerance of the top leadership, which allegedly expelled members on
flimsy grounds of indiscipline. The Cominform in January 1950 stressed the futil-
ity of conducting a violent struggle without mass support. This made the rift
between the ideological purists and political pragmatists even sharper, with
demands for a Third Party Congress for the reorganization of the leadership.78
Possibly there were some international factors involved as well. Nehru very
carefully maintained the separation between the repressive measures followed at
home against the communists and his government’s non-aligned foreign policy in
a Cold War-afflicted world. Immediately after the banning of the CPI in West
Bengal, Nehru at a public meeting in New Delhi reiterated that it was ‘our domes-
tic affair’. ‘It does not mean’, he emphasized, ‘that we have aligned ourselves with
one particular bloc or expressed our opposition to another.’79 The Soviet Union and
the CPSU began to appreciate this cautious ‘neutrality’ of the Nehruvian foreign
policy and the Zhadanov line was soon abandoned as far as India was concerned.
The Indian communists were advised to cooperate with the Congress and to
‘induce’ the Nehru government to join the Soviet bloc, or at least form ‘a bloc or
even an alliance’ with it against Anglo-American imperialism.80 These were all
indications that a change in communist strategy was clearly in the offing.
122 The communists
The communists around 1950 were also facing resistance from the public, par-
ticularly when they tried to disrupt the Republic Day celebrations on 26 January
1950. There were spontaneous processions by the incensed public in disturbed
areas, urging people to resist communist activities, and some suspected commu-
nists were rounded up by the public and handed over to the police.81 However, such
resistance was atypical and perhaps a response to Sardar Patel’s lashing out in a
speech in Calcutta on 14 January 1950 that the average Calcuttans’ response to
communist violence was marked more by apathy, than active resistance.82 But let-
ters to the editor in various newspapers around this time clearly reveal that there
was a growing public mood of scepticism, if not about communist ideals, then cer-
tainly about their terrorist methods (see Chapter 3 for more details).
This scepticism, it needs to be mentioned here, was not just because of uncer-
tainties created by futile violent guerrilla warfare. This was also the result of a well-
orchestrated anti-communist propaganda launched by the government and the
press. In order to win over the poor peasants and the sharecroppers the government
offered some concessions. On 14 November 1949 it issued the West Bengal
Bargadars [sharecroppers] Ordinance, which defined the principles for the regula-
tion of division of the produce between the sharecropper and the landowner – but it
did not fulfil the demand of tebhaga or give the former a two-thirds share. It did,
however, give protection to the bargadars by limiting the rights of the landowner
to evict them, except on some well-defined principles. It also provided for the
establishment of Bhagchas [sharecropping] Conciliation Boards, which would
arbitrate in any dispute between the bargadar and the landowner regarding the
apportionment of produce. Each board would consist of an official chairman, and
four members – two of them representing the bargadars and the landowners in a
particular area.83 The ordinance was later regularized through the West Bengal
Bargadar Bill passed in February 1950. But it did not go far enough to address the
grievances of the sharecroppers or the urgent needs of land reform, and was con-
templated as ‘a temporary measure’, as a far-reaching land reform measure of
zamindari abolition was under consideration.84
On the other hand, the government launched a propaganda campaign against the
communists. It needs to be noted here that it was not a political campaign led by a
political party, because in the Bengal countryside around this time, the Congress
Party, which was the only major political party in the country, had practically no
organizational presence. It was therefore a campaign initiated by the government
with the help of the state bureaucracy. Local level meetings were organized by local
officials like the Sub-divisional Officers, where ministers came and spoke against
the communists and announced local developmental projects that could provide a
temporary escape from poverty for the local people.85 This was complemented by
what a government memo described as a ‘vigorous pamphleteering campaign
denouncing Communist ideology and methods’. ‘Small photographs of national
leaders and small national flags that could be pinned to the chest’ were distributed
free to villagers. Along with that, information was regularly and carefully fed to the
local media about the measures being taken against the communists and the arrest
of important communist leaders.86 It is not surprising therefore that the media
The Communists 123
reports around this time contained little information and analyses of the communist
insurgency, but more details of counter-insurgency measures.
It is important to note that the major feature of this propaganda campaign was the
issue of freedom, more precisely, national sovereignty, and not any fear of a social
revolution. The communists appeared now to be the greatest enemies of freedom
for which a lot of sufferings and sacrifices had been made in the not so distant past.
In other words, if the middle classes were concerned with the rights of citizenship
and civil liberties, the issue of sovereignty was no less important to them either, as
it was the nation-state and its cultural heritage that defined their national identity.
The communist slogan, ‘Ye azadi jhooti hai’ (this freedom is fake) did not go down
well with the patriotic feelings of many Bengalis. The other arrogant action of the
communists, that is, the burning of national flags in a number of public meetings,87
caused a moral outrage, as the flag was now the most sacred symbol of freedom and
national identity. In any modern nation-state, the flag becomes the most revered
and acceptable ritual emblem of the civil religion of the state and therefore flag des-
ecration is an act of political iconoclasm that creates a moral panic not only among
the political elite, but also among the average citizens.88
In this case, the flag burning fitted well into a widely shared conspiracy theory
that the communists were actually trying to bring in the Russians as the new impe-
rial masters of this country. On 18 August 1948 Anandabazar Patrika published an
editorial entitled: ‘Communist conspiracy’. The Russian bear, it argued, had eaten
up all of Eastern Europe and was now stretching its ugly hands towards Asia and the
local communist parties in those countries were eager to shake that hand and sacri-
fice the interests of their own nations. Hence, we should be careful; after
winning freedom from one empire, we should not lose it to another. ‘Whatever may
be Moscow’s ultimate intentions’, queried an editorial in Amrita Bazar Patrika on
9 March 1949, ‘can there be any doubt that the Communists everywhere have
become potential traitors to their countries?’ In today’s world, Suresh Chandra
Banerji, the deputy leader of the Congress Assembly Party, argued in the Assembly
in September 1948, while defending an amendment to the West Bengal Security
Act, that there were two kinds of imperialism: Anglo-American imperialism and
Russian imperialism. India had nothing to fear from the first one, but the second one
was a real danger. Eastern Europe had already been taken over, China was about to
collapse, and through Malaya, Indonesia and Burma the Russians were coming to
India. The local communist agents were preparing the ground for that takeover
through internal sabotage and so there were real dangers of our losing freedom once
again, if the communists were not contained in time.89 The Home Minister, Kiran
Shankar Roy, while defending the same amendment in the Assembly, also argued
that ‘this preaching and preparation for violent seizure of power is not peculiar to
India or Bengal. It is part of an international plan’. If anybody had any doubt, he was
only to look at the situation in Southeast Asia and China. This anarchy was ‘creep-
ing towards Bengal’, he cautioned, ‘from Burma through Arakan’.90 We too want
equality for all, said Suresh Chandra Banerji a few months later; but we differ from
the communists because they want to bring it in a violent way. We also want to be
truly independent in our foreign relations, and everybody knows the relationship
124 The communists
between the communists and the Russians!91 Referring to the communist activities
in West Bengal, Sardar Patel described them as ‘not the way of swaraj but of
China.’92 And this was not just the voice of an embattled political leadership. A
letter to the editor of Amrita Bazar Patrika, on 15 February 1949, expressed the
same concern: ‘That any of my countrymen should be willing to even consider
changing to a Communist dictatorship after so recently gaining their freedom is
utterly unthinkable.’
This thesis of an international conspiracy to endanger our freedom reverberated
regularly in the editorials of Anandabazar Patrika,93 Amrita Bazar Patrika,94 and
The Statesman.95 Almost every day all these newspapers carried front-page head-
lines about communist activities over the world, from the fall of eastern and central
Europe, to the Berlin Blockade, to the advance of the communists in China, Malaya,
Indonesia, and Burma, and the Korean War. Essays published in these newspapers96
and also in popular literary magazines like Sanibarer Chithi97 argued that
we were not afraid of a socialist revolution, but it should come in our own way,
emanating from our own history, not in the way dictated by the Russians, which in
fact curbed civil liberties and democracy, rather than promoted the freedom of the
people.98 India wished to achieve the goal of socialism through non-violent means,
which was in keeping with the Indian tradition, claimed an editorial in Amrita
Bazar Patrika. India’s path was different from that of Russia.99
In addition to such assertions of an independence of identity, the past histories of
betrayal also began to reappear with a vengeance in the public domain. On 27
November 1947, while defending the Security Bill in the Assembly, Niharendu
Dutta Mazumdar described the communists as ‘guilty of treachery to India and of
betraying India’s patriotic cause during the years of 1942–45’; and asked for
more power to deal with them, the ‘criminal anti-patriotic bands masquerading as
political parties’.100 Those who in the days of war and famine tried to make the
people of this country loyal to the British government, were now trying to destabi-
lize the national government in every possible way, wrote another editorial in
Anandabazar Patrika on 28 November 1947. Hadn’t they ‘been trying, since 1942,
to endanger the freedom of India?’ So how can you trust them now – asked
Kalipada Mukherjee, the Congress Labour Minister, at a public meeting in Calcutta
in February 1949.101 In other words, in the public discourse of this period the idea
had been firmly planted that the communists were the major enemies of our free-
dom. And this was not just a concern of the middle class, which had been histori-
cally the main support base of the communist movement in Bengal. Even among
the workers and peasants there was a growing feeling that some more time should
be given to the Congress government in order to fulfil the promises of freedom.
It is significant to note that this was a concern that resonated again and again also
in the public speeches of leaders of the Opposition, like Jayaprakash Narayan and
Sarat Bose, who would not accept the communists in any proposed leftist union
against the Congress. Because they were allegedly ‘prepared to sacrifice the funda-
mental interests of the people on the altar of their narrow party interests.’ In a letter
to the Forward Bloc leader Shilbhadra Yajee, the West Bengal Provincial
Committee of the CPI protested against such an attitude, but this did not change the
The Communists 125
mind of the other leftist groups.102 India would never allow Russia, said
Jayaprakash Narayan in a speech to the railway workers in February 1949, ‘to inter-
fere with her internal affairs through their quislings and fifth columns.’103
In spite of that, in the June 1949 by-election in South Calcutta constituency, the
communists, like all other leftist parties, supported the candidature of Sarat
Chandra Bose against the Congress candidate. But this support became more of a
liability for Bose, as the communists were held responsible for violently breaking
up a Congress election meeting, thus providing easy fodder for the Congress prop-
aganda machine.104 After the election victory, Bose therefore did not acknowledge
this support, did not utter a word about legalization of the CPI and declined to
include the communists in his proposed leftist union, the United Socialist
Organization of India (USOI). ‘The main difficulty is that’, he reasoned, ‘the gen-
eral public do not treat them [the communists] as an Indian party’.105 So Ranadive,
Bhowani Sen and Somnath Lahiri, the three leaders of the CPI, in a public statement
warned Bose not to treat his election victory as a ‘personal triumph’, as the com-
munists had supported his candidature and the voters had voted for him because of
his promise to fight for civil liberties. And now he had to deliver and continue to
fight for democratic rights.106 Yet, when Bose finally established his USOI in
September, he kept the CPI out (details in Chapter 5).
Towards electoral politics

The anti-communist public discourse of 1949–50, it needs to be pointed out, was
not so much against the communists as individuals, and there was no attempt to
brand them as ‘enemies of the nation’, as happened in East Pakistan, where militant
peasant movements also took place around the same time under communist leader-
ship in the border districts of Mymensingh, Sylhet and Rajshahi, involving peas-
ants from tribal communities such as the Hajongs and Santhals. The state and the
Muslim League political establishment there used a different marginalizing rheto-
ric and branded the communists as ‘Hindus’, thus defining them out of their puta-
tive Islamic nation.107 In West Bengal, as we have seen in Chapter 3, the public
disquiet was more about the violent methods of the communists and their alleged
connections with a foreign power. While their movement was seen as a threat to
freedom, they were not seen as outsiders to the nation, and their attempted revolu-
tion actually initiated a political debate about certain key issues that were plaguing
the public life in the province. This critique also prompted a lot of soul searching
and internal dissent within the communist party. A CPI booklet intercepted by the
IB openly acknowledged that ‘it would be gross exaggeration to say that the coun-
try is already on the eve of armed insurrection or revolution, or that civil war is
already raging in the country.’108 By January 1950 leaders like Nripen Banerjee
were conceding in open meetings that the West Bengal Party followed a ‘wrong
track for the last three years’.109 The moderate and expelled leader P.C. Joshi openly
criticized the Left adventurism of the party in a press statement, condemning the
‘tragically mistaken ways of our party leadership which is rushing headlong in a left
sectarian direction’.110 A few months later he charged the existing leadership for
126 The communists
suppressing ‘inner party democracy’.111 It was also reported that many of the
expelled members of the party were working independently in the rural areas and
their influence was gradually reaching a minority group within the party.112 So
more resignations followed from the West Bengal party. The outbreak of commu-
nal violence in 1950 also muddied the political waters and once again the commu-
nist leadership had no viable policy to handle the communal question.113
Within the party there was now a lot of scepticism, particularly about the loss of
support among the middle classes, who constituted the traditional support base for
the communist movement in Bengal. The first critique came from a group of
Andhra members of the Central Committee who issued a document in May 1950
attacking both ‘Joshian reformism’ and the ‘left-adventurism’ of Ranadive, and

advocated the ‘Chinese path, of building up the united front of all anti-imperialist
classes, parties, groups, and individuals that are willing to fight for the national lib-
eration of the country’.114 In its May–June meeting the Central Committee of the
party endorsed this document. In June B.T. Ranadive was ousted and Rajeswar
Rao, another leader from Andhra, became the new General Secretary. But an even
more stringent and wide-ranging critique was circulated on 30 September 1950 by
the three front-ranking leaders, Ajoy Ghosh, S.A. Dange and S.V. Ghate, attacking
not just the Ranadive line, but also the recent Andhra document which they thought
offered ‘a totally inadequate criticism of the old PB’s (Politburo’s) line’. The doc-
ument observed with not so latent sarcasm: ‘The old leadership talked about the
“Russian way”, the new leadership talks about [the] “Chinese way” … . Neither
bothered to understand and analyse the situation in our own country.’ It went
further:
The old PB under the leadership of Ranadive … formulated the ‘tactical line’
of fighting government terror by means of ‘militant action’. The line was car-
ried out in detail in Bengal disregarding all criticism, all opposition from rank-
and-file members of the party.
… railway stations were attacked, bombs were thrown on trams and buses,
attempts were made to break-up Nehru’s meeting … the house of Suren Ghose,
the Bengal Congress president, was attacked, fire was set to Congress offices
… These acts as well as the use of acid bulbs in meetings and demonstrations
were part of the old leadership’s ‘revolutionary’ line.
Terrorism and even gangsterism masqueraded as the line of the ‘struggle
against the bourgeoisie’. What havoc had this caused, everyone can see
today.115
What Ghosh, Dange and Ghate suggested instead was the forging of a broad
working-class and Left unity, bringing into it the middle classes and the peasant
masses, and taking a ‘positive attitude’ towards the general election.116
All these factors led to a significant shift in communist strategy from terrorist
attacks to a focus on propaganda against communalism and winning the confidence
of the middle class, their traditional support base, by working within the parameters
of parliamentary democracy. On 15 November 1950 the Politburo issued a new
The Communists 127
draft policy advocating the formation of a ‘people’s democratic front’ composed of
‘workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie and middle bourgeoisie, and the parties and
groups representing them’ on the basis of a minimum programme of ‘Complete
national independence’. Most important was the change of position relating to
armed struggle, which was defined as the ‘principal form of struggle’, but at the
same time it was acknowledged that:
It would be erroneous to think that this principal form is the only form of strug-
gle because without simultaneously adopting and co-ordinating all other con-
ceivable forms of struggle, such as the economic and political strikes, …
election contests and so on and so forth, the armed struggle alone can neither
be conducted for long nor ultimately can success be attained.117
On 18 December 1950 the Central Committee issued an open letter to all party
members acknowledging the past mistakes that created the ‘gravest crisis in the his-
tory of our party’. The first priority of the party would now be ‘the building of the
unity of the left parties … and to demand the immediate holding of the general elec-
tions and the full restoration of civil liberties.’118 By this time both the Central
Committee and the Politburo had been reconstituted, although the differences
within the party had not been reconciled, delaying the Third Congress of the party.
It was speculated that the issue had been referred to the Cominform urging it to
issue instructions regarding the party’s future course of action.119
In the meanwhile, however, the CPI still described the Congress government as
pro-imperialist and pro-feudal, and the independence achieved in 1947 was
still considered to be fake. On the anniversary of the Republic Day on 26 January
1951, the party organized protest meetings at various places in the districts of
Burdwan, Hooghly, Nadia and West Dinajpur.120 Again on the anniversary of the
Independence Day on 15 August 1951 there were protest meetings at several places
in the province. In Bankura, for example, at Barjora town a procession carrying
black flags protested against the celebration of Independence Day.121 At Naihati
three meetings were organized where the government was criticized. In Balurghat
some people hoisted a flag made of ‘torn umbrella cloth, torn shoes and broken
spikes’, leading to protests from the local people.122 In the 24-Parganas district, a
protest meeting was organized at Alambazar in Baranagar criticizing the Congress
government for celebrating independence; at Behala, in addition to that a black flag
was hoisted.123
But despite such ceremonial protestations, the CPI was gradually coming to
terms with the new constitution and the government. On 5 January 1951, the CPI
had a significant legal victory at the Calcutta High Court, which in response to a
habeas corpus appeal by 88 political prisoners, decided that the ‘declaration of the
Communist Party of India as an unlawful association was … void and illegal’.124 In
April the West Bengal Provincial Committee of the CPI announced that it would
participate in the coming elections and would like to form ‘an electoral alliance
with all democratic and Left parties and individuals who genuinely seek to fight
the election on a progressive democratic programme.’125 By the end of 1951 when
128 The communists
Ajoy Ghosh became the new General Secretary, the change in CPI strategy
was complete.126
On 23 October 1951, through a press statement, the Central and the Andhra
Committees formally announced the withdrawal of the Telengana struggle and
decided ‘to mobilize the entire people for an effective participation in the ensuing
general election to defeat the Congress.’127 In West Bengal, the refugees concen-
trated in government refugee camps and squatter colonies became a new con-
stituency to focus on, although during the initial years of independence the CPI did
not take much notice of the refugees and even distrusted them. But now, they grad-
ually took control of the United Central Refugee Council, which had been launched
on 13 August 1950, originally as a multiparty frontline organization to mobilize

refugees to articulate their demand for rehabilitation. The CPI now planned to organ-
ize protest rallies with them (more on this in Chapter 6).128 Its political agenda of
replacing the Congress government through revolutionary action was put on hold, as
the people were not yet ready. On 25 November 1951 at a press conference, S.A.
Dange and Ajoy Ghosh declared that ‘if the masses by democratic means could
“hang” the Government, there would be no need for violence.’ The party therefore
decided to participate in the general election to be held in January 1952, and planned
to put up about 500 candidates for the state legislatures and parliament.129
So, to sum up this story, when communism was surging triumphantly ahead in
Asia – in Malaya, Burma and the Philippines, and above all in China – the Indian
communists too chose the path of insurgency. But this movement remained local-
ized and even in those restricted zones of communist influence they soon found out
that the objective realities were not yet fully favourable for their grand programme.
If communism appealed intellectually to the young, a sizeable section of the mid-
dle class did not feel comfortable about its ‘foreign’ origin, as they looked for an
indigenous model of modernity. The peasants and workers were prepared to sup-
port them only on their own terms and only when local situations were conducive
to such protests. This was not a situation that favoured the staging of a ‘People’s
Democratic Revolution’ maintaining its theoretical purity modelled after the
Chinese experience. What happened in West Bengal between 1948 and 1950 can be
best described as a series of localized incidents of violent protests against certain
conditions of life, which the new Congress government of independent India failed
to improve, despite widespread expectations generated by the arrival of freedom. In
other words, the effectiveness and intensity of the protests depended on a wide vari-
ety of factors – communist mediation was one of them. What contributed further to
the volatility of the situation was the Congress government’s paranoia about peace,
order and preservation of the newly acquired freedom, and its apparent lack of
qualms about curbing civil liberties to suppress even legitimate opposition. It is dif-
ficult, however, to configure all these fragmented moments of protest into an inte-
grated narrative of an unfolding communist revolution.Their audacious challenge
to offer an alternative developmental trajectory for the nation had to be put on hold,
though not completely abandoned. They had to try a new strategy to achieve that
goal and this led to the transformation of the CPI from a revolutionary party into a
constitutional party. We will examine their election campaign in the next chapter.
5 The fractured Opposition
Opposition from within

The party system in post-independence India was described by Rajni Kothari as ‘a
system of one party dominance’, where the Congress was the ‘party of consensus’
and the opposition consisted of ‘parties of pressure’, because none of them were
capable of offering a viable alternative government.1 While this supposed consen-
sus was continually contested, as we have already seen, what actually saved the
Congress from losing power was the fact that the opposition remained extremely
fragmented – both on the Left and on the Right. And these differences arose some-
times out of personality clashes, and sometimes out of conflicts of perspectives on
the future of the nation.
In West Bengal in March 1949 several MLAs belonging previously to the
Muslim League formed a ‘Parliamentary Opposition Party of West Bengal’; but it
had hardly any agenda or credibility, and was never taken seriously as opposition.2
This absence of a well-organized opposition was being noted globally as well as
locally. The New York Times noted in an editorial in July 1949 that so much domes-
tic distrust of the government in India was partly because there was ‘no solid, well-
organized comparable opposition’.3 Even a pro-Congress newspaper like Amrita
Bazar Patrika admitted in the name of safeguarding democracy that ‘the Congress
Party … [had] converted the legislature into a one-party show.’4 A citizen’s con-
ference at the Indian Association Hall in Calcutta in March 1949 under the chair-
manship of Dr Radha Binod Pal (of International Court of Justice fame) also
resolved that in order ‘to consolidate freedom’ what was needed was ‘a strong
opposition party … which would offer healthy and constructive criticism’.5 But the
opposition on the Right, the Hindu Mahasabha, had been politically inoperative
since early 1948 and the Left alternative, which seemed to be a distinct possibility
in June 1949, after the South Calcutta by-election, did not immediately eventuate.
On 15 August 1949, on the second anniversary of Independence, the political sci-
entist Subrata Roy Chowdhury therefore observed in a newspaper article: ‘the
absence of a healthy opposition at present makes democracy incomplete in the
subcontinent.’6
However, what is interesting about the political developments of this period is
that an opposition to the Congress was emerging gradually from within the
Congress ranks. The debate over Congress economic policies and the ideological
rift that we have described in Chapter 3 ultimately resulted in successive splits
within the party. First, the Socialists, who had been historically operating as a lobby
group – the Congress Socialist Party – within the Congress since 1934, decided to
secede from the Congress and started operating as an independent party. In an
article in Amrita Bazar Patrika on 14 January 1948 the leader of the Socialists
Jayaprakash Narayan observed that the Congress was continually moving to the
Right, losing its original ideals and becoming ‘a Congress of job-hunters’.7 At the
Socialist convention in Nasik on 20 March 1948 a resolution to secede was passed
without even a debate. ‘Once the decision is taken to become a party, the national
or multi-class character of the Congress disappears’, the resolution said. And there
‘ends a long period of organic association of the Socialists with the Congress.’
Their other leader Asoke Mehta further clarified the situation by asserting that the
Socialists were leaving the Congress not just because of its constitution, but
because of its authoritarian tendencies; it was no longer a ‘liberating’, but a ‘limit-
ing force’.8 When the communist challenge became formidable in mid-1949, many
thought – or expected – that the Socialists would sink their differences and merge
back into the Congress, but that did not happen.9 The Socialists continued to main-
tain their distinctive existence in West Bengal as elsewhere, and at the sixth con-
ference of their West Bengal branch in August 1950, they preached as a remedy for
the country’s economic ills the abolition of zamindari without compensation and
the nationalization of basic industries. The conference in a resolution described the
Congress as ‘an organization of vested interests. Behind its policy can be traced the
unseen hand of the capitalist class.’ The resolution further noted the ‘developing
rift’ within the West Bengal Congress and appealed to those leaders who were
resigning from the Congress to join the Socialist Party in order to create a single
‘mass party’ to oppose the Congress.10
Indeed, as indicated in this resolution, the frustration with the Congress culture
was developing in many quarters, not just in West Bengal. Acharya J.B. Kripalani,
at the Gandhi Jayanti (birthday of M.K. Gandhi) meeting in Patna on 2 October
1950, noted with angst:
But God knows what has happened after the achievement of independence that
I find even my companions, who fought shoulder to shoulder in the battle of
freedom fearlessly, now hanging on the frowns and favours of Ministers. Can
there be further depth of degradation?11
Recently he had lost the election for the post of Congress President to
Purushottamdas Tandon.12 So his critique appeared to many – and does still appear
to some historians – as driven by a personal agenda.13 But he was not alone in rais-
ing this criticism. The UP Congressman Triloki Singh, who formed the People’s
Congress, told the pressmen in Calcutta in July 1950 that he and his colleagues had
resigned from the Congress because of its ‘totalitarian trends’. He invited like-
minded Congressmen in West Bengal to come out and form a united organization
of all progressive elements as a viable opposition to the Congress.14 Indeed, as a
The fractured Opposition 131
result of the ideological rift (see Chapter 3), many of the disgruntled Gandhians in
West Bengal had been thinking of seceding from the Congress for some time.
Leaders like Dr P.C. Ghosh had been vocal even in public meetings in their criti-
cism of the government neglecting the establishment of the Gandhian ideal of a
‘krishak-praja-mazdoor raj’, where the gap between the working people and the
rich would be closed. At a meeting of the peasants – Dhanya Chasi Sammelan – in
Bankura in November 1949 he declared that political freedom needed to be trans-
lated into economic and social independence and unless that happened swaraj
would mean nothing to the masses. The ‘grow more food’ campaign initiated by the
government would not succeed unless the welfare of the peasants was looked into
and the tillers of the soil became its owners.15 This open criticism of the government
food policy led to his detractor Atulya Ghosh, Secretary of the West Bengal
Provincial Congress Committee (WBPCC), lashing out publicly at his colleague.
But even after such public acrimony, P.C. Ghosh presided over another peasants’
meeting at Bankura in December.16
In November 1950 Ghosh joined Acharya Kripalani and 40 other leading
Congressmen like Rafi Ahmed Kidwai of UP and T. Prakasam of Madras to form
the Congress Democratic Front, which would function within the Congress to
ensure purity in public life and administration, and to ensure the selection of candi-
dates of ‘known ability and integrity’ in the coming elections to central and state
legislatures. The statement the Front issued pointed out that the Congress Party in
the last three years had been infected by ‘a scramble for positions of privilege and
authority’ and was also‘threatened by irresponsible authoritarian forces’. The new
group would be working for the ‘implementation of the aims of the Congress … and
the restoration of democracy in the Congress organization.’17
The formation of such a lobby group was against the new Congress constitution
(see Chapter 3), but Kripalani refused to admit that, and described it as his one last
attempt ‘to put the Congress house in order.’18 Members of the Congress Working
Committee however thought that this would weaken the Congress at a time when
they were in the process of changing the constitution in order to make it a more
democratic party. A subcommittee had been appointed to that effect and the princi-
pal changes that were recommended were that the primary membership of the
Congress would be a paid membership, and the members of the various committees
would be elected directly by the primary members, replacing the current system of
indirect election. But Kripalani refused to listen and warned his dissident col-
leagues about possible disciplinary action, claiming that Congress had become so
faction-ridden and the ‘dominant group’ so desperately hungry for power that the
slightest voice of protest was likely to appear as ‘indiscipline’.19
However, while Kripalani still contemplated working from within the Congress,
P.C. Ghosh and 100 other Congressmen of the Abhoy Ashram (or Khadi) group20
in West Bengal decided to leave the Congress and on 13 November 1950 formed a
new political party which they chose to call Krishak Praja Mazdoor Party, which
would work towards the establishment of ‘classless non-exploiting democracy’ –
‘krishak-praja-mazdoor raj’. Its objective would be the same as the newly formed
Congress Democratic Front, but it would function outside the organizational ambit
of the Congress, and would serve the Congress ideals – as enshrined in the Jaipur
resolution (1948) – more effectively than the present Congress. A resolution of the
new party stated its political objectives not in terms of high Gandhian ideals, but in
a language of simple minimal needs of average citizens looking for a desired pro-
gression from political to economic freedom:
We stand for an order which will ensure food, clothing, education, medical
treatment and housing to the people. To check corruption and blackmarketing
will be one of the main endeavours of the party. Unless, these vices are checked
no planning can be made really effective.21
To achieve these objectives, it proposed a socialist economic programme: abolition

of zamindari and nationalization of essential industries, insurance and banking
companies, as well as import and export businesses. The members of the party
would not resign from the Legislative Assembly, but would function as an inde-
pendent bloc. And the party would contest ‘almost every seat in West Bengal’ in the
next election. With their joining the Opposition benches, the number of Opposition
members in the West Bengal Assembly at the budget session of 1951 rose to 25 in
a House of 85 (excluding 7 vacant seats), where previously it scarcely exceeded
12.22 And during the debates on the Governor’s speech and the budget, the govern-
ment could feel the heat of this new enlarged and enlivened Opposition.23
Thus when the Bengal dissidents chose to go their separate way it was hoped that
Congress dissident groups in other parts of India would follow their lead. ‘Possibly
a national Opposition is beginning to emerge’ – an editorial in The Statesman
expressed its guarded optimism. But public response remained sceptical, because
its origin, it was suspected, was in ‘group rivalry and intrigue’, as by September
1950 their rival group the Hooghly–Midnapur faction had established its complete
sway over the Congress (see Chapter 3). But P.C. Ghosh disagreed; ‘I do not see
any hope of reforming it [Congress] from within.’ And so, ‘unity to perpetuate the
present order would be handing over the country to anarchy and chaos, if not to
Communism.’24 His detractor Atulya Ghosh retorted by saying that if Congress had
degenerated, it had happened over time, and so Dr Ghosh and his associates could
not avoid responsibility for that. So he appealed to them to reconsider their decision
to resign. In a later statement he mentioned that he had even invited Dr Suresh
Banerji, the President of the new party, to become the President of the WBPCC and
reconstitute its Working Committee, but the latter declined.25 Had he accepted the
offer, the group would have certainly lost its credibility, as the defection was not
about getting personal offices, but to protest against those very practices of the
Congress which preferred to conduct politics through a system of personal rewards,
bribes and concessions.
Also on the all-India front, the newly elected Congress President
Puroshottamdas Tandon sent a ‘conciliatory’ letter to Kripalani, emphasizing the
need for Congress unity and requesting him to reconsider his decision to form the
Democratic Front that contravened the Congress constitution. After Sardar Patel’s
death the Congress High Command’s attitude to Acharya Kripalani’s rebellion had
also further softened.26 At the next AICC meeting at Ahmedabad on 29–31 January
1951 Nehru opened the session with a ‘fighting speech’, chastising Congressmen
for deviating from Congress ideals and a ‘Unity Resolution’ was adopted, calling
upon the Congressmen ‘to bring back something of the spirit and will to work and
suffer for a cause which enabled the Congress to win independence.’ It also ‘depre-
cated’ all attempts to form ‘special groups within the Congress either by a majority
or a minority’, as it would be ‘injurious to [the] organization and the country’.27
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, while seconding the resolution, said that it was the ‘last
all-out effort to save the Congress from slowly withering away, from decay and
ultimate collapse.’ Yet, the contrived conflation of the party and the country was so
glaringly explicit in the resolution that it could hardly satisfy the sceptics. As an edi-
torial in The Statesman observed, what could indeed restore Congress’s credibility
was its workers emulating the Gandhian ideal of ‘selfless public service’. But that
was out of the question, because the main focus of the majority of the members of
the Working Committee at the AICC meeting was on deciding the composition of
the Central Election Committee, which would select candidates for the next elec-
tion. Kripalani could therefore easily retort to Nehru’s call for unity by pointing his
finger to the very ad hoc nature of post-independence Congress politics: ‘We all
want unity. We are willing to be united. But we must have an economic plan. We
must have a political and social plan. I will be the first person to line up with any
progressive plan.’28
On the second day of the AICC meeting, in view of the pressing economic prob-
lems facing the country, Alguri Shastri of Uttar Pradesh (UP) proposed that the
AICC call an all-parties meeting to discuss ways of solving them. But he was forced
to withdraw the resolution when Maulana Azad opposed it on the grounds that ‘we
should strengthen our position before thinking of asking others to emulate [us].’ In
other words, there was no question of sharing the wisdom of others – others were
only expected to follow or ‘emulate’ the Congress.29 It was this intransigence and
arrogance which further alienated the dissident groups within the Congress. If not
anyone else, Nehru could understand that. So a few weeks after the AICC meeting,
Nehru invited P.C. Ghosh to Delhi and asked him if he would rejoin the Congress.
According to press reports Nehru even conceded that Congress had failed in many
respects and needed to be revitalized. However, if Nehru was conciliatory, his lieu-
tenants were not. A few days later, Kala Venkatarao, the General Secretary of the
Congress told the West Bengal Pradesh Political Conference at Howrah that unity
should be brought back to the Congress, but for that there should be no appeasement,
for all those charges of corruption against Congressmen were without substance.
The Labour Minister Jagjivan Ram refused to admit that Congress had deviated
from its aims and ideals. It was unfortunate, he thought, that some people thought
so and sought to weaken the organization. In the context of this state of denial, it
was no wonder that Kripalani and Ghosh did not respond positively to peace over-
tures, and the latter reportedly told Nehru that those who truly believed in Gandhian
principles had no place in today’s Congress.30 A split in the Congress was now
inevitable, and perhaps also desirable, argued an editorial in The Statesman.
‘Freedom has been attained’, it observed, ‘and naturally there are differences of
view [sic] how best to use it. To suppress all opinions except one seems neither
desirable nor necessary.’31
Indeed, in other parts of India too, divergent political views were being organized
into distinct political parties through defection from the Congress. Already in UP the
People’s Congress had come into existence and in Andhra the Praja Party was
formed by Professor Ranga. In West Bengal there was more rebellion within the
Congress in March, as a group under the leadership of Dr.P.C. Guha Roy and Amar
Krishna Ghosh decided to join Kripalani’s Democratic Front.32 On the other hand,
there were also attempts at reconciliation, particularly under the initiative of Nehru
and Azad. However, as newspaper reports of this period and the publication of the
correspondence between Kripalani and Tandon revealed, the majority of the mem-
bers of the Congress High Command were more eager to get rid of the dissidents
than make any substantive concessions to win them over. So ultimately, Kripalani
resigned from the Congress on 16 May 1951, and at a convention at Patna on 14 June
he formed a new party called the Krishak Mazdoor Praja Party – or Praja Party in
short – into which other regional splinter groups like the West Bengal Krishak Praja
Mazdoor Party, Andhra Praja Party and the UP People’s Congress chose to merge.
The word ‘Congress’ was purposefully dropped from the name to signal a clinical
break from the old party and its political baggage of corruption and inefficiency.33
However, according to public perception, the new party struggled to distinguish
itself from the Congress, as all its leaders were still commited to the Congress ide-
ology and the statement of the new party’s objectives – ‘establishment of a free,
democratic, casteless and classless society by peaceful means’ – sounded very
much like the Jaipur resolution of the Congress (1948). Indeed, as Kripalani had
made it clear in his 1,500-word letter of resignation, his differences with the
Congress President were not on ideology or policies, but on his reluctance to deal
with malpractices. The ‘first task’ that the draft manifesto of the new party identi-
fied was cleansing the administration of its corrupt and authoritarian tendencies.
This was to be followed by the curbing of black marketeering and anti-social activ-
ities, and revival of the ‘spirit of swadeshi’ (self-sufficiency). As for its economic
policies, it talked vaguely about ‘land reform’ and opposed wholesale nationaliza-
tion of industries as anti-democratic.34 It is not surprising that it appears to many
that the ‘reasons for their leaving Congress were personal rather than ideological’.35
But more appropriately, the reasons were more ethical and moral than personal, as
both Kripalani and other speakers at the Patna convention made it clear.
This defection was also an act of ideological dissent. As we have already shown,
the growing rift within the Bengal Congress over the intended meanings of ‘devel-
opment’ and the projected future trajectory of the nation was being more sharply
defined at each successive budget debate in the Assembly since 1948. On 24
November 1950, that is about a week after the formation of the Krishak Praja
Mazdoor Party in West Bengal, its President Dr Suresh Chandra Banerji wrote to
INTUC leader Hariharnath Shastri that:
The object and the line of this party and those of the Congress are identical.
We believe that the official Congress is going away from its ideal[s] and
reformation from within, at least in Bengal, is impossible. So the new party has
been started with the object of reforming it [the Congress] from [the] outside
and thus stemming the tide of communism that has already half encircled
India.
There could be no better ideological statement for a man who was associated
with the Congress for 40 years and was prepared to sacrifice his comfortable
political career to defend an ‘ideal’ from which he believed the official Congress
was ‘gradually drifting away’. ‘I have been a fighter all my life’, wrote Banerji,
‘and I cannot go on without having a definite goal for which I must feel I am fight-
ing.’36 In other words, for him the fighting was not over, because the ideal of
freedom in which he believed and fought for in the past had not yet been achieved
in its totality. This difference in the understanding of the Congress ideology of
freedom was spelled out more clearly by Banerji at a Praja Party public meeting
on 23 September 1951. The Congress had set three goals for itself, he told his
largely working-class audience; these were to drive away the British, to make India
free and to establish a ‘kisan-mazdoor raj’. The Congress, he then argued, had
achieved the first two goals and had abandoned the third.37 And here lay the crux of
the ideological dissent. In the perception of Banerji and his fellow dissidents, the
official Congress leaders interpreted freedom as only the attainment of political
sovereignty, while for them it should also have been accompanied by a social
revolution.
However, where the Praja leaders really faltered was in providing a more dis-
tinctive programmatic content of their rather vague shibboleth of ‘krishak-praja-
mazdoor raj’. And here, the party, which claimed to be the new national opposition,
displayed very little individuality, and this would prove problematic for its
prospects in the forthcoming election. After the formation of the Praja Party there
were a series of public meetings in Calcutta where attendance varied from 500 to
10,000, including peasant volunteers brought from the villages. But according to
available reports, the contents of the speeches – delivered by such stalwarts as
Acharya Kripalani, P.C. Ghosh, Suresh Chandra Banerji and Charu Chandra
Bhandari – had little more than criticism of specific government polices or con-
demnation of the Congress in general. The ‘ideal’ of a ‘classless democratic soci-
ety’ that was proudly proclaimed from the pulpits,38 in the absence of programmatic
content sounded more like a castle in the air without a foundation or structure to
stand upon. In other words, the Praja Party’s vision of freedom or the idea of an
indigenous socialism sounded more like a moral goal than a realistic political
option that could be translated into policies and programmes within the structures
of a modern nation-state. It was no wonder that all the modern middle-class scep-
tics could see in the Praja Party manifesto were either the ‘familiar Congress slo-
gans’ or only contradictions and anomalies.39
Closer to the elections, Acharya Kripalani tried further to clarify the points of
difference between the Praja Party and the Congress. The major reasons for the rup-
ture, he argued in an article in The Statesman, were that the ‘Congress Governments
had no clear idea of a new order to be built after independence’ and the
‘Congressmen in office had abandoned the ideals of national service and sacrifice
that marked their public conduct in pre-independence days.’ Hence the new party
in opposition, which offered the possibility of a peaceful change of government,
decided to stick to the true legacies of a nationalist movement, that is, the
‘Sarvodaya ideals of a casteless and classless society’. Following the true Gandhian
programme it proposed a ‘revival of the village on the basis of regional economy’.
It would not support quick industrialization, and recommended ‘socialization’ of
basic industries, which would put the industries in the hands of various interests
rather than in the care of the Government, which might lead to state capitalism.
Opposing Congress’s preferred model of modernity based on centralized democ-
racy, it emphasized the Gandhian line of decentralization and wanted to avoid the
dictatorship of both the Right and the Left. The main players in this state would be
the ‘artisan and the self-supporting agriculturist’ who could be the ‘best supporters
of democracy’. In other words, the Praja Party proposed to swap the Congress’s
preferred western model of development with what could be perceived as the true
Gandhian model of indigenous modernity. How would this agenda appeal to the
electorate was, however, a different question and Kripalani admitted the difficul-
ties of defeating the Congress which had been the dominant party in Indian politics
for 60 years.40 In West Bengal, the Praja Party decided to field 158 candidates for
the Assembly and 13 for the Lok Sabha (House of the People in the central parlia-
ment), but hoped that some kind of electoral alliance with other Leftist parties
would be ‘fruitful’ if Congress was at all to be realistically challenged in an
electoral battle.41
The other interesting aspect of this story of the birth of the Praja Party was
the presence of the Socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan as a guest of honour at
its inaugural Patna session, where he promised to work together with the new
opposition party.42 A few months later, in September 1952, the two parties – both
splinter groups from the Congress – merged to form the new Praja Socialist Party
with Kripalani as the President and Asoke Mehta as the Secretary. However, in
late 1951, that is, on the eve of the first general election, the opposition that arose
from within the Congress remained divided. While the Praja Party proposed an
indigenous model of development, the Socialist manifesto recommended ‘basic
structural changes’ in the social and economic organization of the country. It
proposed to achieve rapid economic growth by striking the ‘needed balance
between state control and private initiative, between central direction and decen-
tralized functioning’. While this did not sound very different from the mixed econ-
omy model proposed by the Congress, as an electioneering campaign the Socialists
were openly scornful of the Praja Party. Their Secretary Asoke Mehta wrote a few
days before the election: ‘The Praja Party’s rocket has come down with a whimper.
In the surrounding debris the Socialist Party’s growth stands out markedly.’
However, he acknowledged the fact that although his party had the right ideology,
it was not yet organizationally equipped to take on the Congress on its own.43 In
other words, both the splinter parties needed the help of other leftist parties if they
wanted to offer a realistic electoral challenge to the vast political machinery of
the Congress.
A divided Left
Almost from the very beginning of independence there were attempts to forge a
united non-communist leftist front as a pan-Indian alternative to the Indian
National Congress, offering Socialism with an indigenous face. The initiative was
taken by leaders like Swami Sahajanand Saraswati of the All-India Kisan Sabha
and Soumyendranath Tagore of the Revolutionary Communist Party of India
(RCPI), joined by Sarat Chandra Bose, who had left the Congress and formed his
Socialist Republican Party in August 1947 with some members of the Forward
Bloc and the Bengal Volunteer Group.44 On 29 October 1947 Sahajanand wrote to
Tagore that a ‘happy and encouraging response’ had come from all the parties who
wanted a ‘united front of the left in the country’. He also drew up some tentative
proposals as the basis of such a leftist agreement, the purpose of which would be to
offer a left alternative to achieve the ideal of ‘kisan mazdoor raj’.45 Sarat Bose too
focussed his attention on the possibilities of such a leftist unity since late 1947,
when he started negotiating with such diverse groups as the CPI, RCPI, Bolshevik
Party of India, Bolshevik Leninist Party (Trotskyite group), Forward Bloc,
Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and the Bengal Volunteer Group.46 But things
moved slowly, other than occasional meetings. For example, we get a report of one
such meeting held on 6 July 1948 at the Indian Association Hall in Calcutta. It was
presided over by Satyapriya Banerjee of the Forward Bloc, and Swami Sahajanand
was the main speaker. He appealed to all leftist parties to unite in order to convert
political freedom into social and economic freedom. Banerjee talked about his
reluctance to describe the current government as a ‘national’ government as the
colonial bureaucratic structures had been left intact.47 In January 1949 Bose also
organized a conference of leftist groups in Bombay, where appeals were made for
unity and demands were raised for declaring India a sovereign republic outside the
Commonwealth.48
The South Calcutta by-election victory for Bose further motivated the leftist par-
ties to form a more enduring political alliance to contain or possibly replace the
Congress in the next election, as it was widely believed that Congress was devel-
oping its autocratic wings because of the absence of any viable national opposition.
This result actually showed that the Congress could be defeated in an election by
the combined power of the leftist parties. The various congratulatory messages that
Bose received indicated that there was now an even greater expectation that he
would devote more energy into bringing about such a leftist unity to ensure ‘a
defeat of [the] Congress regime’.49 Radha Binod Pal in a letter to Bose congratu-
lated the people of West Bengal for this spectacular victory that thwarted the
‘enslaving attempts of blatant propaganda’. ‘I have full faith in you and I believe’,
he wrote, that ‘you can help the full realisation of this tremendous potential-
ity.’50‘The tempo of opposition to the Congress and unity for the Leftist Parties is
very great now following upon your victory’, wrote the trade union leader Mrinal
Kanti Bose. This unity he thought would be absolutely necessary ‘if the Congress
is to be effectively fought at the next elections’.51 V.L. Sundarrao, the Secretary of
the all-India Forward Bloc wrote to Bose: ‘If you do not thus rise to the occasion …
Sardar Patel will finish away all the left parties one by one.’52 There were also
appeals from ordinary citizens pointing out that the Roy ministry was ‘diseased
from within and without’, and hence it ‘is now necessary for you to devise means to
minimise the sufferings of the people of this province.’53
Sarat Bose’s son Amiya Nath Bose in a letter to his father, still in Switzerland,
apprised the situation most appropriately:
Your victory has created most unprecedented enthusiasm all over India. It has
made one thing clear – if the leftist forces in India are able to unite on a com-
mon platform, they can takeover political power from the Congress. What is
desired is a political platform as wide as the National Congress.
And he also felt that the communists were to be kept out of this alliance and it could
only be achieved by Bose, as he was widely regarded as a ‘symbol of unity’.54 He
now started contacting various leftist parties to prepare the groundwork for such a
united platform. Leela Roy of the Forward Bloc, supporting his overtures, wrote to
her central leadership that the South Calcutta by-election victory had made ‘the
atmosphere heavily surcharged’. ‘The question now is’, she wrote, ‘who will take
advantage of the ground lost by the Congress.’ And here she thought that unless the
democratic socialist parties could develop ‘a third line distinct from the Congress
and the C.P.I’, it would be difficult to contain the onrush of communism. ‘Sarat
babu’, she wrote, ‘will have [a] unique opportunity when he returns but unless he
utilizes [it] properly the reaction will be severe.’55 On 15 July 1949 a meeting was
held at Wellington Square in Calcutta, where leaders like Sibdas Banerjee
(Socialist Party), Soumyendranath Tagore (RCPI), Makhan Pal (RSP) and
Satyapriya Banerjee (Forward Bloc (Marxist)) spoke of the need for leftist unity to
consolidate the gains from the recent defeat of the Congress candidate in the South
Calcutta by-election.56
So it was left for Sarat Bose, after his return from Europe in July 1949, to initiate
the most important project to launch a united leftist political platform, which he too
believed could become a substitute for the Indian National Congress. But the ideo-
logical basis of this non-communist leftist unity remained problematic, as it too
went on to propose an Indian variety of Socialism. For Bose this would mean that
the leftist parties and groups would follow the path of Mahatma Gandhi, which the
present government was ignoring.57 At a press interview in Bombay on 26 July
1949 he outlined his ‘eleven point blue-print’ on the basis of which such a possible
left unity could be forged. These included ‘scientific socialism’, India becoming a
sovereign independent socialist republic and not a member of the British
Commonwealth, a place for workers and peasants in the administration of the coun-
try, abolition of zamindari without compensation, nationalization of key and basic
industries, linguistic redistribution of provincial boundaries, guarantee of civil lib-
erties, freedom of religion, free education, and provision of food and shelter for all.
Bose was aware of the contentious nature of his motley collection of programmes
and was prepared to negotiate on the details and priorities.58 But he was confident,
and in a message to the people of Calcutta on 2 August 1949 he declared that ‘the
fight for freedom has already begun’. ‘Socialist unity’, he assured, ‘will be
achieved much sooner than some people can imagine.’ In response to a public
reception given to him by the leftist parties at Calcutta Maidan in August 1949, he
told the people that only a leftist union could save the ‘krishak-praja-mazdoor’
from the misrule of the Congress, characterized by ‘nepotism, corruption and
favouritism’.59 In short, his critique was more ethical and moral, and less ideologi-
cal or programmatic.
As a first step towards this aim, in July 1949 in Bombay Bose convened a meet-
ing of the Leftist Co-ordination Council, formed previously in April. It was
attended by representatives from the Forward Bloc, the Peasants and Workers Party
and the Kisan Sabha. But there were problems from the very beginning. The
Socialist Party and the CPI did not send their representatives to the council. Asoke
Mehta, the leader of the Socialists, met Bose separately and pointed out the hetero-
geneity of ideological positions among the leftist parties. In order to have an endur-
ing leftist unity, he thought, the leftist parties must develop ‘a community of
outlook’ and this unity should have nothing to do with the communists.60
Another leftist conference was planned – to be held in Nagpur in September – but
had to be cancelled because of Bose’s ill health. Finally, at another meeting known
as the ‘United Socialist Conference’ held at Netaji Bhawan at Elgin Road in
Calcutta on 30 October 1949 and attended by more than 300 delegates, the United
Socialist Organization of India (USOI) was finally launched with Bose as its pres-
ident. ‘Socialist consolidation is … the need of the moment’, he declared in his
inaugural speech. The object of the USOI would be to set up ‘a Union of Socialist
Republics in India with a view to the establishment of a classless society …’ Its 24
point programme included a call for repudiating the constitution and convening a
People’s Constituent Assembly based on universal adult franchise. Its forthcoming
task would be ‘to carry on a revolutionary struggle against all vestiges of imperial-
ism, feudalism and against capitalism in order to replace the undemocratic, dicta-
torial and reactionary Government of the Indian vested interests by a Workers &
Peasants Government.’61
The USOI condemned the banning of the CPI, but would not accept the commu-
nists because of their ‘adventurism and sectarianism’;62 and the Socialist Party
under the leadership of Jayaprakash Narayan seemed reluctant to join.63 It will be
worthwhile to mention here that the local Socialist leaders Sibnath Banerjee and
Purnananda Dasgupta personally preferred to join the USOI in order to end the
party’s isolation in the province. But they were overruled by the central leader-
ship.64 There were also public speculations about a possible personality clash
between Bose and Narain, the two veteran Congress stalwarts. But the formal rea-
son that was cited was the Socialist preference for the creation of a new party out of
all the democratic leftist organizations, with a single programme, rather than a
loose federation of leftist organizations as proposed by Bose. It was experienced in
the past, Narain argued, that it was not possible for different leftist parties to main-
tain their separate identities and work together. He met Bose and assured him that
if all the leftist parties decided to merge together, the Socialist Party would be
happy to dissolve itself and join them.65 But given the heterogeneity of ideological
positions among the leftist parties at the time, that was certainly not going to hap-
pen. And in view of this diversity of positions, many doubted the effectiveness of
such an endeavour at leftist unity.66
The proposed leftist unity had other problems too. Tridib Chaudhuri of the RSP
had apprehended at the very beginning of the endeavour that with all the leftist par-
ties already having their distinctive programmes and rules of discipline, it was too
much to expect them to work together, unless there was a firm consensus on a min-
imum programme.67 And in the absence of such a consensus, personality clashes
were inevitable, and they began to appear almost from the very beginning, as a sec-
tion of the RCPI and the Forward Bloc official group did not like Sarat Bose’s lead-
ership style.68 Anil Roy of the Forward Bloc wrote to R.S. Ruikar that Bose’s
‘activities and attitudes have disappointed us. We don’t feel he is serious about left
unity and he prefers moving within his own narrow groove.’69 Soumyendranath
Tagore of the RCPI accused Bose of ‘undemocratic methods and totalitarianism’,
and of packing the provisional Working Committee with men from his own
Socialist Republican Party. Bose rebutted all the charges,70 but it seems Sahajanand
was also unhappy with the way Bose was functioning, although he decided not to
leave the USOI through any open confrontation with him.71 Tagore, Sahajanand
and others wanted the USOI to develop as a mass organization rather than as a fed-
eration of left parties as desired by Bose.72
So Bose’s attempt to forge a non-communist left unity was fraught with prob-
lems from the very beginning. But before the war of words and this internal bicker-
ing could go further, he died of a heart attack on 20 February 1950. B.C. Roy
announced his death in the Assembly in the middle of the budget discussion,
describing him as ‘a valiant fighter for freedom’, though the ‘roads that he travelled
might have been different’.73 Nehru paid a glowing tribute to him in the parliament,
describing him, however, as ‘one of our severest critics’.74 But it was also a fact that
with his death the united leftist criticism lost its driving spirit, at least for some time.
Bose was succeeded by Sahajanand as the President, but he too died soon after on
27 June 1950. After this, the presidency of the USOI went to General Mohan Singh
of the Forward Bloc (Marxist) group, but his public standing and charisma were too
limited to give this movement any real leadership. The USOI maintained its pre-
carious existence, but it was not until mid-1951, that is, close to the election, that it
showed any political initiative or posed any real challenge to the Congress, and
even then, it was not really a united front.
With the election barely six months away, it was reported in June 1951 that, dis-
satisfied with the leadership of Mohan Singh, Soumyendranath Tagore, his faction
of the RCPI and some other political groups had dissociated themselves from the
USOI.75 This was followed by a meeting in Calcutta on 18 July 1951; convened by
the Socialist Party, the Leela Roy group of the Forward Bloc and the Tagore group
of the RCPI, its purpose was to set up an alternative People’s United Socialist Front
(PUSF), to establish Socialism in India and to drive out the Congress ‘Government
of the capitalists’. Leela Roy announced that though it was an initiative of three par-
ties, it proposed to incorporate all left parties before the election. However, both
Sibnath Banerjee (Socialist) and Tagore made it clear that the communists and the
communalists were not welcome because the CPI, Tagore argued, was ‘directed by
an outside organization and was a counter-revolutionary force.’ And Suresh
Banerji, while expressing his sympathies for this endeavour at left unity, could not
commit that the Praja Party would join the alliance. The resolution adopted at the
end of the second day of the conference announced that the primary purpose of the
alliance would be to ‘ensure the defeat of the Congress in the general elections and
to establish a people’s government.’ It also announced an election manifesto,
which included among other things, abolition of zamindari without compensation,
nationalization of key industries including defence, public utility concerns, etc. and
withdrawal of India from the Commonwealth.76
A month later on 19 August, the USOI also announced its own election mani-
festo, which had much in common with that of the PUSF, like, ‘land to the tiller’,
nationalization of key industries, moving out of the Commonwealth, and develop-
ing friendly relations with Russia, China and other ‘progressive democracies’. For
the Bengal branch, Amiya Nath Bose later added another point, that is, consolida-
tion of all the Bengali-speaking areas within the state of West Bengal – an issue
close to the heart of Sarat Bose.77 However, the two organizations maintained their
separate existence and the possibility of their unity was further ‘hampered’ by the
forthcoming South Calcutta by-election. Necessitated by the death of Sarat Bose
about two years ago, in this election Bose’s widow Bivabati Bose contested against
his nephew Aurobinda Bose. Bivabati’s candidature was supported by the official
USOI and she made repeated appeals for left unity.78 She won the election, but unity
continued to elude the leftist parties. The PUSF, under the leadership of
Soumyendranath Tagore, decided at this stage to enter the election campaign on its
own as a separate alliance of leftist parties.79
The other major weakness of these unity endeavours was to leave the commu-
nists out. Sarat Bose would accept any ideas that had been successfully tried in
Soviet Russia, but would not accept the communists into his USOI.80 But, as dis-
cussed in Chapter 4, communist activities had increased manifold since the second
half of 1949 and of all the leftist parties it was the CPI which had the largest mass
base. As the leftist academic Nirmal Bhattacharya pointed out in a letter to the edi-
tor in The Statesman, this division between the communists and the Social
Democrats might lead to disastrous consequences, as it had made the rise of
Fascism possible in European history. However, other letters in the same paper
indicated that there was still a strong lingering distrust of the communists, and so
there was a risk that by taking the communists on board the left alliance might fur-
ther undermine its credibility, as it was already widely considered to be a motley
collection of myriad political groups whose only focus of unity was opposition to
the Congress.81 But the CPI which returned to parliamentary politics in 1950 was
keen to get into an alliance with other left-leaning parties, as defeating the Congress
in the election would otherwise be an insurmountable challenge – almost an impos-
sible task. In his 14 August press conference, while announcing the election mani-
festo of the CPI, Jyoti Basu kept the door of negotiation wide open, saying that the
CPI was prepared to negotiate even with the Socialist Party though its ‘right-wing
leaders are now playing a disruptive role’. In an earlier statement he had even
expressed the desire to come to some kind of electoral alliance with the Praja Party,
if they agreed with some fundamental points in the Left manifesto.82
The CPI election campaign was formally launched on 27 October 1951 at a large
meeting at the Calcutta Maidan. The principal speaker was Jyoti Basu, who gave a
call to oust the Congress government which in the last four years had failed to
improve the conditions of any section of the people. The zamindari system had not
been abolished; the peasants were not yet the ‘masters of the soil’; the prices were
soaring and workers were being retrenched; the middle classes suffered from the
rising cost of living and unemployment; the small traders were suffering due to the
free import of foreign goods. The CPI would bring in ‘a new social order’ through
a united leftist front consisting of all classes. However, in order to achieve this new
order the party would be working both within the Assembly as well as outside it. He
also demanded that in order to have a fair election all the political prisoners were to
be released.83
Apart from this broad-ranging election manifesto, the CPI leaders also showed a
clear understanding that they alone could not form an ‘alternative government
against the Congress’. On 2 November 1951 the CPI announced the names of 81
candidates to the state legislature and four for parliament. But they were prepared
to negotiate till the polling day for adjustment of seats with other leftist parties pre-
pared to accept ‘a minimum democratic programme’.84 Eventually, in November
the CPI managed to arrive at an understanding with the USOI, consisting at this
stage of Forward Bloc (Marxist), Revolutionary Socialist Party, Socialist
Republican Party, Bolshevik Party and the INA People’s Movement. Negotiations
with the Praja Party broke down on ideological grounds, as Kripalani could see no
ideological common ground between the communists and the Praja Party, although
provincial workers and leaders like Suresh Banerji were prepared to endorse such
an alliance on strategic grounds, and at the regional level such an alliance could
actually be forged in Andhra.85 The new alliance, called the ‘Left Consolidation
Front’, announced its joint election manifesto, proposing withdrawal from the
Commonwealth, alliance with Soviet Russia and other ‘peace loving countries’,
friendly relations with China, abolition of zamindari without compensation, redis-
tribution of land amongst peasants, nationalization of all key industries, supply of
food, cloth and shelter at cheap rates, and free and compulsory education for all up
to the age of 16.86 This alliance of course raised a lot of questions. As one corre-
spondent in The Statesman wrote: ‘[would] the Leftists maintain their unity after
their primary objective of winning the election … [had] been achieved?’ And more
poignantly, as another correspondent wrote, how would the followers of Netaji
work with the communists who had once described him as a ‘Quisling’? So to many
people the alliance appeared to be an opportunistic one, formed with the ‘exclusive
purpose’ of defeating the Congress.87
The suspicion was not perhaps entirely without substance as despite the talk of a
‘minimum democratic programme’, the only common goal that all the leftist parties
had agreed upon was to dislodge the Congress government. And that common goal
was predicated as much on the present misadministration of the Congress govern-
ment, as on a contestation of the past legacies of freedom struggle. ‘The need of the
hour’ said Bhupesh Gupta, was ‘an alternative leadership based on the unity of all
the democratic forces to expel the Congress from office.’88 In a centre page article
in The Statesman on 22 December 1951, S.A. Dange said in the very first sentence:
‘The Communist Party enters the election battle in order to help the masses to over-
throw the rule of the Congress Party’, which was ‘incapable of solving the main
problems of the people …’At a large meeting at Wellington Square in Calcutta,
jointly sponsored by the CPI and USOI, Ajoy Ghosh repeated the same appeal to all
the leftist parties ‘to unite and oust the Congress from office’.89 However, by the end
of December the CPI leadership understood the reality that that was not going to
happen. At a press conference on 23 December Ajoy Ghosh told the reporters that
his party ‘was not thinking of forming a Government anywhere’, although he was
certain that a democratic government led by the CPI ‘could be and would be formed
very soon’ no matter what happened in this election.90 However prophetic this state-
ment might sound in today’s perspective, it almost amounted to conceding defeat
even before the election. It also signalled an admission of failure to offer a united
leftist coalition as a viable alternative to the Congress. As the communist media
alleged, some of the other leftist leaders like the staunchly anti-communist
Soumyendranath Tagore were more critical of the communists than of the Congress
or the Hindu Mahasabha in their election campaigns.91 In other words, when the
election approached, the left was far from united – either ideologically or organiza-
tionally. The result of this disunity was reflected in the outcome of the election of
January 1952, which we will return to in a short while.
Hindu Right in a quandary

Unlike most other regions of India, in colonial Bengal the Hindus were a minority
population. It was the first census of 1872 which revealed this particular demo-
graphic feature of Bengal, indicating that the Muslims had a slight edge over the
Hindus. While this first census was flawed, the second census in 1881 confirmed
the situation, the Muslims being slightly over 50 per cent, the Hindus slightly less.
This phenomenon was politicized in the partition of Bengal (1905) and in the
Swadeshi movement that followed. However, the nationalist movement from this
time onward began to use more overt Hindu imagery and symbols to define the
nation, the most important of which was the ‘mother goddess’, representing the
spiritual and aestheticized imagining of the nation.92 This aspect of nationalism –
which some historians have described as religious or cultural nationalism – was
represented in Bengal by the mainstream Congress, rather than by the more right-
wing Hindu organizations like the All India Hindu Mahasabha (AIHM) or the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Since the Congress or the Hindus had never
been able to form a provincial government in Bengal, the main responsibility of
mounting political opposition to the Muslim League remained with the Congress,
rather than with the Hindu Mahasabha. For the latter remained the blame for all the
communal riots that took place during the late colonial period.
While the RSS could never have a proper foothold in Bengal, the Mahasabha
acquired its major support base in eastern Bengal following the Dacca riot of 1941
when the Hindu minority increasingly felt the pressure of the Pakistan movement.93
But the organization always suffered from an identity crisis and struggled to main-
tain its distinctiveness from the Congress. This was quite apparent in the election of
1945–46, when the Mahasabha candidates lost to the Congress as voters could not
distinguish between the two. In the late 1940s when the Pakistan movement began,
the Mahasabha championed the cause of Akhand Hindustan (united India). But
when Congress agreed to partition Punjab and there was a distinct possibility of the
whole of Bengal going over to the proposed nation of Pakistan, the Mahasabha
decided to launch a major political campaign for the partition of Bengal. This
would keep the Hindu-majority areas within India and would also prevent the
Hindus of Bengal from becoming a perpetual minority in East Pakistan. The cam-
paign was soon endorsed, supported and appropriated by the Bengal Congress and
both of them opposed the ‘united Bengal’ proposal offered by Sarat Bose and a sec-
tion of the Muslim League. On 20 June 1947 most of the Hindu legislators in the
Bengal Assembly (except the two CPI members) voted for the partitioning of
Bengal. This was apparently a success for a campaign started by the Mahasabha;
yet almost immediately after this they started an agitation to protest against the vivi-
section of the province and blamed the Congress for it.94 When freedom arrived on
15 August, they decided to boycott the celebrations as a protest against Partition.
The Mahasabha was thus clearly in a major dilemma in positioning itself within
the complex political scenario of the new province of West Bengal in post-Partition
India. Not only did it lose its major support base in East Bengal,95 but after having
agitated for Partition, such vocal opposition to Partition put them in a peculiarly
ambiguous position. Its rank and file workers were confused,96 and the only dis-
tinction that the party could claim was in condemning Congress for its policy of
‘unnecessary Moslem appeasement’. Accepting the inevitability of Partition, it
decided to claim India for the Hindus, as Pakistan had now become the land of the
Muslims. As Mahasabha leader B.S. Munje wrote in February 1948, ‘All Hindus,
Mussulmans, Christians, Parsees etc. should be given to understand that Indian
Union is the Hindu Nation and the Homeland of the Hindus … as Pakistan is the
nation for the Mussulmans …’97
Indeed, in the wake of Partition and its consequences, many Hindus in the new
province felt attracted to the Hindu Mahasabha. An enthusiastic Balai Chand
Mukherjee, the Secretary of the Burdwan Sadar Hindu Sabha could not conceal his
glee when he wrote of the situation to N.C. Chatterjee of the Bengal Provincial
Hindu Mahasabha on 19 October 1947:
In view of the recent altered situation and atmosphere of the country which has
been of late very favourable to the expansion and development of Hindu Sabha
organizations in the rural areas of the district, myself with some of our best
workers are making regular tours, carrying on the extensive propaganda by
holding public meetings etc. in rural areas of this side of West Bengal, and it is
extremely pleasing to tell you that we are getting unprecedented response and
support even from erstwhile Congressites for our cause – most of whom have
by this time been already enlisted in our Sabha.98
The AIHM also shared this optimism: ‘The new situation has also opened up great
opportunities for mass enrolment of members’, a circular sent to all provincial and
district committees in October 1947 pointed out. ‘Times are very favourable for
us’, it emphasized, and hence, to ‘make the best use of the opportunities ... [e]nrol-
ment of members should be taken up in right earnest and carried on vigorously and
every household should be approached to get themselves enlisted as members’.99 A
police intelligence report calculated that the total membership of the Mahasabha in
the province in November 1947 stood at 54,250. In the next three months it
recruited nearly 6,000 new members. So its total membership was around 60,000
by January 1948.100 To put these figures in an all-India perspective, according to
another report, in 1947 the total membership of the Mahasabha in all of India stood
at 1,080,000101 – therefore about 5.5 per cent of its members were in Bengal. The
‘Bengal Brigade’, its volunteer corps recruited during the riots of 1946, also con-
tinued to operate, and allegedly collected arms and ammunition for possible con-
tingencies arising from ‘Muslim aggression’.102
To resolve the obvious dilemmas of its political position, in December 1947 the
Working Committee of the AIHM initiated an internal debate to redefine its ideo-
logical position in the context of the new realities of free India. A Special
Committee was appointed to collect and collate opinion on ‘reorienting the policy
of the Hindu Mahasabha’.103 The circular that it sent out to its members for feed-
back reiterated its faith in the ‘Hindu rashtra [nation]’, but refused to project it as a
concept of a communal or theocratic state. However it raised interesting questions
about the future trajectory of the Indian nation, vis-à-vis what it described as the
Western model of a linear journey towards the goal of a ‘democratic secular state’,
championed by the Congress. Interrogating the latter’s preferred model of moder-
nity, where religion would be separated from politics and relegated to a private
sphere of the individual, it raised several pertinent questions:
Will a secular democratic state adequately satisfy the aspiration of the Indian
masses? Will the new Free State of India solely concern itself with the material
happiness and prosperity of the people or will it endeavour to develop the spir-
itual urge of her people and to subordinate their purely material interests to
considerations of higher culture and spiritual revolution?
Has democracy, as it has worked in Western countries, really brought about
peace and prosperity of her people? … will Free India blindly imitate the West
in this respect or will India forge ahead on the lines of her innate political
genius?104
These questions, if properly probed, might lead to a fresh new definition of a

distinctive Indian modernity. But before this important debate could go forward,
the Mahasabha received its severest political blow. The assassination of Mahatma
Gandhi (30 January 1948) was widely believed to be the result of a conspiracy
involving the Mahasabha and the RSS.105 The public outrage that followed led
to a severe clampdown on both these political groups by the Government of
India.
Apart from increased state surveillance and monitoring, there was also a huge
popular backlash against the Hindu right-wing political organizations and their
leaders. The most important Mahasabha leader Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherji’s
Calcutta residence was attacked by a mob. In response to this public wrath, on 11
February 1948 the Bengal Branch of the Mahasabha formally adopted a resolution
that recommended to its national body that it would suspend all political activities
and only exist as a social philanthropic organization.106 However, this was certainly
not an uncontested decision, as a number of members of the provincial council
wrote to B.S. Munje, the Vice President of the AIHM, that this resolution was the
‘verdict of Dr Mukharji [sic] and Mr N.C. Chatterjee only and not the verdict of the
Bengal Provincial Hindu Mahasabha Council.’ It was passed, they complained, in

‘a most undemocratic way’ in a meeting that was attended by only 87 of the 350
members of the Council.107
The police intelligence reports reveal that this contentious decision created a
major internal crisis for the Mahasabha – a crisis that could ultimately threaten its
very existence. On the one hand it signified a public humiliation. On the other hand
it created a deep division within the Mahasabha’s leadership and its rank and file.
While Mukherji was the main protagonist of the moderate as well as the retreating
position, this was vigorously opposed by the younger and more radical leaders
like Ashutosh Lahiry, who was the General Secretary of the organization and
was briefly jailed following Gandhi’s assassination. In November 1948, Mukherji
under pressure resigned from the Hindu Mahasabha, but his resignation was
not accepted by the Bengal Working Committee, where his followers under
Debendranath Mukherjee endeavoured to transform the Mahasabha into a non-
political organization.108 On the other hand, there were threats from the Lahiry
group that if the Bengal Mahasabha did not follow any political programme, the
senior leaders would be ousted by force, and some of them even threatened to form
a new party. The Working Committee of the AIHM, dominated by Lahiry, gave in
to the pressure and decided in a meeting on 8 August 1948 to reverse its February
decision and resume its political activities to fulfil the objectives of the ‘free
nation’.109 But since things did not move very fast, by mid-1949 Lahiry was even
threatening to liquidate the Mahasabha, which he thought was going under, and
form a new party on a more militant political line and some of the all-India leaders
like L.N. Bhopatkar were supporting him.110
The support base of the Lahiry camp was provided by the rank and file in the inte-
rior. Frustrated radicals from villages and district towns began to write to him
protesting against such a cowardly measure following the ‘killing of a friend of
Pakistan’, expressing in no uncertain words their Brahmanical and masculinist
anxieties.111 In public meetings, Mukherji was vilified in abusive speeches.112 After
the execution of Nathuram Godse, convicted in the Gandhi murder case, pamphlets
were distributed describing him as ‘Hutatma dharmaveer’ or the sacred soul, a reli-
gious hero, who had become a martyr on 15 November 1949.113 Lahiry asked his
followers to observe the day as the ‘National Mourning Day’.114 But these radicals
also communicated to him the real difficulties of continuing with the work of
organization in the West Bengal countryside, where they were harassed by the state
machinery, challenged by the Congress volunteers, as well as opposed by the local
population.115 In other words, the Mahasabha at this juncture was certainly not the
most popular organization in West Bengal and was in a real crisis of existence and
this situation continued up to the election.
However, behind these factional squabbles there was a serious ideological rift
over the nature of Indian modernity and citizenship. On one side of this fault line,
as Lahiry explained in a personal letter to one of his supporters in Bankura, were the
modernists who believed in a Western-type of democracy and through it wanted to
establish the dominance of the Hindus, and according to them, this had already been
accomplished with the independence and Partition and hence the demand for trans-
forming the Mahasabha into a non-communal organization. On the other side were
the radicals like Lahiry who believed that a democratic tradition in India could only
be built slowly, and hence the ‘spiritual and cultural heritage of India must be the
sheet-anchor’ of the future Indian state.116 As the Reorientation Committee dis-
cussed the new draft constitution of the party, which was to be approved by the
AIHM in October 1948, two opposing views on citizenship of the Indian nation,
and consequently on the membership of the Mahasabha, emerged. One group
wanted to redefine the term ‘Hindu’ by emptying it of its religious connotation and
making it a purely geographical concept. All those who called Hindustan their
motherland would be considered as Hindus and could become members of the
Mahasabha. On the other hand, the radicals wanted to stick to the existing religious
and exclusive definition of Hindu, and as a concession to the new realities of
free India would perhaps accept non-Hindus as ‘associate members’ of the
Mahasabha.117 In the end, the ‘New Political & Economic Programme’ which the
Mahasabha issued in November 1948 defined the ‘Hindu’ as ‘a person who
declares that he is a Hindu and regards this land of Bharatvarsha … as his Father-
land as well as his Holyland.’ And within that definition it decided to ‘carry on its
political activities without admitting any non-Hindu thereto.’118
From mid-1949 the political conditions for the Hindu right-wing groups
gradually began to improve. The ban on RSS was lifted and the AIHM, under
intense pressure from the radical group, decided to revive its political programmes.
Its Central Working Committee at its meeting in New Delhi on 8 May 1949
formally adopted the resolution to function again as a political party on the basis
of their original political position and programme of actions.119 Veer Savarkar’s
birthday, 28 May, was to be observed as ‘Hindu Mahasabha Day’, when the work-
ers would re-launch the political programmes of the party after 16 months of
suspension. However, this did not resolve the squabbles within the West Bengal
Mahasabha, where the Lahiry group tried to oust the more moderate group of
Debendranath Mukherjee from the Working Committee, while the latter
threatened to bring charges of financial irregularities against Lahiry who allegedly
laundered money during the riots of 1946. S.P. Mukherji came from Delhi to
mediate between the two warring factions, and taking cognizance of the new reali-
ties of free India urged all of them to convert the Mahasabha into a non-communal
organization, while the Lahiry group still preferred a political party for Hindus
only.120
As the Mahasabha tried to reposition itself by the end of 1949 as an opposition
political party, it also had to undertake the unfinished task of redefining its
ideological position. However, nearly two years of internal debate produced only
some patchy compromises, not any innovative definition of Indian modernity. The
‘New Programme’ issued in June 1949 pointed out categorically that ‘there
has been no departure, whatsoever, from our ideal of Hindu rashtra.’ ‘[W]e call it
Hindu rashtra’, the document said, ‘because the word “Indian” is foreign to us.’
Any ‘blind imitation’ of western democracy ‘can never inspire the masses, nor
can it lead our land to its desired destiny’, only the ideal of Hindu rashtra can.121 At
a press conference in Calcutta on 4 November 1949, Ashutosh Lahiry as the
General Secretary of the AIHM provided a further clarification of its new ideology.
‘[P]olitics is inseparable from religion’, he argued in a conscious attempt to
dissociate the Mahasabha from the western model of secular modernity. However,
he accepted the western model of a homogeneous nation-state and argued that
the ‘state must aim at securing cultural homogeneity throughout the country’. And
of course, this must be based on the notion of ‘Hindu rashtra’. While defining
the concept, his statement did take into account the new realities of post-Partition
India. Hinduism today, he observed, was like ‘a federal system of diverse faiths’,
and therefore in the Hindu rashtra every religion will have its right. But
everyone will have to align with the cultural notion of Hindu rashtra, going back
to ‘ancient moorings’, and the Muslims living in India would have to be
‘nationalized’.122
But the debates were not concluded yet, and they resurfaced again at the AIHM’s
Calcutta conference, held at Deshbandhu Park on 24–26 December 1949. In this
conference the party changed its name from All-India Hindu Mahasabha to Akhil
Bharat Hindu Mahasabha,123 to make it look more Indianized. Veer Savarkar, while
inaugurating the session, described the independence of India as a great victory for
Hindudom. For him the Hindu rashtra had already arrived, as the President, Prime
Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister were all Hindus. So now the total fulfil-
ment of the promise of freedom for this Hindu nation would be in restoring Akhand
Bharat or undivided India. As for the future developmental trajectory of the nation,
Upendra Nath Banerjee, the Chairman of the Reception committee, sounded the
note of caution that India was now caught between the devil and the deep blue sea,
that is, between the capitalist democracy of the Anglo-Americans and the totalitar-
ian communism of the Russians. It was only the Indian genius and confidence in her
spiritual destiny that could drag the nation out of this slough of despond. At the
other end of the debate was Dr N.B. Khare, whose presidential address was in sharp
contrast to the triumphalist celebration of Indian independence by Savarkar.
Freedom, Khare believed, was a hasty transfer of power, marred by the Partition.
The Hindu Mahasabha, he declared, believed in a non-communal government,
where every individual would be equal before law. But the Muslims had failed to
become ‘nationally-minded’, and hence the policy of ‘appeasement’ towards the
Indian Muslims should be given up. He opposed the Hindu Code Bill and thought
that the idea of a secular state only reflected ‘a confused and diseased mind’, as it
did not exist anywhere.124
The question of the Indian Muslims continued to cause rancour among the
Mahasabha ideologues for some more time. As they looked for an Indian modernity
anchored in the nation’s past, it was difficult to ignore the existence of Muslims in
the present of the nation. And if that present had a past, it was a past marked by the
Congress’s faulty policy of appeasement and Partition. The Mahasabha ideologues
were not prepared to look back any further than this. In December 1950 the
Parliamentary Board of the Mahasabha ultimately announced that they would
accept non-Hindus into the Hindu rashtra and they would ‘enjoy the same rights
and privileges as Hindus’.125 But this attempt to embark upon a new inclusive poli-
tics led to a furious backlash from its own radical rank and file, who could not rec-
oncile to the idea of accepting Muslims or Christians, until their loyalty to the idea
of the Hindu rashtra was proven.126 To resolve this anomaly, a special session of the
Mahasabha was convened in Jaipur on 28 April 1951, and it adopted a resolution to
accept non-Hindus in its parliamentary activities. However, the resolution invited
the ‘Indian Muslims to rally under the banner of the Mahasabha to build up a Hindu
rashtra in which their interests would be fully safeguarded.’127 In other words, in
the Mahasabha’s ideological parlance, citizenship of India was not going to be
based on the western concept of secular individual citizenship, it was going to be
defined culturally by its notions of Hindutva. The Muslims had to accept that ide-
ology to become full citizens. The new constitution declared that: ‘The Aim of the
Hindu Mahasabha is to establish a really democratic Hindu State in Bharat, based
on the culture and tradition of Hindu rashtra and to re-establish Akhand Bharat by
all constitutional means.’128
In West Bengal, the party after its rebirth decided at once to seize the refugee
problem as its main issue, as Hindu refugees, supposed to be fugitives from Muslim
violence in East Bengal, were considered to be the ideal receptive audience for
Hindu right-wing politics.129 In January 1949 the Mahasabha had a major public
meeting at Sraddhananda Park demanding a comprehensive programme of rehabil-
itation of the refugees from East Bengal. In July the Mahasabha launched a
campaign to augment its membership, and the refugees seemed to be the natural
target constituency.130 Communal violence that erupted again in Calcutta in
February–March 1950, in retaliation of a reported incident at Khulna and the fresh
refugee influx from East Pakistan (see Chapter 2) provided new opportunities for
political mobilization. Meetings were held at refugee colonies, like Nabadwip,
where the Congress government was criticized for Partition and for not solving the
refugee problem. However, true to the Mahasabha’s ideology, it claimed the unifi-
cation of the two Bengals and abolition of Pakistan were the only tangible solutions
for the refugee problem.131
But, at this juncture, the Mahasabha was not the only player championing the
cause of the refugees. To begin with, Sarat Bose had stolen their thunder in con-
demning the government for mishandling the problem of the refugees.132 However,
after Bose’s death in February 1950 Shyama Prasad Mukherji emerged as the main
protagonist of the cause of the East Bengali refugees. His relationship with the
Mahasabha at this stage was tenuous at best. He resigned from his cabinet position
and on 22 May 1950 re-entered public politics at a well-attended meeting in
Calcutta, where he condemned the Delhi Agreement as unworkable, denounced the
central policy of repatriation of the East Bengal refugees, and demanded a compre-
hensive plan for their rehabilitation. A Bengal Rehabilitation Organization was
formed with Mukherji as its President, and to recommend solutions to the refugee
problem in the East it appointed a Rehabilitation Board, with Dr Radhakamal
Mukherjee in the chair. Between 27 and 29 May Mukherji, along with the members
of the Board, visited a number of refugee colonies in Nadia and Murshidabad dis-
tricts, followed by another tour of Midnapur district in June, and inquired about the
grievances of the recently arrived refugees. He told them not to risk their lives by
trying to return to East Pakistan. Since the Congress was responsible for Partition,
he argued in his meetings, it was their responsibility to rehabilitate the refugees.133

Meanwhile the Rehabilitation Board, which included such Bengal luminaries as
Radha Kumud Mukherjee and Meghnad Saha, warned about the dangers of the
influx of so many refugees ‘in a poverty and disease-ridden state whose density of
population, [was] 750 persons per sq. mile’. ‘Misplanned or unplanned migration
and settlement of many lakhs of refugees may,’ they cautioned, ‘even repeat the
tragedy and horror of the last famine in Bengal.’ Their report therefore recom-
mended, among other things, planned reclamation of waste land, industrial decen-
tralization, ‘Rurbanisation’ and planned exchange of population and assets.134 An
all-India Refugee Day was observed on 3 September 1950 at a meeting in
Deshbandhu Park in Calcutta. At this meeting – attended by about 10,000–12,000
people and chaired by Mukherji – demands were raised for ‘Annulment of parti-
tion, demand for territory and exchange of population and assets’, and refugees
were urged to unite to press for their demands.135
Mukherji at this stage certainly represented the mainstream Bengali thinking on
the refugee issue, and the letters which many East Bengal refugees, frustrated with
government apathy, wrote to him show that he came to be looked at, at least by
some of them, as their only hope.136 But there was still a continuing distrust about
his leadership, primarily because of his connections with the Hindu Mahasabha,137
which certainly was not the most popular organization in Bengal after the riots of
1950. For the control of this political ground Mukherji had to contest with other
leftist parties, which were also trying, with relatively greater success, to build their
support base within this refugee constituency. Close to the election, the controver-
sies and agitations around the Refugee Eviction Bill in March–April 1951 gave the
leftists – both CPI and the non-communist left – a decisive edge over the Hindu
right138 – a story we will return to in the next chapter.
Mukherji at this stage was thinking of launching a new political party of his own.
The discussion to start the new Bharatiya Jan Sangh (Indian People’s Party) was
initiated in April, and was formally launched at a conference in Delhi on 21 October
1951, where Mukherji was elected its president. This party, which was the true
predecessor of the modern Bharatiya Janata Party, was joined by some of the erst-
while Mahasabha members, representing the more moderate view within its ideo-
logical spectrum. But the new party maintained an ambiguous relationship with the
Mahasabha and the RSS. Even in terms of its ideological statements, the differ-
ences with the Mahasabha were more in nuances and details, than in substance. Its
Draft Manifesto indicated that it stood for a democratic government based on
Indian culture and tradition, advocated a reunification of Bharat and rejected the
existing policies of making her a ‘a carbon copy of the west’. ‘The whole Bharat
Varsha from the Himalayas to Kanya Kumari is and has been through the ages a liv-
ing organic whole, geographically, culturally and historically.’ So ‘United India is
essential’.139 Mukherji in his presidential address at Delhi admitted that in the past
he and other Hindu leaders had committed the mistake of supporting the Partition,
but that was because they were compelled to do so when the division had become
inevitable and they only tried to save as much territory as possible for Bharat. He
refuted the charge that the Jan Sangh was a communal party, and announced that its
membership would be open to all who considered Bharat as their motherland.

While the party considered it dangerous to appease minority identities anchored in
caste and religion, it also felt that the majority had a responsibility to provide pro-
tection to such groups.140 In other words, it adhered more to the Western concepts
of individual citizenship and modernity.
However, in terms of its political programme, the Jan Sangh offered hardly any-
thing distinctive or innovative. To solve food problems, its Election Manifesto pro-
posed cultivation of waste land, advocated abolition of zamindari with
compensation, and recommended rapid industrialization to make the country self-
sufficient.141 It decided to focus on two issues – Kashmir and the East Bengali
refugees – for its immediate political campaign. In West Bengal Mukherji found it
difficult to get a sufficient number of willing candidates and volunteers who would
be prepared to work for his party or accept his party’s nominations.142 But never-
theless, he launched a vigorous election campaign and extensively toured the coun-
tryside.143 Here he assiduously cultivated the friendship of the Muslims. At an
election rally in Kharagpur, he assured the Muslims of safety, and denying the
charge that he was ‘communal’, he submitted: ‘My only fault is that I stand daunt-
lessly for the cause of the Hindus in East Bengal.’144 At another election meeting at
Park Circus in Calcutta on 21 December 1951, Mukherji admitted that the plight of
the Hindu minorities in East Bengal was the most important issue for which he was
fighting the election. While there was nothing ‘communal’ about this issue, as he
claimed with some justification, it was hardly an issue that could win him the elec-
tion in West Bengal, where citizens had a plethora of other problems which they
expected their political leaders to address. There were also allegations that RSS
members had infiltrated this party in large numbers. As a result, as another speaker
admitted in this meeting, while the party had made its presence felt in north and cen-
tral India, it was yet to gain a foothold in West Bengal.145
This brings us to the other player in the politics of the Hindu right – the RSS –
which never had a base in Bengal, but shared common ground with the Hindu
Mahasabha, with which it had many common members. A police intelligence
report in November 1947 reported that the organization was strong and influential
in almost every province of India, except Assam and West Bengal.146 Like the
Mahasabha, the RSS also condemned the Congress for its ‘appeasement’ of the
Muslims and held it responsible for the Partition. However, there were points of dif-
ference too, as it refused to join the Mahasabha instigated boycott of Independence
Day celebrations on 15 August 1947, and instead, organized its own celebrations.
The RSS called India Hindusthan – the land of the Hindus – and its professed objec-
tive was its unification under Hindu rule. Its popularity was growing in Bengal
since the riots of 1946, and since independence the RSS made fresh attempts to pen-
etrate Bengal politics. It used popular Hindu religious festivals, like the immersion
of goddess Kali, to organize such social programmes as demonstration of lathi play
by its young members, emphasizing Hindu masculinity, and at the end of such
events local leaders would give short speeches about the utility of the Sangha
(organization).147 How far these indirect methods of propaganda were successful
we do not know, but by late 1947 police reports from districts were noting with
alarm that: ‘the RSS continues to grow in strength and popularity.’148 According to
one report, between 15 August and 31 December 1947, the RSS had started as many
as 70 new branches in Calcutta and Howrah alone.149
The banning of the RSS after Gandhi’s assassination temporarily halted its activ-
ities, as its offices were raided and many of its leaders and workers were arrested.
Those who were left outside in their strongholds like Malda, staged loud protests
demanding withdrawal of the ban.150 The ban was ultimately lifted in July 1949,
when the RSS chief M.S. Golwalkar gave an assurance to the Home Minister that
his organization would pledge loyalty to the new Constitution, respect the national
flag and eschew violence.151 After this their organizational activities were resumed
forthwith with full zest, but the RSS could never really acquire a mass base in West
Bengal. Golwalkar came to Calcutta and addressed a public meeting on 8
September 1949, but evoked little public enthusiasm.152 And apart from organizing
cultural training camps for young volunteers,153 the RSS in West Bengal did not get
involved in any other overt political activities and did not contest the election.
However, in the lead-up to the election, it organized numerous public meetings in
the countryside – never attended by large crowds though – where its main purpose
was stated to be the protection of Hindu religion and culture.154 But its relationship
with the Hindu Mahasbha though unspoken was nevertheless well-known to the
Bengali voters. Moreover, while the RSS targeted mainly young students and
industrial workers, here they were vigorously challenged by the CPI and its student
wing, the Student Federation of India.155 In the end, the RSS could never have a
proper foothold in West Bengal.
Thus, in post-independence West Bengal the Hindu political right was clearly in
a political quandary, suffering from the fallout of its complicated position vis-à-vis
Partition. The RSS never really became politically viable in Bengal, possibly
because its ideology was more appealing to a Hindu-majority community than to a
Hindu community that lived with a minority mentality, because of the historic
demographic configuration of this region. The Hindu Mahasabha was weakened by
personal rivalries, organizational divisions and ideological confoundedness dam-
aging its political prospects. The bitter exchanges of letters between Ashutosh
Lahiry and N.C. Chatterjee even in June 1951156 – that is, barely six months away
from the election – shows how divided the Mahasabha was on the eve of the elec-
tion. One month later a frustrated General Secretary of the provincial Mahasabha
wrote to his High Command in Delhi:
This is condition of our office here. The President [N.C. Chatterjee] is ill. One
of the Vice Presidents has boycotted the office. Sri Ashutosh Lahiry, President
of the All-India Parliamentary Board, has also non-co-operated and we have
got to fight the Congress, the People’s party of Dr Mookerjee, the Krishak
Praja Mazdoor Party of Profullo Ghosh and Kripalani, leaving aside the
Communists and the Socialists.157
And then it was difficult to contest – let alone win – an election on a political agenda
that was so removed from the day-to-day problems of the average citizens. As Joya
Chatterji has shown, the East Bengali refugees – the most important potential sup-
port base – unlike their West Punjabi counterparts – responded more to the left’s
social justice argument on the rehabilitation issue,158 than to the Hindu right-wing
message of reversing the course of history.
So the Mahasabha tried to relate to the everyday politics of the citizens as the
election drew closer. After the Cooch Behar firing on the hunger marchers (21
April 1951), the Mahasabha took it up in right earnest and made it an election issue.
It held a number of meetings in Cooch Behar – as well as elsewhere – where the fir-
ing, together with the broader issues of food shortages, blackmarketeering and the
ineptitude of the government in solving the day-to-day existential problems of the
common people provided the content of a vigorous election campaign. The
Mahasabha promised to work for the ‘real freedom of the masses’.159 But in the end,
this concept of freedom was linked to the Mahasabha’s ideological position on the
Partition. The shortages of food, cloth and other essentials would continue,
Ashutosh Lahiry told his audience at a meeting in Cooch Behar, as long as the
Partition of the country was not reversed.160
As the election approached, the Hindu Mahasabha organized numerous meet-
ings and district conferences. But its election campaign was seriously compro-
mised by its own internal divisions. The personal animosity between Lahiry and
Mukherji continued to generate distrust and affect the election campaign.161 And as
N.B. Khare noted in a meeting at Deshbandhu Park in Calcutta on 19 May 1951, all
the Hindu political parties, the RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Jan Sangh were
fighting against one another and the Congress at the same time. The common Hindu
front against the Congress in the coming election, which he recommended at
another meeting four days later at Sraddhananda Park, never did really eventuate.162
6 The ‘great adventure’
The election of 1952
Preparations
On 22 November 1951, in a broadcast to the nation, Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru described the first general election as a ‘great adventure’ and urged the
nation to face it ‘with good heart and spirit’. ‘Thus shall we lay the firm foundations
of the democratic structure of this great republic’, he announced in a triumphalist
tone of making history.1 Indeed, this was a huge and unprecedented administrative
exercise destined to transform India into a modern democratic nation. In April 1950
the Representation of the People Act was passed by the parliament; already an
Election Commission had been constituted and Sukumar Sen, a Bengali ICS
officer who was then the Chief Secretary in West Bengal, was appointed the Chief
Election Commissioner. The task for him was truly ‘gigantic’, as The Statesman
described it; if completed properly it would be a ‘triumph indeed for the nation’.2
There were 176,000,000 registered voters in this election, and this meant that
about 50 per cent of the total population had been enfranchized, while after the
Government of India Act of 1935 only about 14 per cent of the population had the
right to vote.3 Of these voters 12,800,000 lived in West Bengal and they would elect
their representatives to 238 seats in the West Bengal Assembly and 34 seats in the
House of the People of the central parliament. To conduct this election, 18,000
polling stations had to be set up, nearly 300,000 ballot boxes were required and
26,300,000 ballot papers had been printed. The elections would commence in north
Bengal on 3 January and would end in Calcutta on 22 January.4 The voting proce-
dure was extremely complicated, particularly as elections for both Assembly and
parliamentary seats were to be conducted simultaneously, and there were some
constituencies that had two seats, where one seat was reserved for either Scheduled
Castes or Scheduled Tribes. This meant a voter had to cast her/his vote three times
– each time stamping on a separate ballot paper against the right symbol of the pre-
ferred candidate and putting the paper in the right ballot box with the symbol of
their chosen candidate. The procedures could be baffling for first time voters, as
nearly 76 per cent of them were uneducated. So some voter education was neces-
sary, and this was to be conducted through documentary films produced by the cen-
tral Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, to be shown in regular cinema
houses as well as through mobile vans. The local Calcutta station of the All India
The ‘great adventure’ 155
Radio was also to run regular programmes on the election.5 For any state govern-
ment it was truly an administrative and logistical nightmare. No wonder B.C. Roy
described this election as a ‘colossal undertaking, the like of which has never been
attempted before in this country or in any country in the world.’6
Notwithstanding all these uncertainties, the fairness of the whole process had to
be scrupulously maintained, as the opposition parties were already over-sensitive
and suspicious. There were fears that the government with its total control over the
administration might use its power to manipulate the election process by using the
administrative machinery, putting undue pressure on the electorate and making life
difficult for the opposition candidates. J.B. Kripalani raised the scare of undue pres-
sure being exerted by the Congress volunteers on average voters.7 Sibnath Banerjee
of the Socialist Party complained to the Chief Election Commissioner alleging
intimidation of the voters and opposition party workers by Congress volunteers
with the active connivance of the police.8 The CPI leader Bhupesh Gupta, in a rep-
resentation from jail, expressed his apprehension that the election would certainly
be rigged by the Congress.9 Muzaffar Ahmad, the Secretary of the West Bengal
Committee of the CPI, complained in a press statement about harassment and
obstructionism by the authorities. Their use of microphones was being monitored,
and ‘a large number of political workers’ were arrested. ‘We protest strongly’, said
Ahmad, ‘against this partisan attitude of the Government and its deliberate attempt
to stifle the campaign of opposition parties.’10 To allay such fears, the Chief
Minister had issued strict instructions to all the public servants to maintain their
neutrality in the conduct of the elections and warned the ministers not to use any of
their privileges for the purposes of electioneering.11 At the same time, in an effort to
curb electoral corruption, the Chief Election Commissioner issued a strict warning
to all candidates to keep their expenses within permissible limits and to keep
accounts of their expenditure.12 But all these precautionary measures, it seems, had
failed to allay the fears and misgivings of the opposition.
Another issue concerning the fairness of the electoral process was that a number
of CPI leaders, many of them candidates, remained behind bars, most of them under
preventive detention without trial. When the CPI changed its policy of insurrection
and decided to participate in the democratic process, the government did not take it
seriously and considered it only ‘a shift in the emphasis and nothing more’.13 And
Chief Minister B.C. Roy was in no hurry to release the 264 security prisoners still
detained without trial at the end of October 1951, because the reasons for their
detention, he told the Assembly, had not disappeared.14 At a press conference on 11
November, he said that ‘there was nothing to prevent the political prisoners’ from
voting or standing for election from behind bars.15 On 16 November 24 opposition
leaders, journalists and intellectuals issued a press statement demanding the release
of all political prisoners in the interests of a free and fair election.16 The criticism of
the government on this account continually increased as the question of civil liber-
ties became an issue in the election campaign, almost creating a sympathy wave for
the communist candidates.17 So finally on 7 December, Roy changed his stand
and released 17 prisoners on parole – but only those who were candidates in the
election.18
Given all these serious allegations that were being raised about the process and
the enormity of the challenge, one question certainly arises: did those who were
leading the nation into this gigantic modern democratic experiment as ‘an act of
faith’19 have full conviction in the process and its possible outcome? Dr B.R.
Ambedkar, the father of the Indian Constitution, was aware of the basic contradic-
tion of this Indian modernity: ‘An ancient people like the Indians who have no roots
in democracy are made the judges and asked to choose the party and put it in charge
of the Government.’20 Even Nehru was unsure. On 20 December – that is, in the
middle of his whirlwind election campaign – he told an international philosophers’
conference in New Delhi that: ‘I have little doubt that democracy is the best of all
the various methods available to us for the self-governance of human beings.’ But
the ‘emergence of democracy in a mass and somewhat uncontrolled way’ seemed
problematic, for people were turning into an ‘unthinking mass of humanity’. In that
situation,
Are they likely to elect the right persons or at any rate the more or less right per-
sons? That becomes a little doubtful … the quality of men who are selected by
these modern democratic methods of adult franchise gradually deteriorates.21
Whether this scepticism was born of a sense of frustration resulting from his recent
contact with the masses in the course of his countrywide election tour or because of
a lingering Congress attitude of seeking to act on behalf of the unlettered and
supposedly politically unconscious members of the nation, is difficult to tell.
But Nehru was not alone. A satirical piece in the Bengali literary journal
Sanibarer Chithi resonated the same scepticism by predicting that as a result of the
illiterate and therefore politically unconscious people getting the right to vote two
kinds of people would be elected: the locally powerful magnates like the zamindars
and moneylenders or the ‘radical proletariats’ who would promise to fix every-
thing, but in the end deliver nothing. The intellectuals who had the intelligence and
prudence to govern the country would be squeezed out by these two groups.22 Many
educated citizens in the country shared the same cynicism and believed that the
introduction of adult franchise at this early stage in the nation’s life was not an act
of political wisdom.23 The election in modern political terms was expected to be the
anonymous act of participation in the exercise of sovereignty on the part of the new
citizens of the nation-state; yet how many of them would exercise their franchise,
and would do so after fully comprehending its implications? In West Bengal, the
Chief Minister himself did not expect more than 40 to 50 per cent voters’ turnout.24
In that case, would the election really represent the myriad voices of this infant
nation? With all these searching questions reverberating in the public space the
nation moved towards its first election.
Nomination
The initial signs were encouraging as there was a huge response about filing
nomination papers, not just from those who were associated with various political
parties, but also among those unorganized individuals who, euphemistically speak-
ing, sought to represent the small voices of history. Out of 1,521 candidates fight-
ing the election in West Bengal – both for Assembly and parliamentary seats – there
were 646 independent candidates.25 There was so much anxiety about their nomi-
nation papers being cancelled on technical grounds that candidates submitted more
than one nomination paper – in some cases many more than one. In the end very few
nomination papers were rejected. The unexpectedly high number of independent
candidates required extra symbols to be allocated by the Election Commission and
70,000 extra ballot boxes to be requisitioned.26
This mad rush for nomination did not go down well on the ethical register of the
Bengali middle class who were suspicious of corrupt politicians. For instance Kafi
Khan’s cartoon in Jugantar caricatured it as a rush for honey (‘Raser sandhane’) or
seeking a share of the governmental funds.27 Another cartoon in Amrita Bazar
Patrika showed an independent candidate pawning his wife’s gold ornaments to
pay his deposit, in the hope that if elected to the Assembly he would get back ‘fifty
times this amount’.28 Birupaksha too in one of his satirical pieces echoed this cyni-
cism of the middle class, which believed that the independents were out to look
after their own interests and secure their own future. Otherwise, why could they not
join one of the political parties? In these days of popular democracy you would be
effective only when you could shout in chorus!29
However these independents were not just self-seeking individuals; they came
from all walks of life, and for the most part were already involved in the public
sphere, either as professionals such as lawyers, journalists, and teachers or were
associated with public institutions like municipalities, trade unions or other non-
government organizations.30 In other words, they were the people who were
already active in the civil society, had the knowledge, expertise and aspiration to
participate in the governance of their country, and represented the unorganized
voices of the nation that had not as yet reposed their faith in any organized political
party. In many areas their electoral campaign was carried on by civil society – the
local clubs, samitis (committees), student organizations, refugee bodies and even
impromptu slum committees.31 These were men who longed for ethical good gov-
ernment. At a meeting in Beliaghata, the independent candidate Amulyachandra
Ray described himself as a constructive worker who believed in the compatibility
of the means and the goal. A resonance of this Gandhian ethical politics was audi-
ble also at another meeting at Halsibagan at Sealdah in support of another inde-
pendent candidate Sudhir Ghosh, where speakers insisted that rather than bowing
to any imported ideology the nation should be built according to Gandhian ethics of
self-less constructive work. Gyanada Prasad Mukherjee, another independent can-
didate in Diamond Harbour constituency, described himself as an ‘educated
patriot’ who was contesting the election to prevent the Congress from ignoring
public opinion while formulating its policies of governance.32
The political parties across the spectrum were therefore not happy with the inde-
pendents. The Congress and the Socialists in Bombay could agree only on one point
and that was in asking the voters not to vote for the independents, because they were
‘not an organized party and have no principle to guide them’.33 In West Bengal too
it was reported that Congress and Socialist candidates in some constituencies were
jointly asking voters not to vote for the independents.34 The speakers at a meeting
of the United Socialist Organization of India (USOI) at Shraddhananda Park in
Calcutta on 2 December told the voters that the independents were only creating
confusion.35 At a meeting of the People’s United Socialist Front (PUSF) at
Beliaghata on 14 January, Soumyendranath Tagore warned the voters not to trust
the independents.36 The independents therefore also tried to organize themselves. A
convention of the independent candidates was held in Calcutta in early December,
presided over by Radha Binod Pal. Its purpose was to thrash out a joint programme
for the coming elections.37 But its whole purpose was self-defeating – the
independents defied organization.

However, in some cases the independents were frustrated Congressmen, who did
not get the party’s nomination, as Nehru told a meeting at Patna.38 A Congress
ticket was considered to be the surest entry pass to the corridors of power and hence
there was a huge rush for nomination all over the country. According to one media
report, for 4,000 seats 20,000 applications for Congress nomination had been filed
and by 27 October 80,000 letters of complaint were received by its Central Election
Committee.39 It therefore ran behind schedule, and for West Bengal endorsed the
recommendations of the provincial election committee headed by Atulya Ghosh.
And here Congress factionalism came to play a significant role, as a meeting of dis-
gruntled Congressmen at the Indian Association Hall in Calcutta on 11 October
complained. It expressed concern that men and women with integrity were being
ignored for nomination if they did not agree with the leaders of the electoral com-
mittee.40 But such remonstrations had little effect, and hence a group of district
leaders resigned from the party in protest against the ‘dictatorial attitude’ of the
West Bengal Provincial Congress Committee (WBPCC) executive. Others filed
their nominations as independents against official Congress candidates, despite
pleadings and warnings from Ghosh. Ultimately, disciplinary action had to be
taken against 40 Congress members who were expelled from the party. But they
were not alone, reports of similar dissidence came from Punjab, Bihar and UP and
the AICC took a ‘grave view’ of the situation. But this indiscipline was born of the
very built-in looseness of the party structure and the central leaders could do very
little about it. In UP 49 people were ultimately expelled from the party, although
about 270 people were known to have defied the party mandate and filed their
independent nomination.41
In spite of this internal dissension a Congress victory seemed imminent as the
opposition – both on the right and on the left – remained hopelessly divided. There
were about 20 political parties contesting this election and all launched their elec-
tion campaigns by the beginning of October.42 But among them the right-wing par-
ties – Jan Sangh, Hindu Mahasabha and Ram Rajya Parishad – as mentioned
earlier, were fighting among each other and against the Congress, although they
were aware, as Shyama Prasad Mukherji lamented in an election speech in
Deshapriya Park in Calcutta, that only a united opposition had any chance of
defeating the Congress.43 On the left, as we have discussed earlier (see Chapter 5),
the prospects of a united front seemed elusive. On 27 October (at the Rammohan
Library Hall in Calcutta) Hemanta Kumar Basu presided over a meeting of the
Progressive Workers’ Union, which issued a fresh appeal to all progressive parties
to eschew their mutual differences and unite against Congress misrule in order to
reconstruct India on the noble principles of Netaji.44 But such appeals had little
effect over personal egos and non-negotiable ideological positions, as well as
differences on seat adjustments.45 The Socialist Party and the Revolutionary
Communist Party of India (RCPI) (Tagore group) would have nothing to do with
the CPI.46 So they formed the PUSF with the Forward Bloc (Subhasist), the Tapsili
Jati Sangh and a few other minor parties. The other contending leftist alliance was
the USOI composed of the CPI, Forward Bloc (Marxist), Socialist Republican
Party, Bolshevik Party, Revolutionary Socialist Party and the Progressive

Workers’ Bloc.
USOI’s negotiations with the Krishak Mazdoor Praja Party (KMPP) broke down
on the issue of seat adjustment, as the latter’s claims on the labour seats in Calcutta
and its neighbourhood seemed unacceptable to other leftist parties.47 Their claim
particularly seemed untenable as KMPP was facing a difficulty in getting candi-
dates for all constituencies and in some cases candidates nominated by the party
later publicly remonstrated against such nomination without their consent.48 And
not just that, these protracted negotiations ended in public acrimony, as the CPI in
a press statement blamed the KMPP for the breakdown of the talks, questioned its
leftist credentials, condemned its ‘nose-in-the-air attitude’ towards other left par-
ties, and pointed out that its leaders were more interested in post-election ministry-
making than in the radical potential of a left unity. S.C. Banerji, the President of the
KMPP, refuted all the charges and blamed disunity within the USOI for the break-
down of negotiations.49 In any case, the mutual blame game did not do the leftist
opposition any good, as in this election all the opposition parties had to confront the
massive propaganda machinery of the Congress.
Campaign
The Congress had a provincial campaign budget of 2,000,000 rupees, which none
of the other political parties could match, particularly when for some opposition
parties like the CPI the only source of funding was door-to-door collection. By con-
trast, in addition to funding, each provincial Congress committee received from its
central election committee 1,200,000 coloured pamphlets, audio records contain-
ing Nehru’s speeches and a film to be shown in cinema houses celebrating the
Congress Party’s achievements. Coloured posters of a pair of yoked bullocks – the
election symbol of the Congress – began to appear on walls all over the province in
urban and rural areas, and in railway stations. In cities, at important intersections,
neon signs urged the voters to vote for the Congress. And finally, there was the sur-
prise element – a grand plan to drop Congress leaflets from aeroplanes on 31
December on the eve of Prime Minister Nehru’s visit to the province for a series of
election meetings.50
As for the content of this campaign, the AICC approved the draft election mani-
festo in July and it was formally adopted at the 57th session of the Indian National
Congress at Satyavati Nagar in New Delhi on 18–19 October 1951.51 It was here
that Nehru, the new President of the Congress, flagged off the election campaign.
In his presidential speech, he promised an ideology-based election campaign – this
was not an election just to get access to power by whatever means possible.52 And
from this ideological vantage point, he identified the main enemies to be fought:
one was ‘communalism’ which was to be resisted by a secularist Congress, and the
other was ‘poverty’ which would be taken care of by the Planning Commission and
the Five Year Plan, just presented in the parliament. Through these fights Congress
would deliver a stable government and guarantee the security and unity of the coun-
try. And of course, it was only the Congress which could deliver these, and it was
here that he cleverly appropriated history. To the opposition parties he threw the
audacious question: ‘where were you when the fight for freedom was going on?’ As
Congress had played a leading role in bringing about India’s freedom, it symbol-
ized the nation’s aspirations and, therefore, was the only party that could legiti-
mately claim the right to govern the new nation-state. In the morning, while
hoisting the Congress flag he had made this claim in a more appealing rhetorical
tenor:
Nearly 21 years ago I unfurled this Congress flag at the banks of the Ravi River
in Lahore. Since then thousands of people have pledged themselves to serve
their country and fight for freedom under the flag …
The flag represented the unity and oneness of the Indian people and it should
remind them that, as brothers and sisters, they had to work together in full
cooperation for the service of the country. The flag was not the flag of a few
select leaders but of the whole people – the common people [Emphasis
added].53
The statement established in no uncertain terms the political conflation of the party,
nation (‘Indian people’) and the state (‘country’). Hoisting the national flag here-
after became a regular feature of Congress election meetings.54
Nehru was even more explicit about claiming the historical legacy during his
tour of West Bengal, particularly at the election rally at the Brigade Parade Ground
in Calcutta on 1 January 1952. The Amrita Bazar Patrika reported his speech in the
following way:
In his speech Pandit Nehru analysed the role of the Congress since its inception
and said that the history of India of the last thirty or forty years was the history
of the Congress and the history of the Congress of that period was the history
of India.55
And therefore the future of India was to be a future with the Congress as well, and
it would be a very stable and secure future. In the course of the two days (31
December–1 January) that he stayed in this province, Nehru addressed as many as
10 election rallies and everywhere these were the themes that he spoke on. And not
just that, these were the two themes – stability and history – that all the central
leaders who came to West Bengal for the election campaign and the state leaders
who addressed election rallies and street corner meetings would repetitively
reiterate.56
Obviously, the Opposition had to contest this particular construction of history
and argue that it was not the Congress alone that had secured India’s freedom. On
the right, the Hindu Mahasabha leaders like Debendranath Mukherjee began to tell
their followers in party conferences that it was the international situation which had
compelled the British to leave India; they partitioned the country to safeguard their
interests, and the Congress concurred.57 On the left, Satyapriya Banerjee of the
Marxist Forward Bloc asserted at an election meeting that there ‘could be no greater
falsehood than to say that the Congress had won independence’.58 The same point
was reiterated again, a few days later, at a large leftist rally at Calcutta Maidan,
jointly sponsored by the CPI and USOI, by none other than Aruna Asaf Ali, the
heroine of the Quit India movement. Once a Congress Socialist, she was now a
leader of the Left Socialist group and a supporter of the CPI-led leftist alliance. The
pre-1947 Congress, she argued, was a genuine national organization and worked
with the sanction of the people, while the Congress of today represented only the
capitalists and privileged classes and was unfit to solve the country’s economic
problems.59 So not only did the Congress not win India’s freedom, but it had indeed
betrayed the nation by spoiling the fruits of freedom, as other leftist leaders like
Soumyendranath Tagore and Leela Roy told a public meeting at Deshapriya Park
in Calcutta on 12 December 1951. It had given every facility to the capitalists to
‘suck the last drop of blood of the poor workers and middle classes.’ In meeting
after meeting the leftist opposition capitalized on the food and cloth scarcity, the
refugee problem and firing in Cooch Behar. This independence was a charade, they
argued, because it was only for the capitalists and the rich.60
But such contestation also made the opposition election campaign look very neg-
ative. A cartoon in the Amrita Bazar Patrika titled ‘World War III?’ represented all
opposition parties having only one target to shoot, and that was Nehru and his
Congress party.61 Their manifestos had hardly anything that could distinguish one
from the other. A Shankar’s cartoon – ‘Who’s Who’ – alluding to the Mahabharata
episode of Draupadi choosing her husband, presented all the political parties as
prospective grooms with their faces (or their distinctive identities) covered, waiting
in silence for the favour of the would-be-bride – the voter.62 As one media com-
mentator wrote, the voters had ‘by and large, only one alternative’, they had to
choose either the Congress or the communists, as all other opposition parties
looked almost the same.63
Indeed, of all the leftist parties the CPI alone had the most robust election cam-
paign, posing the most serious challenge to the Congress. They had an organized
group of volunteers, who could easily be mobilized into an effective electioneering
apparatus. The CPI election campaign had begun long before it was officially inau-
gurated in October 1951. From late March the local organizations of the CPI began
holding small street corner meetings on local issues as well broader concerns such
as world peace.64 The earliest meeting focussing on the election was reported from
Mayna in Midnapur on 18 May 1951, where speeches were made emphasizing food
and cloth scarcities and the villagers were urged to form Krishak Samitis in prepa-
ration for the forthcoming general election.65 In Midnapur district in the four
months between July and October, the Police reported 29 election meetings, where
attendance varied from 60 or 70 to 7,000. In these meetings the main speakers were
leaders like Muzaffar Ahmad, Biswanath Mukherjee or Renuka Chakrabarty, and
they spoke on issues like civil liberties, government policies on food and cloth, teb-
haga, abolition of the zamindari system, and above all, the need to vote for their
candidates.66 Similarly, in Hooghly district between 7 June and 23 September, 18
meetings were reported, where attendance ranged from 100 to 1,000. These meet-
ings were often preceded or followed by processions carrying red flags and shout-
ing anti-government slogans.67 A series of similar meetings were also reported

from the 24-Parganas district.68 In Bankura, the special feature of such meetings
was the large-scale attendance of Santhal peasants, who were active participants in
the Tebhaga movement a few months ago.69 The reports that we get from the police
abstracts indicate that the CPI had launched the most extensive grass-roots level
campaign long before any other party had gone there. It is interesting that we hardly
get any information about this CPI election campaign from the mainstream media
reports.
This brings us to the role of the media which stood at the intersection between the
political parties and the electorate. As in the South Calcutta by-election back in
1949, the media in this first general election remained politically positioned,
although they perceived their role as both pedagogic as well as propagandist. As for
the educational role, the newspapers disseminated detailed information on election
procedures, names of constituencies and candidates; published articles on ‘dos and
don’ts’ for both voters and candidates; and brought out pictures of election symbols
of different parties. Jugantar provided daily information on election meetings and
the Amrita Bazar Patrika even carried a daily advertisement reminding voters that
it was their duty to vote and vote wisely and conscientiously.70 And the cartoons in
both Anandabazar Patrika and Jugantar provided perceptive critical commen-
taries on various social and political aspects of the election in most innovative and
humorous ways.71 Their imagery perhaps conveyed one important message and
that was of the empowerment of the average citizens in a reversed relationship of
power, although that might be true only for a moment. Yet, that moment was impor-
tant in the nation’s journey towards political modernity, and hence the print media
left for us meticulous reports on everything that happened, which can now enable
us to reconstruct a historical narrative of this great spectacle that marked India’s
journey towards political modernity.
But like any other historical document this media reportage is not free of
bias – and we need not even look for a hidden transcript. The local print media was
overtly pro-Congress – as their editors and proprietors were either Congress lead-
ers or were closely associated with the Congress, and in this there was no difference
between the Bengali language papers (Anandabazar Patrika and Jugantar) and
their English language counterparts (Amrita Bazar Patrika and Hindustan
Standard). In a way all these newspapers came to constitute the propaganda
medium for the ruling party. One or two examples would clarify the situation.
Nehru conducted the campaign through a whirlwind tour of the country commenc-
ing from 1 October – in all he travelled 25,000 miles in the course of nine weeks,
addressing election meetings in remote corners of the country.72 But wherever he
might speak, his speeches made front page headlines in the Calcutta newspapers,
thus taking his message to the drawing rooms of the literate provincial voters every
day.73 The election campaign of other parties never merited such wide coverage. On
3 January, the day polling started in West Bengal, Amrita Bazar Patrika – associ-
ated with the well-known Congress leader and candidate Tushar Kanti Ghosh –
published on its back page a picture of a ballot box with the Congress symbol
inscribed on it and a ballot paper being inserted into it – leaving no ambiguity about
what its message was to the West Bengal voters. Then on 21 January, the day before
Calcutta went to the polls, the same newspaper ran a bold headline on its back page:
‘Communists Routed in West Bengal’ – this report was based on the first batch of
results that came out for only eight seats in the province. The Statesman, still
European owned, would try to maintain its journalistic neutrality,74 but that would
never go as far as giving a dispassionate coverage of the communist activities. Most
information about the CPI election campaign therefore can be found only in the
police intelligence reports. However, we should also remember that the print media
in India had not as yet reached that stage of ‘massification’ in a Habermasian sense,
where it could produce and manage political consensus.75 Its role was limited in an
election where about 76 per cent of voters were unlettered.76
This election campaign, which sought to mobilize these uneducated people to
participate in this novel democratic experiment in the exercise of their sovereignty,
had to appropriate the artefacts of popular culture in a bid to become a part of it. In
other words, democracy in India could hardly afford to separate itself from its per-
formative aspects – in a most literal sense. So the election campaign also became a
form of public entertainment. The Durga puja, the most popular religious festival
of the Bengali Hindus, coincided with the political calendar of the nation, and the
community pujas became the locales for public activities of the political leaders of
all hues. As Kafi Khan’s cartoon in Jugantar put it, all the leaders were seen to be
performing the arati (ritual prayer) before goddess Durga.77 Processions in the
evening with lighted mashals (torches) became another feature of the election spec-
tacle, although after an incident in Calcutta on 20 January threatening the Chief
Minister, mashal processions were banned. Other than mashals, sometimes brass
bands accompanied the Congress political processions.78 By December of 1951
when the ‘election fever’ began to rise in West Bengal, the CPI extensively used its
cultural organizations to stage musical soirees, ballads and folk plays, and also
launched a literature campaign. Then they started a door-to-door campaign with a
posse of disciplined volunteers.79 Congress also organized mushairas or musical
programmes. There were street corner meetings everywhere, organized by all polit-
ical parties. There were also protest demonstrations at these meetings – particularly
at Congress meetings when the speakers recounted their achievements. However,
such disruptions were a part of the show which would still go on.80 And there
was the all-out ‘poster war’ that added visual feasts to the sound bytes flowing
in abundance.81 In Budge Budge, as a report in the Amrita Bazar Patrika put
it: ‘Poster-scarred trees, flag tipped bamboo poles raised high in the air, and plac-
ard-pasted mudwalls will bear witness to this peaceful battle of ballot boxes for
many more days to come.’82 In Kharagpur town there was not a single public vehi-
cle which did not have an election poster pasted on its body. The carnivalesque
atmosphere made the election campaign a new form of popular entertainment that
people could easily identify with. The election also created job opportunities for
thousands of volunteers needed by the political parties. In a district like Nadia it
absorbed the surplus manpower of refugee youth. In Midnapur, the influx of vol-
unteers from outside led to a short-lived boom in the local market.83
The countryside was certainly not ‘apathetic’, as an editorial in The Statesman
tried to portray it.84 The Amrita Bazar Patrika reporter who travelled across the two
districts of Nadia and Murshidabad to find out what the rural people were thinking
of the elections, did not find them to be ‘overwhelmed with perplexity’. ‘They are
simply discussing’, he wrote, ‘the mighty subject of the election as normally as they
would discuss other social or political issues among themselves or with strangers in
their leisure moments.’ Except in some very isolated places cut off because of prim-
itive means of communication, everywhere he could find that the election had
become a part of everyday conversation, although there were still myriad voices
and opinions.85 The staff reporter of Jugantar noticed with enthusiasm the moder-
ate but articulate debates among the ‘simple-minded’ voters in both urban and rural
areas about the coming elections.86
Minorities
These citizens of new modern India however remained embedded in their commu-
nity and cultural bonds, although the Indian electoral law would emphasize the
importance of the individual voter exercising her/his free political choice.87 What is
even more important is that all political parties – the leftists included – took cog-
nizance of these ties and this was reflected in their nomination strategies and polit-
ical campaigns. In his election speech at Patna on 28 December Nehru condemned
‘casteism’ in Bihar and the way the provincial Congress leaders had taken that into
account while lobbying for nomination.88 But not every voter in the country shared
his modernist thought that sought to bring the individual out of the social collective,
and all the political parties knew that – not just in Bihar, in West Bengal too. ‘If you
nominate a Mahishya candidate in a Mahishya constituency, the work was almost
done. However progressive we might be, we too had to concede defeat to caste.’
This was the self-introspection of the CPI leader Manikuntala Sen, writing in her
autobiography about 30 years later. And it was not just in Midnapur, the Mahishya
stronghold, that she experienced the power of caste. In her educated middle-class
south Calcutta constituency she encountered people who would vote for her not for
her politics but just because she was a Baidya by caste.89 It was indeed difficult to
miss the ambivalence of Indian modernity.
This modernity, however, sought to incorporate caste through the discourses of
social justice and affirmative action. Caste was therefore destined to play a promi-
nent role in this election as all political parties had eyes on the reserved seats
provided by the Indian Constitution for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled
Tribes, the two hitherto excluded minorities of the nation. In West Bengal, the
Congress fielded candidates in 29 of the reserved Assembly seats and in all 8
reserved seats for the Parliament; other parties too had candidates in these seats.90
But in this modern election campaign the language of caste needed to remain sub-
dued and subservient to the language of nation and equity. The independent Dalit
voice – which had been so prominent in pre-independence Bengal – remained unor-
ganized or had only nominal representation through PUSF candidates and some
independents. Dr Ambedkar and his Scheduled Caste Federation had just dissoci-
ated themselves from the Congress and had aligned with the Socialists, becoming a
part of the PUSF alliance in West Bengal. But they had a very limited political fol-
lowing in the province, where most of the Dalit candidates chose to fight the elec-
tion as independents. The most important of them was Jogendra Nath Mandal, a
pre-Partition ally of Dr Ambedkar in Bengal, and a bitter critic of the latter’s recent
resignation (see Chapter 2). A former Pakistani Minister of Law and Labour,
Mandal had just migrated to India following the riots of 1950. He contested as an
independent candidate from the Beniapukur-Ballygunge reserved seat in Calcutta,
after an objection about his citizenship status was dismissed by the Returning
Officer.91
Mandal in this election did not project himself just as a Dalit, but more as a
representative of a much broader front incorporating both the Dalits and the
refugees. The local Dalits brought out processions in support of his candidature,92
while he was also supported by the refugee women and lawyers’ organizations, and
with their help he held a number of street corner meetings in the constituency.93 In
this election the particularistic demands of Dalit cultural politics remained largely
muted because the Dalit candidates were seeking election in reserved seats in the
general constituencies, and this meant they had to seek the votes of caste Hindu vot-
ers as well – their second votes. Therefore, in election meetings hosted by various
Dalit organizations like the Scheduled Caste Congress and the Anunnata Jati
Sammilani, speakers used the rhetoric of class more, and dealt with the general eco-
nomic and social conditions of the poor.94 Nation and class thus displaced caste
from the political vocabulary of this election campaign in which everyone had to
speak of a putative inclusive nation. But that did not make caste any less important,
as in some of the general non-reserved constituencies where there were sprinklings
of Dalit voters, Congress candidates used Dalit leaders for their election cam-
paign95 – using caste in the same way as they used religion in Muslim-majority
constituencies.
As the new constitution had abandoned separate electorates and the Muslims
constituted about 25 per cent of the West Bengal electorate,96 every political party
had to pay attention to them. In October the Working Committee of the All India
Muslim League decided to contest the election and field candidates in as many con-
stituencies as possible. However if in any constituency there was no Muslim
League candidate, the Muslim voters were urged to vote for any other political
party except the Congress, the Socialists and communists. Their major grievance
against the Congress was non-acceptance of their demands for reservation in
education and jobs.97 But neither did the League manage to reorganize itself in West
Bengal, nor did the Muslim voters in the province ever pay any attention to its whip.
They remained committed to the Congress as their only protective armour. Also,
following the riots of 1950 the Congress in West Bengal, as elsewhere in India, had
been seriously trying to win over the Muslim political elites and Muslim voters.
This strategy helped the grand secularist posturing of the Congress leaders; but in
West Bengal it was also to strengthen the B.C. Roy–Atulya Ghosh group against
their factional rivals (see Chapter 3). The WBPCC, controlled by Roy and Ghosh,
therefore, nominated 21 Muslim candidates, much against the consternation of
their opponents.98 One of the major themes of the Congress election propaganda
was that Muslim interests were safe only with the Congress. Nehru made commu-
nalism his major enemy and stressed the need for secularism in most of his election
speeches, and so did most of the other Congress leaders in West Bengal and
elsewhere.99
This secularist propaganda was obviously not liked by the Hindu right wing, as
they were the most direct targets of this attack. ‘The secularism of Pandit Nehru
seems to be a delusion’, announced N.C. Chatterjee, while inaugurating the Hindu
Mahasabha campaign at a meeting in Shraddhananda Park in Calcutta on 10
November.100 S.P. Mukherji announced in an election speech that Indian politics
had been afflicted by a new disease called ‘secularitis’. He had no dislike for secu-
larism per se, he pronounced at another meeting, but Nehruvian secularism was
against anything Hindu and was only meant to scare Muslim voters to vote for the
Congress.101 Indeed, despite all grandstanding about secularism, Congress cam-
paign strategists were using religion as freely as they saw fit. At an election meet-
ing in Zirat Hat, in Amdanga police station in Barasat, B.C. Roy shared the podium
with Maulavi Dargapuri, the President of Jamiat-ul-ulema, who gave an ‘inspiring
speech citing [the] Quran’, explaining why Muslims should vote for the
Congress.102 And this was not an isolated incident; there are several reports of elec-
tion meetings in Muslim majority constituencies where Muslim spiritual leaders,
accompanied by Congress stalwarts, urged Muslim voters to vote for Congress can-
didates.103 In border districts like Nadia, where a large number of Muslim voters
seemed to have migrated to East Pakistan, the local candidates, belonging to both
the Congress and the KMPP, sent their agents across the border to persuade them
with full guarantees of security to comeback and vote.104 Suddenly, before the elec-
tion, the Muslims became the most sought-after minority.
The other social group which also had to be included in this election campaign
was women, who constituted half of the electorate. To bring the women into the
political arena and have them participate directly in the exercise of their sovereign
right was a crucial challenge for Indian democracy, and therefore each polling
booth would have a woman assistant to help female voters cast their votes.105 The
Bengali newspaper Jugantar published articles on the election in its women’s page
every Sunday, giving instructions on how to vote and why they should vote.106 No
political party could have even a modicum of hope of winning the elections if it
could not mobilize women voters. No wonder than at the AICC session in Delhi,
special arrangements were made for seating the ladies, and women volunteers were
prominently seen to be participating in the marches.107 In the more conservative
areas of central and north India mobilization of women became a real problem for
the party volunteers.108 In West Bengal, parties recruited women political volun-
teers for this purpose. Many of them were paid workers – who for the first time took
active part in the elections and were found to be as active and enthusiastic as their
male counterparts.109
As for the specificities of mobilization in West Bengal, both Congress and the
opposition followed the same strategy to preach different messages. On 4 January
the West Bengal Provincial Congress Mahila Sebadal (women volunteer corps)
was constituted at Kumar Singh Hall in Calcutta, where the WBPCC chief Atulya
Ghosh addressed the women volunteers and explained their duties during the
election days and after.110 Renuka Ray, a sitting Congress MP in a radio speech
appealed to all women of Bengal to exercise their right of citizenship.
Emancipation of women, she claimed, was a part of the freedom movement, and
now as a result ‘women had equal rights of citizenship with men’. So ‘this right
must be exercised with proper assessment and judgement and understanding of
what it meant …’.111 In her constituency in Tarakeswar another woman leader,
Shanti Das, while addressing well-attended public meetings asked women to vote
for Ray and other Congress candidates.112 Special, often exclusive, meetings for
women, sometimes conducted at the residence of local influential men and
addressed by women leaders, became a regular feature of the Congress election
campaign.113 Other parties also organized election meetings particularly targeting
women voters, and formed women’s volunteer corps. But they vehemently con-
tested the Congress message that women’s liberation was a part of the freedom
movement.114 Dipti Bhattacharya, the President of the Nikhil Banga Mahila
Sangha, in a statement made the women conscious of their democratic right and
advised them to use it with prudence, because the past experience of voting for the
Congress had not resulted in any betterment of the conditions for women.115
Thus, what freedom and sovereignty meant for women remained a contested
theme in this election campaign, but more importantly, however much the various
political parties might like the women voters to vote for their candidates, there was
yet little preparedness to accept them in leadership roles. Out of 237 candidates
nominated by the Congress for the Assembly seats, only four were women; and of
the eight candidates for the parliamentary seats two were women.116 But the
Congress was not alone in this act of exclusion – of the total of 1,521 candidates
fighting the election in West Bengal only 11 were women.117 The figures spoke
volumes about the gendered power relations in the province, which I shall discuss
in detail later in this chapter.
Refugees
In this electoral process one social group that remained at the margins, but whom
no party or candidate could afford to ignore, were the refugees. Between 1949 and
1951, particularly following the disturbances in Khulna, about 1.5 million of them
had entered the province.118 Many of them remained disenfranchised because the
Government of India had announced 25 July 1949 as the cut-off date – refugees
arriving after this date were not to be offered Indian citizenship, as long as there was
an act of parliament making a special provision for acquisition of citizenship by
such displaced persons.119 However, after protests from Shyama Prasad Mukherji,
and also pleadings from the provincial government, the Home Minister Sardar
Patel agreed to offer them citizenship, but Prime Minister Nehru refused to give
them voting rights, because any revision of the electoral roll at that late stage would
delay the elections.120 Moreover, the refugees were not automatically entitled to
Indian citizenship, they had to apply for it, and many of them simply could not man-
age it on time and remained disenfranchised, and therefore still remained outsiders
to the nation. No wonder, Mukherji and the Jan Sangh were to make this act of
exclusion a major election issue.121
However, since the Sealdah incident of 14 January 1949 (see Chapter 4) the
refugees and their organizations were unmistakably drifting towards the political
left, as their demands for specific refugee ‘rights’, as Joya Chatterji has argued,
were gradually expanding into demands for rights for all citizens – particularly, the
deprived, the underprivileged and the poor – and this fitted well into the leftist
agenda.122 By 1950 the communists had acquired a foothold within this con-
stituency, while all other opposition parties on the left were also focussing on the
plight of the refugees. The RSP in April 1950 decided to launch a province-wide
agitation to protest against the inhumane handling of the refugee problem by the
government.123 Around the same time Soumyendranath Tagore of the RCPI,
Satyapriya Banerjee of the Forward Bloc (Marxist), Leela Roy and Arun Roy of the
Forward Bloc (Subhasist), Purnendu Dasgupta of the Socialist Party all began to
visit refugee camps in the districts, mobilizing support among the refugees to pres-
surize the government for more provision for their rehabilitation.124 On 12–13
August 1950 the United Central Refugee Conference was held in Calcutta and on
its second day a mammoth meeting of 30,000 refugees took place at
Shraddhananda Park, where prominent leftist leaders like Mrinal Kanti Bose,
Sadhan Gupta and Jyotish Joardar spoke.125 Then in September 1950 the firing inci-
dent at the Dhubulia camp, in which one of the refugee protesters died in police fir-
ing,126 became a further occasion for political mobilization when all these leaders
made frequent visits to various camps in Nadia and held meetings among the
refugees, as tension in the camps continued to mount.127
Meanwhile, since April 1949, illegal squatter colonies had been proliferating in
Calcutta and in the surrounding districts of 24-Parganas, Hooghly and Howrah as
an organized campaign supported by the Nikhil Banga Bastuhara Karma Parishad
(All Bengal Refugee Council of Action). By the end of 1950, according to one cal-
culation, there were around 150 squatter colonies, accommodating about 30,000
families on 2,400 acres of land. This unauthorized occupation led to violent clashes
between the refugees and the landlords’ armed men, often with the tacit connivance
of the local police.128 In February 1950 such a clash was reported from Netaji Nagar
at Tollygunge in Calcutta.129 In January 1951 a meeting was held to protest against
police action on 25 December against refugees at Jadabgarh colony in Calcutta,
killing a refugee woman named Binapani Mitra, described as the ‘first woman
martyr in the history of the refugee movement in Bengal’.130 The government
issued a gazette asking the refugees to vacate illegally occupied lands within 15
days or face forcible eviction, but it was hardly implementable. And then a court
decision in an eviction-related case in Mahesh in Hooghly district made it more dif-
ficult for a landlord to evict any unauthorized occupier if the latter had occupied the
land continually for three months. So under pressure from the landlord lobby within
the Congress the government introduced the infamous Refugee Eviction Bill to
transfer the onus of eviction from the landlord to the state.131 Roy defended it in the
name of sanctity of private property guaranteed by the Constitution – another pillar
of Indian modernity.132
The opposition parties and the refugee organizations at once made this bill a tar-
get of public agitation. On 18 February 1951 the CPI-dominated United Central
Refugee Council (UCRC) organized a massive rally near the Monument in
Calcutta. It was attended by 50,000 refugees coming from different camps in and
around Calcutta. Satyapriya Banerjee chaired the meeting and it was addressed by
Jyoti Basu, Jyotish Joardar and others – all the speakers demanding the withdrawal
of the bill and the grant of legal status to the refugee colonies.133 With the election
approaching, there was also evidence of rival political mobilization on this issue, as
other leftist parties like the KMPP, RCPI , Forward Bloc (Subhasist) and Socialist
Party formed a parallel Refugee Eviction Resistance Committee, and on 28 March
1951 organized a procession of refugees in Calcutta. About 5,000 people, includ-
ing 500 women and children, started marching from Wellington Square towards
Assembly Hall, led by Suresh Banerji, Leela Roy and Soumyendranath Tagore.
But, on the way, at Curzon Park they were stopped by the police, who resorted to a
lathi-charge and then a cavalry charge, injuring many refugees including women.
The leaders were arrested, but were later released. An adjournment motion brought
by P.C. Ghosh in the Assembly on the next day was successfully blocked by the
government members.134
On the same day, and simultaneously with the meeting mentioned above, there
was another rally near the Monument in Calcutta organized by the UCRC, signalling
a major rift in refugee politics. Roy took advantage of that and brokered a compro-
mise, which did not alter the bill to any substantial extent but could secure its safe
passage in the Assembly on 4 April 1951. The refugees were certainly not happy
with the compromise negotiated by the political leaders. As available evidence sug-
gests, throughout the rest of the year various refugee committees, students and youth
bodies organized numerous meetings in Calcutta and various camps in the districts,
demanding withdrawal of the Refugee Eviction Bill which had now become
Act XVI of 1951. These meetings were attended by 2,000–10,000 people, mostly
refugees, who thus maintained their high public visibility in the election year.135
While the eviction bill remained the main target of refugee agitations, it was not
the only cause of their grievance, and while the UCRC remained at the forefront of
refugee politics, initiative and leadership for these movements were also forthcom-
ing from the camps and colonies, where the living conditions remained appalling.
The government thus remained under continuous pressure due to the refugee
problem while the election was fast approaching. On 27 October the West Bengal
Refugee Conference was held at Taherpur in Nadia, where demands were raised for
a proper rehabilitation programme and speedy payment of housing, business and
agricultural loans within three months of leaving the camps.136 The central Ministry
of Rehabilitation in November 1951 approved the Government of West Bengal’s
20,000,000-rupee scheme of rehabilitating 12,000 displaced families from East
Bengal. With this money the government would develop refugee colonies in the
districts of Nadia, Burdwan and 24-Parganas. The refugees were to be given a piece
of land and a loan to build a house; and, in addition, each family would get either a
small business loan or a piece of agricultural land for their maintenance. But the
loans were not paid on time, health and hygiene in the colonies remained dreadful,
water supply and medical facilities were scarce.137 When appeals went unheeded
and protestations at the local level failed, 26 refugees, including 12 women, from
Daspara camp staged a hunger strike in the compound of the Office of the Relief
and Rehabilitation at Auckland Place in Calcutta from 12 November. On 15
November the refugees squatted on the railway track at Gobardanga station in north
24-Parganas district blocking trains on the Sealdah-Bongaon line, demanding
immediate help for rehabilitation.138 Again on 17 November refugees at Habra sta-
tion squatted on the railway lines to demand installation of tube wells in their
camps, introduction of statutory rationing and jobs for the unemployed.139
These protest movements reached new heights a few days later on 20 November
when about 200 from Taherpur camp came to Calcutta and demonstrated before the
Chief Minister’s residence. The next day hundreds of them travelled ticketless by
train from Taherpur to Sealdah and then staged a demonstration at Wellington
Square in front of the Chief Minister’s house. About 300 of them, including some
women, started to fast unto death until their demands for speedy payment of loans
and provision of water supply and adequate medical and educational facilities in the
colonies were fulfilled. The hunger strike went on for four days and every day hun-
dreds of refugees travelled ticketless to Calcutta to join the demonstrators.
Ultimately on 24 November the hunger strike was withdrawn after the Chief
Minister sat with the representatives of the refugees and promised speedy action.140
Thus the refugees, though many of them did not have votes, were very much
present in this election campaign, adding, shall we say, a more direct performative
dimension to this great Indian experiment in democracy. For those who had votes,
their sympathies drifted towards the Left and became a major factor in determining
its electoral fortunes.141 Another important feature of the refugee movement of this
period was the high rate of participation by women. The experience of displace-
ment had brought them out of their domesticity into a new public space, where
they struggled for their rights and survival; but this did not change, as Gargi
Chakravartty has recently argued, the ideology and praxis of stereotyped gender
roles in refugee families.142
Polling
When the polling started in the province on 3 January voters went to the polling
booths in droves – for many of them it was an altogether novel experience. Out of
12,800,000 voters in West Bengal, 7,530,991, or 58.8 per cent, voted, while the
national average was 60 per cent. And despite the extremely complicated and con-
fusing voting procedures – as indeed many rural voters complained of being con-
fused – only 76,309 or just 1.01 per cent of votes were counted as invalid.143 So
much enthusiasm and judiciousness on the part of the so-called illiterate voters so
impressed the Chief Election Commissioner that he issued a press statement rejoic-
ing in the fact that the Indian electorate had become ‘politically adult’.144 Nehru was
prepared to eat his words: in a self-corrective statement he said: ‘My respect for the
illiterate voter has gone up and whatever doubts I might have had about adult suf-
frage are gone and the faith I put in our people has increased.’145 B.C. Roy was
similarly ecstatic when he told his audience at the Bengal National Chamber of
Commerce that: ‘… 17 crores of people, who never knew of the elections and who
were not literate, came out in large numbers to the polling booths to register their
votes …’146 It seemed their great pedagogic experiment in introducing modern
democracy in India had been a ‘magnificent success’, to quote an editorial in The
Statesman.147 It was now evident that this desired model of political modernity had
been accepted by the people of India. As Amrita Bazar Patrika observed, there was
no information of any boycott of the elections from anywhere in India; everywhere
the people welcomed and participated in the system.148 The only exceptions were
perhaps the Nagas in the northeast, who preferred to have their freedom from India,
rather than endorse their forcible integration by participating in the election.149 But
that minor aberration hardly mattered to the jubilant liberal political opinion in the
West. In London the liberal newspaper News Chronicle and liberal politicians like
Sir Percival Griffiths in his speech at the East India Association meeting celebrated
the success of modern democracy in a non-western post-colonial society.150 It sig-
nalled the ultimate victory for Britain’s modernizing mission.
However, while all these plaudits speak volumes about the seriousness with
which the average voters in West Bengal – and in the rest of India – had treated this
anonymous exercise of their citizen’s rights, in real situations there were vastly
mixed responses. Indeed, as a Staff Reporter of the Amrita Bazar Patrika noted on
the first day of the election, ‘The reaction of the voters … was different from indi-
vidual to individual.’151 Time and space appeared to be major factors. A Jugantar
reporter heard rural voters complaining about walking miles to reach the nearest
polling booth during the time of work in the field. The industrial workers got a
better deal, as they got time off from their place of work on the election day.152 But
that alone does not explain the widely divergent voters’ turnout in the province,
ranging from just 25 per cent in Tehatta (Nadia), 30 per cent in Kharagpur
(Midnapur) and Berhampore (Murshidabad), to 70 per cent in Karimpur (Nadia)
and Nalhati (Birbhum), to an impressive 80 per cent in Bishnupur constituency in
the 24-Parganas district. In some cases the polling average varied even within con-
stituencies – in Kharagpur, for example, while on the whole 30 per cent voted, in
some booths polling was as low as just 15 per cent. In most other constituencies the
polling average ranged from 40 to 60 per cent, and rural voters showed as much –
or as little – enthusiasm as their urban counterparts, although the polling date fell in
the harvesting season. In Krishnagar constituency 30 per cent of the urban voters
and 50 per cent of the rural voters voted, whereas in Kalna 50 per cent of the urban
and 40 per cent of the rural voters turned up at the polling booths.153 There was, in
other words, no set template within which we could conveniently pigeonhole this
differential voters’ enthusiasm for this novel democratic exercise. This, perhaps,
only indicated that the nation did not yet live in a ‘homogeneous, empty time’, as
theorized by Benedict Anderson, where politics as a common activity could be seen
to be happening in the same way in all parts of the territory inhabited by it.154
Evidence of such heterogeneity was replete everywhere. In most constituencies
polling was peaceful and quiet (in a literal sense, as no microphone was allowed on
the polling day), but full of colour and drama, except some isolated violent inci-
dents in Burdwan and Howrah. The environment was most tense in the Bowbazar
constituency in Calcutta where the Chief Minister Roy was locked in a straight con-
test with Forward Bloc (Marxist) candidate Satyapriya Banerjee, supported by all
leftist parties and in whose favour all other candidates had withdrawn. But despite
all that political heat, only 44.92 per cent of the voters turned up at the election
booths. Yet, that lack of voter enthusiasm did not dampen the excitement of the
political workers; it spilled over on the evening of the polling day (22 January)
when a large crowd of leftist political volunteers gathered at Wellington Street in
front of the Congress Office and the Chief Minister’s residence, shouting anti-
Congress slogans and burning Congress posters. A large police force arrived,
bombs were thrown and ultimately the crowd was dispersed by the police.155
What was most striking, however, in this scenario of uneven voter enthusiasm
was the overwhelming response from some of the minority groups. Muslim voters,
including women, turned up in large numbers, particularly in constituencies bor-
dering Pakistan. In districts like north 24-Parganas and Nadia, many of them came
from across the border and returned after voting.156 The situation only indicated
how eager the minority community was about ensuring their security by registering
their voice in the selection of the future government of the country. For the tribal
population, the election had perhaps a lot of curiosity value. In Birbhum, for the
Santhal voters the polling date had coincided with Bandhana, the most important
festival in their communal religious calendar. But their ritual time had to be
adjusted to the more dominant calendrical time of modern democracy, and so both
Santhal men and women turned up in large numbers at the polling booths, bringing
with them their bows, arrows and drums.157 In the Darjeeling hills, the Bhutia,
Lepcha and Mechi women showed more enthusiasm in voting than their males; in
the women-only booths the polling was nearly 72 per cent.158 In the Kalimpong
constituency a large number of hill people turned up in their festive dress and on the
banks of the river Teesta the casting of votes was ‘accompanied by annual prayers,
ceremonial dance and songs and even offerings of goats and cocks to deities.’159 To
get back to our earlier point, although these voters, like all other urban middle-class
citizens of the nation, acted according to the same calendar of modern democracy,
it is still difficult to argue that they all lived in the same ‘homogeneous, empty time’
in an Andersonian sense.
We do not have the detailed breakdown of polling percentages in the reserved
seats for the Scheduled Castes – because most of these seats were in two-member
constituencies. The situation does not look very encouraging though if we look at
the available figures for the two single-member reserved seat constituencies, one in
Burdwan district (Raina) and the other in Jalpaiguri (Mainaguri) – in the first con-
stituency just 30 per cent of the electorate cast their votes, while in the latter the rate
was 40 per cent. In polling booths in the Scheduled Caste reserved constituency of
Sankrail in the district of Howrah, women outnumbered their male members.160
This was not anything exceptional, as women in many constituencies – both gen-
eral and reserved, and both rural and urban – were showing greater enthusiasm than
men. Although there were only a few women candidates, the newspapers of this
period are full of reports on unprecedented enthusiasm among women voters seen
to be standing in long queues, often with small children in their arms.161 The Staff
Reporter of the Amrita Bazar Patrika described the rural election scene in the fol-
lowing language that reveals both his sense of astonishment and admiration:
Women, Hindus and Muslims, who scarcely could be expected to stand in

queue with men in open areas broke asunder the traditional pattern of social
life at least on this occasion and did exercise their rights in full gracefulness
and dignity. There was no lightheartedness in the scene as is witnessed at a
‘mela’.162
Despite the obvious tone of approbation, the report hardly conceals a patronizing
attitude. But even if women for once were not found to be ‘lighthearted’, it is diffi-
cult to conclude on this evidence that they looked at this modern democratic ritual
of citizenship as symbolic of their empowerment or freedom. Yet, there were many
signs of ambivalence. In one booth a woman left without voting after a loud quar-
rel with her husband as she refused to vote for the candidate preferred by her hus-
band. The Statesman thought this to be a ‘Lighter Side of the Polling’ and published
a cartoon on this incident,163 while Jugantar considered it to be one of the many
‘amusing stories’ of the election.164 But this episode was perhaps neither light nor
amusing, as it is possible to read in this comedy script of a publicly played out
domestic drama a silent but serious change in gender and family relations in
Bengali society, where a wife could refuse to vote according to the wishes of her
husband. This was in sharp contrast to the situation in north India where the Chief
Election Commissioner had to strike off 2.8 million women from the electoral rolls
because they did not provide their own names, but wanted to be registered as some-
body’s wife or mother.165
In West Bengal this heightened enthusiasm among women also evoked male
anxieties. A staff reporter of Amrita Bazar Patrika found that in Basirhat con-
stituency women were voting for a woman candidate not because of her programme
or ideology, but ‘simply because she was a woman’. The reporter – almost certainly
a man – was appalled by this non-rational behaviour and could not conceal his con-
cern: ‘Are we to have a new menace – that of sex – added to the already existing
ones of communalism, casteism and parochialism?’166 But he had little reason to
worry, because in the end this did not result in a gender revolution. An independent
candidate Mrs Padmarani Sabui, who contested a reserved seat for Scheduled
Castes in Sankrail constituency, issued a manifesto telling voters to support her
because she was an ordinary housewife who looked after her family, knew the joys
and sorrows of the lower- and middle-class home life, and therefore was most
equipped to represent them. But this plea did not appeal to the voters and she got
only 773 votes,167 although, as we have noted earlier, in this constituency women
outnumbered male voters at the polling booths. In the end, in West Bengal only five
female candidates won the election.168 It was no wonder that 22 years later the
Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India would observe that ‘the
majority of women are still very far from enjoying the rights and opportunities
guaranteed to them by the Constitution.’169 But then, let us look at what other impli-
cations for the future the first election held out to the nation.
Results
‘The vote is the greatest anonymous performance of citizenship’, writes Partha
Chatterjee. ‘But it only concealed the question of who represents whom within the
nation.’170 And this act of concealment became all too obvious in the first election
in India. Its results (see Table 1) were so ambiguous that anyone could read any
meaning in this confounding script. The Congress obviously read in it a resounding
victory, as it won an absolute majority in the West Bengal Assembly, winning 150
of the 238 seats. But it got the support of only 38.49 per cent of voters who actually
went to the polling booths. If we look at the total electorate (12.8 million) and the
voting percentage (58.8 per cent), then it appears that only 22.64 per cent of the
adult citizens in the province had actually expressed their confidence in the
Congress by registering their votes in its favour. Seven of the thirteen members of
the B.C. Roy cabinet lost the election,171 while Roy himself won in a straight con-
test with Satyapriya Banerjee in the Bowbazar constituency by a narrow margin of
4,111 votes. In his constituency, only 44.92 per cent of the electorate voted, and of
them 58.6 per cent voted for Roy.172 On the other hand, his Food Minister Prafulla
Sen – the leader of the now notorious Hooghly faction within the Congress – lost in
his own stronghold, Arambagh, to a little known independent candidate by a mar-
gin of 21,155 votes.173 Nothing could be more demonstrative of the public dis-
pleasure at their factional politics. In the parliament too Congress won 24 seats out
of 34, with the support of 41.2 per cent of the electorate who went to the polls.174
The Congress win was most spectacular in north Bengal and the border districts like
West Dinajpur, Jalpaiguri, Cooch Behar, Nadia and the Muslim-majority district of
Murshidabad. Its losses were most significant in areas which were once its strong-
holds, like Midnapur, Hooghly and the 24-Parganas district – or in other words, in
the areas where the so-called powerful Hooghly-Midnapur faction reigned so long.
According to one observer, this debacle was mostly due to the complacency, arro-
gance and corruption of the Congress leaders, and the KMPP factor that cut away
its support base in these districts.175 Later, five independent MLAs joined the
Congress giving it even greater strength of numbers in the Assembly. On 26 March
B.C. Roy was unanimously elected the leader of the West Bengal Congress
Assembly Party.176
Table 1 West Bengal Assembly Election: Final Results
Party Seats Seats won Total votes Percentage
contested of votes
Congress 236 150 2,898,526 38.49
CPI 79 28 838,438 11.13
Socialists 62 0 221,103 2.93
KMPP 126 15 634,963 8.43
Jan Sangh 85 9 428,277 5.69
Hindu Mahasabha 36 4 185,769 2.46
Ram Rajya Parishad 11 0 3,912 0.05
Forward Bloc (M) 50 10 392,001 5.21

Forward Bloc (S) 30 1 95,289 1.27
RSP 13 0 51,835 0.69
RCPI 10 0 32,105 0.43
Other Parties* 25 8 146,584 1.95
Independents** 201 13 1,525,880 20.26
Invalid votes 76,309 1.01
Total 237 238*** 7,530,991 100
Source: Amrita Bazar Patrika, 12, 13, 14 February 1952.
Notes:
* Other parties include USOI – 4, Gorkha League – 3, and United Progressive Bloc – 1.
** Total votes polled by Independents represent the votes polled by all the 598 independent candidates.
*** Total seats won include one Congress unopposed return.
In India as a whole, Congress won an absolute majority in 17 out of the 22 states;

it remained the largest single party, but failed to win a majority in Orissa, Patiala
and East Punjab States Union (PEPSU), Madras and Travancore-Cochin.177 In
the House of the People in the Central Parliament too, the Congress got an
absolute majority, but questions arose about the representative character of this
win. As Ramachandra Guha calculates, in the parliament the Congress won 364 of
the 489 seats or 74.4 per cent of the seats, but got only 45 per cent of the votes
polled; in the states it won 68.6 per cent of the seats with 42.4 per cent of votes
polled.178
The Congress win was therefore hardly unambiguous. Historian Anil Chandra
Banerjee in an article in Amrita Bazar Patrika cautioned the Congress that although
it could ‘congratulate itself on the remarkable electoral victory, it must take into
serious consideration certain disquieting factors’. And the most important of them
was the ‘wide gap between the proportion of seats captured by the Congress and the
proportion of votes secured by its candidates’.179 The other well-known Bengali
intellectual, Dr Srikumar Banerjee, a known sceptic, was even more candid: ‘by far
the larger section of the population was against Congress’, he thought.180 A satiri-
cal essay in Jugantar argued that ‘election’ and ‘democracy’ were not the same
thing, because in an election a candidate against whom the majority of voters had
cast their votes could still get ‘democratically elected’!181 The expectations of ethi-
cal good government representing the general will of all the people seemed to be at
odds with the numerical logic of liberal democracy.
The question of representation or the issue of legitimacy of the Congress win
would not go away easily as it was continually raked up by the opposition parties.
Suresh Chandra Banerji and Prafulla Chandra Ghosh of KMPP issued a joint state-
ment on 2 February, stating that: ‘The people’s verdict has clearly gone against the
Congress. The electors have voted out the Congress, but it is the want of unity
between the different parties that has kept the Congress still in power’.182 The
KMPP leaders realized this truth rather late, as they paid dearly for their pre-elec-
tion sense of self-importance and inability to get into any alliance with the other
leftist parties. Both Banerji and Ghosh were defeated and their party candidates
won in only 15 of the 126 seats contested. The pre-election overconfidence also
came back to bite the Socialist Party and its PUSF partners RCPI and Forward Bloc
(Subhasist), who were almost completely wiped out in the polls (see Table 1).
Shyama Prasad Mukherji, who won the parliamentary constituency in Calcutta
South-East, also noted with angst that the number of votes cast against the Congress
was larger than that polled by it.183 But a disunited political right was not to reap the
benefit of that anti-Congress wave.
The election results (see Table 1) revealed several other important political
trends as well, some with serious implications for the future. First, the independent
candidates, the 598 of them contesting for Assembly seats, together got 20.26 per
cent of votes polled – the highest after the Congress, although they won only 13
seats. One could perhaps argue that one-fifth of the conscious citizens of West
Bengal who went to the polls had not yet identified themselves with any of the
organized political alternatives available to their nation. However, these unorgan-
ized dispersed individual small voices could hardly make a difference to the nation
in a modern liberal democratic structure, where, as Birupaksha had noted, only
shouting in chorus could make a difference. The second important feature was the
Gorkha League candidates winning three of the four seats in Darjeeling district on
a platform that demanded a separate homeland for the Gorkhas in the hills.
Although the Gorkha League MLAs later decided to join the Congress parliamen-
tary party in the Assembly,184 this probably marked the innocuous beginning of the
future militant Gorkhaland movement of the 1980s.
Thirdly, in the Scheduled Caste reserved seats, the results indicated that the inde-
pendent candidates did badly – only two of them won. Jogen Mandal was beaten by
an unknown Congress candidate – so was Ambedkar in Bombay. Yet, the Congress
did not win all the seats – of the reserved seats in the West Bengal Assembly, CPI
won three, Forward Bloc (Marxist) won two, KMPP got two, Jan Sangh got one and
the rest went to the Congress. The PUSF – the political alliance which the
Scheduled Castes Federation was attached to, got none.185 The Congress candidates
who won in the reserved seats did not include any prominent Dalit leader of the pre-
independence days, except Radhanath Das, who won from Chinsurah (Hooghly)
and Hema Chandra Naskar winning from Bhangar (24-Parganas).186 In many con-
stituencies the winning Congress candidates got fewer votes than the total votes cast
against them. So the election results, ambiguous as they were, hardly indicated any-
thing about the political mind of the Dalit in West Bengal with any amount of cer-
tainty. It was not surprising that on 18 February P.N. Rajbhoj, the General Secretary
of the Scheduled Caste Federation, announced at a press conference in Poona that
his organization would soon launch a nationwide agitation to protest against the
unrepresentative character of the Scheduled Caste legislators elected throughout
the country.187 The same story was true for the Muslims as well. Out of 83 Muslim
candidates, 19 won – 17 of them were Congress candidates (out of 21) and 2
Independents. This did not necessarily mean that the Muslims had become ‘secu-
lar’ or ‘Congress minded’; in many constituencies non-Congress votes were
divided among numerous Independent and opposition candidates.188
However, the most significant outcome of the first election was the emergence of
the Communist Party of India as the largest opposition party in the West Bengal
Assembly and subsequently in the Central Parliament. Even more spectacular was
its victory in Madras (59 seats), Hyderabad (42 seats) and Travancore-Cochin (32)
where Congress failed to get an absolute majority. In West Bengal the CPI got
28 seats in the Assembly, and won five of the nine seats it contested for the House
of the People. In the Central Parliament the CPI and its allies got 27 seats.189 In West
Bengal, its most spectacular gains were in the urban middle-class and labour con-
stituencies of Calcutta and its surrounding areas, and in the rural constituencies in
the districts of Midnapur and 24-Parganas where its militant peasant movement of
the last three years had been most powerful.190
For many self-professed votaries of democracy this was indeed a very unpalat-
able result that this experiment in democracy had delivered. And this initiated
an interesting debate about the meanings of democracy in India. B.C. Roy
continued to dismiss the communists as a party controlled from Moscow and influ-
enced by a foreign ideology borrowed from Russia. He questioned their commit-
ment to democracy and predicted that their ultimate aim was to establish a
dictatorship of the proletariat. He therefore continued to hold many of the elected
communists in prison without trial.191 And like Roy, the Hindu Mahasabha too was
particularly perturbed because this outcome would have serious repercussions for
the freedom of the state, since the communists had an ‘extra-territorial affiliation’
– as a resolution adopted by the Hindu Mahasabha’s Working Committee empha-
sized.192 The communists were a ‘new menace for the country’, a threatened
Ashutosh Lahiry wrote to Veer Savarkar. ‘The election’, he thought, had ‘brought
about almost a revolutionary change in the political situation of the country.’193
There was also concern for the security of the citizens, for ‘The leopard would
sooner change its spots’, wrote a columnist, ‘than that [sic] communists should
abjure violence and lawlessness.’194 M.N. Roy wrote two articles in The Statesman
describing the communist success in the elections as ‘a disturbing factor of incal-
culable potentiality’. He tried to expose the ‘logical fallacy’ of their theory that
‘postulates dictatorship, that is, abolition of freedom, as the instrument to create
conditions for freedom.’195
So there were articles and letters to the editor in newspapers to explain this
unexpected and potentially dangerous communist success in Bengal and south
India, and the general conclusion, barring a few dissenting voices, was that it was
more due to negative voting against the Congress than positive support for the com-
munist ideology.196 One correspondent wrote: ‘Of the communist sympathizers
here 99% do not know what Communism is and the support they give the party
is born largely of poverty or frustration.’197 The Hindu Mahasabha leader
N.C. Chaterjee argued in the same vein: ‘those who voted for the communists did
not do so out of any intellectual allegiance to the Communists, but they did so out
of deep frustration of their political and economic ambitions …’198 In other words,
while their vote was important to proclaim the ideological triumph of modern
democracy in India, the intellectual capacity of the Indian voters, their ability
to exercise their choice wisely, was suspect – because they had delivered an
undesirable result.
The debate over freedom of the nation-state, which had dominated the public
space during the days of insurgency in 1949–50, thus came back with a vengeance
at this unexpected communist victory in the battle of the ballots. The CPI had no
option but to refute all these charges publicly by issuing a statement that its aim was
‘the replacement of the present reactionary Government by a democratic
Government representing the united forces of the working class, the middle class
and national bourgeoisie’ – the grand coalition – and not the establishment of the
‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.199
The international reaction was even more edgy, and even more distrustful of the
Indian voters. In an editorial on 2 February the liberal UK newspaper Manchester
Guardian noted in an alarmist tone: ‘Though in most parts of the country the
Congress is triumphant, Communism has taken its foothold in the constitutional
politics of three states.’ And its influence might increase in future, because all those
who voted for the Socialists in this election might vote for the communists in the
next.200 The Sydney Morning Herald in an editorial expressed its misgivings about
the ‘Ominous Development’ of communism in India. ‘A general election in a coun-
try where 90 per cent of the population could neither read nor write was not likely
to reflect any very considered view on national issues,’ the editorial concluded.201
In other words, the results made the election suspect, although only a few days ago,
on 9 February, the chief of the Australian news agency who came to India as an
election observer was euphoric about the phenomenal success of the Indian elec-
tions – the world, he thought, was ‘impressed’.202
In the United States, the self-professed guardian of democracy in the post-war
world, President Truman described India as ‘the largest democratic nation in all
Asia’. However, he also hastened to add that ‘India is faced with the same kind of
threat that overpowered the Chinese.’ To save democracy in India he offered a US
$7,900,000,000 foreign aid package to stop famine and help development in India
so that the people did not vote for the communists in future.203 On 20 March his
Secretary of State Dean Acheson told the Congress, by way of defending the aid
package, that the results of the Indian election became a hazard signal for the future
of democracy in Asia, and ‘if the trend should continue you would have a growth of
Communist strength in India and a very dangerous situation in Asia.’204 This read-
ing of the Indian political situation only points to the ambivalence of Indian moder-
nity which seemed to be germane with contradictory implications – to many of the
votaries of democracy in India its very success appeared to be an ominous threat to
its stability.
Aftermath
The real political significance of the first election, however, lay in the fact that now
it could be asserted that by participating in the election and exercising their equal
rights the citizens of India had endorsed and symbolically formalized the idea of a
homogeneous nation and its modern democratic future. This was meant to sound
like the final proclamation of the coming of the nation. Through this construction
of a homogeneous nation or the abstract notion of ‘the people’, all with equal rights,
the accomplishment of transition to popular sovereignty was seemingly com-
plete.205 But this abstraction of homogeneity would also conceal the real hierarchies
of power.
On 12 March the old Legislative Assembly in West Bengal met for the last time
before dissolving and in his speech Governor Dr. H.C. Mukherjee announced this
in a self-congratulatory tone: ‘We are almost at the end of the transitional period
through which we have passed since the commencement of the constitution and a
new era of representative democracy is about to begin’.206
But there was no sharp break in the history of the nation, as the new era also wit-
nessed the continuance of some of the old methods of governance and this initiated
an interesting new debate on the meanings of freedom and democracy in India.
Already on 1 March the central Home Minister K.N. Katju had a bill passed in the
parliament extending the life of the Preventive Detention Act by another six
months, despite loud protests from the Opposition. While he conceded that during
and after the election the political situation in the country had been peaceful and
harmonious, he argued nevertheless that ‘a short period of extension will not harm
anyone’.207 But the problem was, while in the states of Madhya Pradesh, UP,
Saurashtra, Mysore, Rajasthan or Assam no elected member of the legislatures
were in jail, in Madras as well as in West Bengal there were many. In Bengal of the
19 security prisoners who were released on parole to contest the election, six were
successful. Two of them were later released, but the other four – one MP and three
MLAs – along with the unsuccessful candidates, were all taken back to prison on 16
February.208
This continued detention of political prisoners without trial sparked off a post-
election campaign for civil rights spearheaded by a newly elected MP, the widely
respected scientist Dr Meghnad Saha. He presided over a rally at the Maidan on 24
February, where he charged the Congress government of having the same ‘vices’ of
the British and of using the same old ‘barbarous’ and ‘oppressive’ tactics. He urged
the Congress to take lessons from the election where 60 per cent of the voters had
voted against it. The meeting demanded the immediate release of all political pris-
oners, including the elected members.209 On 9 March 26 prominent citizens of West
Bengal, headed by Dr Saha issued a press statement demanding the repeal of the
Preventive Detention Act and the release of all political prisoners.210 So when the
Assembly opened, the Governor’s speech became the occasion for another round of
opposition attack on the government policy of detention without trial, raising ques-
tions about its commitment to democracy. By way of defending his policy, Roy told
the House that all countries in the world, other than the totalitarian regimes, had
laws for detention of people. ‘Totalitarian countries believe in extinction rather
than detention. My democracy is entirely different’, he said, ‘from Mr Jyoti Basu’s
democracy which is dictatorial democracy.’ And Basu’s demand for a referendum
on this issue was ‘idiotic’, Roy thought, because Congress had won a large major-
ity in the recent election. In response, Basu threw at him a bold counter challenge,
asking him to name any country which fell within ‘his conception of democracy’
and from which he ‘drew inspiration’ where people were detained without trial.211
Meanings of freedom and democracy thus continued to be a contentious discursive
terrain in post-election West Bengal.
While the debate on political prisoners went on in the Assembly, on 19 March
Meghnad Saha released his correspondence with the Chief Minister, in which he
pointed out that most of the prisoners were being held without trial on flimsy ex
parte charges like taking part in the Chittagong armoury raid, participation in ‘nor-
mal’ trade union activities or for writing critiques of police firing on women volun-
teers. Saha wrote: ‘I feel it is repugnant to all principles of democracy to take back
to prison detenus who have been chosen as representatives of the people sometimes
by very large majorities.’ Roy did not even acknowledge Saha’s letter and the gov-
ernment on the following day refuted all his charges.212 In a few days’ time the
AICC meeting was to be held in Calcutta and Nehru came to attend it. A delegation
headed by Saha met the Congress President to press their demands for the release
of the prisoners. Nehru talked to his Chief Minister and declared at the AICC ses-
sion that the cases of all the 258 detainees in West Bengal would be reviewed and
they would be released by the end of April.213 Following this announcement two
more communist prisoners were elected to the Council of States and two more to
the West Bengal Legislative Council. It was only from 10 April that the security
prisoners were gradually released in batches, but the saga went on. Even in early
May there were 72 political prisoners left behind bars and a delegation of 32 MPs
and MLAs led by Saha again had to see the Chief Minister to plead for their release,
with no sympathetic response.214
However, despite all those uncomfortable questions raised about the Congress
Party’s commitment to democracy, the election had delivered the mandate it was
looking for. The victories in the lower houses were followed by similar victories in
the upper houses of the state assemblies and the central parliament, and this was
rounded off by a resounding victory at the Calcutta Corporation election in April,
with the veteran Congress leader Nirmal Chandra Chunder taking over as the new
Mayor.215 However, to put this victory into perspective, it should be mentioned that
the Calcutta Municipal Act of 1951 had restricted voting rights to the wealthiest 10
per cent of the city’s population.216 In view of such ambiguities of the election
results, the Congress President Nehru was cautious and circumspect. ‘The results
of the elections are full of lessons for us’, he wrote in a circular letter to all Congress
members. He asked the provincial committees to focus on reorganization and mass
contact and vowed to weed out corruption and factionalism from the ranks of his
party.217
But that note of caution was lost on his provincial satraps. In his analysis of the
election results, B.C. Roy told a meeting of the Indian Chamber of Commerce at the
Grand Hotel in Calcutta on 5 February that the ‘bulk of the people were Congress-
minded’ and thought that the Congress was the only organization that could pro-
vide stable administration in the country.218 On the strength of this election victory
he sought to brush aside all opposition criticism of his handling of the political pris-
oners. And he was not alone in interpreting this limited expression of support that
gave the Congress a lease of life under the first-past-the-post system as a massive
electoral mandate for the Congress way of governance. At the AICC meeting in
Calcutta – the first after the election – a resolution on the general election was
adopted. B.G. Kher of Bombay, by way of introducing the resolution, pointed out
that millions of voters had voted for the Congress hoping that it would fulfil the pro-
gramme that it enunciated. The ‘illiterate’ voters thus used their vote ‘with proper
distinction’ by using their ‘brilliant common sense’.219 It was this feeling of vindi-
cation – a perceived popular mandate – that would encourage Congress leaders to
go ahead to universalize their vision of history and their programme for the future
of the nation in the next few decades.
At least that is what Congress President Nehru signalled in his Presidential
speech at the AICC meeting in Calcutta. Congress had now two main tasks, he said;
one was to rebuild the party as a ‘disciplined and dynamic’ organization and the
other was to show the ‘right path’ to the country. The ‘right path’ was of course the
Congress path, and so those who agreed with it were welcome. He appealed once
again to the Socialists and the KMPP, ‘who accept our basic principles to cooper-
ate with us for the national reconstruction of India.’ But he hastened to assert
firmly: ‘There can be no question of cooperation with the Communists or commu-
nalists who differ from us fundamentally’. And now the people’s sovereignty could
only be exercised through the legitimate constitutional channel of elections; the
days of daily mass democratic protests were over. Referring to the young men who
were processioning on the streets of Calcutta protesting against continued deten-
tion of political prisoners, he reminded them that a method so effective against the
alien power might not be so now. And therefore, although he detested the idea of
detaining anyone without trial, he was not willing to give up that coercive power of
preventive detention. However, he also warned the Congress that the task ahead
was the ‘economic betterment of India’. ‘If we do not do it quickly’, he cautioned,
‘someone else will. A revolution is rising in the whole world. Asia is resurgent …’
And at this critical juncture the only party that could maintain the unity and freedom
of India and could steer the nation to its desired future of development and moder-
nity was of course the Congress.220
But the Congress in West Bengal, despite the lessons of the election days,
remained hopelessly torn by internal factionalism which came out into the open
once again at the AICC meeting when a group of party members submitted a letter
of complaint to Nehru against their provincial leaders.221 It was not surprising,
therefore, that the KMPP, looking for corruption-free ethical government, rejected
Nehru’s olive branch. The West Bengal KMPP, at its convention in Calcutta, criti-
cized the ‘Congress for its failure to establish a classless democratic society in
India’. However, it also acknowledged its own failure to make its mark on the elec-
toral register, because a false propaganda had been underway that it was ‘the B team
of the Congress’. So it wanted to distinguish itself by aligning with the other leftists
and progressive parties to form democratic blocs in various legislatures.222 So too
thought the CPI223 and a united leftist opposition in the parliament and the provin-
cial legislatures now seemed to be a more realistic possibility, as the bitter lessons
of the election were still fresh in everybody’s mind.
But the developments of the transitional period also indicated that the future
political trajectory of this post-colonial nation would be more complicated and not
linear. In West Bengal, as the state began to walk haltingly under B.C. Roy’s lead-
ership along the path charted by the First Five Year Plan (1951–56) to repair the
damages of Partition, handle the food crisis, and restore economic and political sta-
bility,224 the Congress party sank deeper into the quagmire of corruption and fac-
tionalism. The Chief Minister showed little enthusiasm to arrest this downward
stream, as he continued to patronize some of his tainted colleagues. His new cabi-
net, announced on 11 June 1952, was from the very beginning shrouded in contro-
versy – much to the dislike of Nehru.225 Discordant voices became more and more
audible and were reflected in the second election of 1957, but Roy’s charisma put a
lid on the crisis.226 Once that leadership was removed with Roy’s death on his
eighty-first birthday on 1 July 1962, and P.C. Sen took over his mantle, the crisis
deepened and the voices of disenchantment became louder. It was in the election of
1967 – 20 years after independence – that Congress lost its grip on power in West
Bengal. It was finally unseated by the force of leftist unity which proved so difficult
and elusive in 1951–52.227
The growing disaffection against the Congress, representing the Centre, also
strengthened the Bengali regional identity which, unlike the situation in UP,228
remained largely inarticulate during the transitional period after independence.
While Bengali regional identity became a political force to reckon with after Lord
Curzon’s first partition of Bengal in 1905 and was rekindled during the Subhas
Bose–Gandhi controversy over Bose’s election as Congress President at Tripuri in
1939,229 it took a different turn with the Partition campaign in mid-1947. As the
Hindu Mahasabha and the Congress launched the campaign for the Hindu-domi-
nated districts of western Bengal to remain in India, the compulsion was more to
identify with a larger pan-Indian identity, rather than to emphasize the need for a
Bengali regional polity.230 And this continued during the first five years after inde-
pendence, despite the fact that substantial Bengali-speaking areas remained in the
neighbouring provinces of Bihar, Orissa and Assam. While Sarat Bose in his polit-
ical meetings raised the demand for unification of the Bengali-speaking areas,231
and he was joined by the Bengal Volunteer Group and the Forward Bloc,232 politi-
cal opinion on this issue remained divided. The provincial Congress leaders, fol-
lowing Nehru’s lead, opposed the linguistic division of provinces during the
election campaign.233 Shyama Prasad Mukherji too opposed it in the larger interest
of the country.234 In the leftist campaign the issue never even featured.
At a more popular level, a section of the media supported the demand for a lin-
guistic province and anguished over suppression of the Bengali language in
Dhanbad and Manbhum areas by the government of Bihar.235 But there were also
public meetings which condemned such campaigns as unhealthy manifestations of
narrow provincial politics.236 The noted Bengali intellectual Kshiti Mohan Sen in
his address to the Prabasi Banga Sahitya Sammelan (Expatriate Bengali Literary
Conference) held at Patna, the capital city of Bihar, in December 1951, objected to
the use of the word prabasi (expatriate) to describe the Bengalis living in other
provinces of India, for it amounted to an acknowledgment of the ‘disease of provin-
cialism’. The general president of the conference, Atul Chandra Gupta, another
noted Bengali intellectual, gave a call to construct a new Indian nation by building
bridges across community and regional boundaries.237
However, it was during the election campaign of 1951–52 that the inhabitants of
Purulia, which still remained in Bihar, held a major black flag protest when B.C.
Roy came there for campaigning. Roy had to sit with them and promised to look
into the language issue.238 It was after the election that the demand for the unifica-
tion of the Bengali-speaking areas grew louder in the public space as the leftist
parties made it a major issue in their campaign against the Congress and the
central government. This build-up which led up to the decision of the States
Reorganization Commission’s report in 1955 and the controversies surrounding
it,239 symbolized perhaps a wider sentiment of anguish against a perceived neglect
by the centre of the legitimate grievances of Bengal. A regional patriotism that had
at one stage vigorously contested the dominant discourse of Indian nationalism,240
and which was not articulated in the transitional years in the vain hope of integrat-
ing into the broader Indian nation controlled from its heartland in the north, began
to assert itself again from the mid-1950s. But that story remains outside the ambit
of the present book.
Conclusion
For the people of India who were under colonial rule for 200 years and were exposed
to its model of modernity, it was a natural tendency to think of freedom in terms of
its Other – freedom was the absence or opposite of unfreedom. And this also implied
an expectation that whatever was wrong in the latter state would be rectified in the
former. However, when the struggle for freedom was going on, it attracted various
groups of people whose existential experience of unfreedom was variegated and
their visions of freedom were hardly homogeneous when freedom actually arrived
on 15 August 1947. As anti-colonial solidarity was contingent and strategic, a
nation was born, one might say, on the basis of a consensus that did not possibly
extend beyond a common will to be free of foreign rule. It was not surprising that 30
years on many freedom fighters in rural West Bengal would feel that ‘their leaders
and their organization had betrayed them’; for, their ‘dreams of nationhood’1 were
different from those of their leaders. This sense of betrayal was not just because of
a list of frustrations generated by certain failed promises or material hardships in the
wake of the departure of the British. It was because their distinctive visions of free
India were gradually sidelined or marginalized by a new dominant model of moder-
nity and statecraft that started emerging in post-colonial India through a process of
normalization reliant on the numerical logic of universal adult franchise.
The other important aspect of this transitional period was that whenever we think
in terms of the freedom/unfreedom binary, we tend to think of agency, that is, try to
identify persons or objects or conditions that could potentially threaten or take
away our freedom. As long as the British were there, the enemies of freedom were
easy to identify and the imagining of the Indian nation was to a large extent
focussed on this anti-colonial struggle.2 So when freedom arrived and it unceas-
ingly appeared to be vulnerable, people started inventing new enemies of freedom.
This led to conflicts at various levels – on the labour front, in rural society and at a
discursive plane among the intelligentsia and the middle classes. As these conflicts
appeared to be new threats to our freshly earned freedom, the government of the day
chose to rule with the tested tools of governance borrowed from their colonial
masters, that is, with coercive power. This continuity in the modes of governance
revealed the contradictions of Indian political modernity, where on the one hand
constitutional democracy was established, but on the other popular protest or
everyday democracy was frowned upon.
Conclusion 185
As we look at this contested terrain, what we find is a pervading sense of incom-
pleteness. This is not the freedom we wanted, as many people wondered, or more
precisely, this is not the freedom we imagined! So the question is: what were these
conflicting imaginings of freedom at the dawn of the history of the independent
Indian nation-state? It is important to note that while our nationalist movement is
often described as a ‘freedom struggle’, the 15th of August is celebrated, in official
discourse and subsequently in popular parlance, as ‘independence day’. Indeed, the
Bengali language has no synonym for freedom; the word that is most often used is
swadhinata, meaning independence. The closest word for freedom is perhaps
mukti, which is rarely used to identify this particular day. Thus a narrower political
version of freedom, that is, the end of political dependence on a foreign power or
achievement of political sovereignty for the Indian nation-state is privileged in
such official and state-sponsored popular celebrations of the event. But while the
state and the Congress leadership who held the state power – though not the rank
and file members of this party – remained preoccupied with this narrower expres-
sion, the masses preferred the extended meanings of freedom. The various expres-
sions of freedom that we have come across during the first five years of free India
can be lumped together into the same discursive category which Ross Poole has
called the ‘nationalist concept of freedom’.3 But the problem of translation
remains.4 While Sarat Bose’s election manifesto would fit in readily into this cate-
gory, the demand for a ‘krishak-praja-mazdoor raj’ would not exactly translate
into rights of citizenship.
Gandhi sometimes mentioned vaguely that the ‘Congress stands for democratic
kisan-mazdoor-praja raj’, but never cared to define this concept. And his moralis-
tic definition of rights5 would hardly fit into the modern definition of citizenship.
His followers, who were vocal in the West Bengal Assembly as Congress back-
benchers, were worried by the fact that the Congress was gradually gravitating
towards big business and away from the peasants and workers. Their concern was
for the rights of small men; their desire was to see a moral and ethical transforma-
tion of the polity through the Gandhian ideal of selfless constructive service. But
this Gandhian moral vision that repudiated bourgeois civil society found no space
within the new emerging consensus that the Congress was trying to build in post-
colonial India. This led the Gandhians to defect from the Congress, which moved
closer to what is known as the Nehruvian vision of scientific modernity. Though
Nehru himself was personally committed to the ‘Indian values of collective good’,6
such ethical or moral concerns were not always shared by his colleagues who ran
the government in the provinces. The dissident voices, which vaguely sought a
‘third’ or indigenous path of development located somewhere between Western
capitalism and Soviet communism, gradually grew fainter due to the logic of the
numbers of a modern electoral democracy. They gave way to the Nehruvian moder-
nity of which the large dams and heavy engineering industries would be the new
icons, the state would be the harbinger of social change, and secularism (that denied
legitimacy to religious or caste politics) and democracy (based on individual citi-
zenship) would be the producers of a homogeneous nation and its political consen-
sus. This modernity was also seriously contested by the Hindu right-wing groups.
186 Conclusion
This modernity, they thought, was not home-grown and therefore without any roots
in Indian traditions and had no claim to its ancient wisdom. But in the end they
failed to grapple with the pluralist nature of Indian nationhood and ended up with
a narrow exclusivist slogan of Hindu rashtra, which had very few takers in
West Bengal.
In the communist-led movements in the West Bengal countryside, we still find a
resonance of the earlier modes of peasant resistance against the local agents of
oppression and the influence of such ‘non-modern’ factors as tribal solidarity. This
does not mean however that the Bengali peasant was unaware of the modern state
and its structures of power. The coming of the railways and print culture were
breaking down the insularity of the village.7 Towards the end of his novel
Ganadevata, Tarasankar Banerjee had noted this phenomenon in the rural society
of Bengal with a sense of despair: ‘The village society, with all its ancient customs,
had, as a matter of fact, already collapsed. ... The bonds that held the village
together had loosened.’8 Therefore, their embracing of the Communist Party might
not have been just an extension of a tradition of resistance from an earlier era.
However, there were also signs of ambiguity here. In Bankura, the way the Santhal
peasants related to the Communist Party – calling it ‘Coma Congress’ – perhaps
indicated a certain amount of fuzziness in their understanding of organized politi-
cal structures and their distinctive ideological strands. The call for ‘tebhaga’ was,
however, potent enough to bring them into confrontation with the police – now of
the independent Indian state. But as veteran communist leaders like Abani Lahiri
and Manikuntala Sen have admitted in their memoirs while referring to the situa-
tion in 1948–49, although there was a yearning for social justice and a mentality of
protest against the local agents of oppression, there was not yet a consciousness to
stage what the communist leaders would like to call a ‘People’s Democratic
Revolution’. In other words, while the communists tried to tap into the existing
reservoir of rural discontent, peasant support for an insurgency was contingent and
transient. The elements of ambivalence and ambiguities in the process of political
modernization in India were too obvious to be dismissed.
The Indian nation in 1947–52 thus remained, to borrow an expression from Ania
Loomba, ‘a ground of dispute and debate’.9 The available historical evidence
makes it hard to talk about a consensus. It witnessed a contest between alternative
visions of ‘freedom’ – some defined in very narrow terms, others vaguely defined
or not defined at all. However, through these debates and disputes a dominant
model was about to be universalized. Although retrospectively we may read ambi-
guities in the results of the election of 1952, it nevertheless gave a massive popular
mandate to the Congress to surge ahead with its own vision of political modernity
for the Indian nation. Notwithstanding the fact that more than half of the citizens
had voted against the Congress, it won absolute majorities at the centre as well as in
most of the provinces. The electoral democracy under the first-past-the-post
system worked with a different numerical logic than the Gandhian ideal of moral
politics. The consensus, which the recent histories of post-colonial India have so
eloquently spoken about, only began to emerge after this Congress victory in the
first election of 1952.
Conclusion 187
After the election Nehru was undoubtedly the ‘most powerful man in Asia’, as
the British conservative newspaper Daily Express noted in February; but the ques-
tion was, what would he do with this power?10 Notes of caution came from the
friends of the Congress. Nalini Ranjan Sarkar, who had now withdrawn from active
politics, wrote that: ‘Although Congress Party has returned to power, it no longer
enjoys that position of dominance which it used to enjoy when it was installed in
office as the successor to the British Administration in the country.’ This corrosion
of support, he conceded, ‘was based not so much on what the Congress actually did
as on what actually it did not.’11 So the Nehruvian Congress, now armed with this
mandate, had to do more and it moved quickly to address the economic ills facing
the nation, particularly addressing the grievances of the middle classes, who hap-
pened to be the main support base of the leftist opposition. Commitment to modern
liberal democracy became the foundational principle of this modernity. But this
modern aspect of Indian politics continued to use the non-modern facets of Indian
social realities, like religion or caste, in most innovative ways. Indeed, it is heuris-
tically problematic to try to separate the two. The charismatic leadership of Nehru
at the centre and Roy in the province – which many believed was behind this recent
electoral victory of the Congress12 – led the nation to the goal of modernity,
encoded in Nehruvian shibboleths of planning, industrialization and socialism.13
This left little space for the opposition to manoeuvre. The independent voices
unattached to any organized political party gradually faded out in the political
wilderness. The minority voices like those of the Muslims and the Dalits continued
to hope to be represented through the Congress which appeared to be the best pro-
tector of their interests. The more organized discordant voices which either looked
for a non-modern way of development cherishing the models of ancient India, or
desired ethical good government based on the Gandhian ideal of selfless public
service, or preferred a revolutionary way of achieving a different model of democ-
racy and social justice, all fell behind and were relegated to the margins – at least for
the next two decades. And during that period the history of one national party was
in the process of becoming the history of the nation.
However, the alternative voices were never completely lost, and as we look at
today’s India it becomes evident that they ultimately came to constitute her hybrid
modernity. And none of them disputed the identity of the putative Indian nation –
they only visualized its future in divergent ways. As for West Bengal, the political
developments of the transitional period foreshadowed some of the important
aspects of the subsequent history of the province – the gradual decline of the
Congress, the eventual rise of a leftist coalition and the relative failure of right-wing
Hindu politics. Even though a new political modernity grew stronger since the
1950s, the moral and ethical politics of the Gandhians – that yearning for an indige-
nous model – was never completely abandoned, and up until these days is still
frequently mentioned as an ‘ideal’ in countless social and political speeches.
Notes
Introduction
1 P.S. Gupta, Power, Politics and the People: Studies in British Imperialism and Indian
Nationalism, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001, p. 43.
2 For example, B. Chandra, M. Mukherjee and A. Mukherjee, India after Independence
1947–2000, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999; S. Bose and A. Jalal, Modern South
Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004;
and more recently, R. Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest
Democracy, London: Macmillan, 2007.
3 S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru, 3 vols, London: Jonathan Cape, 1973–84; S. Wolpert,
Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; J.M.
Brown, Nehru: A Political Life, New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2003;
B. Zachariah, Nehru, London, New York: Routledge, 2004.
4 Guha, India after Gandhi, pp. xxii–xxiii.
5 J. Sprinhall, Decolonization since 1945, London: Palgrave, 2001, p. 2; for a similar def-
inition also see J.D. Le Sueur, ‘An Introduction: Reading Decolonization’, in J.D. Le
Sueur (ed.) The Decolonization Reader, New York and London: Routledge, 2003, p. 2.
6 J. Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation: the retreat from empire in the post-war world,
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.
7 A.H. Green, ‘Tunisia’s Decolonization Experience: A Contextual Comparative
History’, The Maghreb Review, vol. 19, nos 1–2, 1994, p. 2.
8 D.A. Low, Eclipse of Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 14 and
passim.
9 N. Mansergh (ed.) The Transfer of Power 1942–47, 12 vols, London: Her Majesty’s
Stationary Office [hereafter HMSO], 1970–83.
10 For this argument, see H.V. Brasted and C. Bridge, ‘“15 August 1947”: Labour’s part-
ing gift to India’, in J. Masselos (ed.) India: Creating a Modern Nation, New Delhi:
Sterling Publishers, 1990, pp. 1–35; also their ‘The Transfer of Power in South Asia:
An Historiographical Review’, South Asia, New Series, vol. 17, no. 1, 1994,
pp. 93–114; J. Darwin, The End of the British Empire: the historical debate, Oxford,
UK, Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1991; D.G. Boyce, Decolonisation and the
British Empire, 1775–1997, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999; M.E. Chamberlain,
Decolonization: the fall of the European empires, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999;
R. Douglas, Liquidation of Empire: the decline of the British Empire, Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2002.
11 See, for example, J.M. Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy,
second edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 349.
12 N.W. Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African
Literature, London: James Curry, 1986.
13 J.N. Pieterse and B. Parekh (eds) The Decolonization of Imagination: culture,
knowledge and power, London: Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1995.
Notes 189
14 See Le Sueur (ed.) The Decolonization Reader; P. Duara (ed.) Decolonization:
Perspectives from Now and Then, London: Routledge, 2004; D. Rothermund (ed.) The
Routledge Companion to Decolonization, London: Routledge, 2006.
15 See, for example, U. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the partition of
India, Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1998; R. Menon and K. Bhasin, Borders and
Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1998; S. Kaul (ed.) The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India,
New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001; G. Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence,
Nationalism and History in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
16 G. Pandey, ‘The Prose of Otherness’, in D. Arnold and D. Hardiman (eds) Subaltern
Studies VIII: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994,
p. 194.
17 For more details on this, see J. Chatterji, ‘The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe
Line and Bengal’s Border Landscape, 1947–52’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 33, no. 1,
1999, pp. 185–242; W. van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and
Nation in South Asia, London: Anthem Press, 2005, chapter 3; B. Chakrabarty, The
Partition of Bengal and Assam, 1932–47, London, New York: Routledge, 2004,
chapter 5.
18 See for more details, P.K. Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the Left
Political Syndrome in West Bengal, Calcutta: Naya Udyog, 1999; N. Chatterjee, ‘The
East Bengal Refugees: A Lesson in Survival’, in S. Chaudhuri (ed.) Calcutta: The
Living City, vol. II, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 70–77; Chatterji,
‘Right or Charity?’, in Kaul, The Partitions of Memory, pp. 74–110; also her The Spoils
of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007; D. Chakrabarty, ‘Remembered Villages: Representations of Hindu–Bengali
Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition’ South Asia, vol. XVIII, Special Issue,
1995, pp. 109–29; R. Samaddar (ed.) Reflections on the Partition in the East, New
Delhi and Calcutta: Vikas Publishing House, 1997; J. Bagchi and S. Dasgupta (eds) The
Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India, Kolkata: Stree, 2003;
T. Roy, A Suppressed Chapter in History: The Exodus of Hindus from East Pakistan
and Bangladesh, 1947–2006, New Delhi: Bookwell, 2006.
19 See, for example, D. Sengupta (ed.) Map Making: Partition stories from 2 Bengals,
New Delhi: Srishti, 2003.
20 See J. Masselos, ‘“The magic touch of being free”: the rituals of independence on 15
August’, in J. Masselos (ed.) India: Creating a Modern Nation, pp. 37–53.; T.Y. Tan
and G. Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, London and New York:
Routledge, 2000, pp. 38–43.
21 K. Baynes, ‘A Critical Theory Perspective on Civil society and the State’, in N. L.
Rosenblum and R. C. Post (eds) Civil Society and Government, Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 125–26.
22 See B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, second edition, London: Verso, 2006, p. 26; and P. Chatterjee, The
Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, New
Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, pp. 7, 12, 29, 34, 36.
23 D. Chakrabarty, R. Majumdar and A. Sartori (eds) From the Colonial to the
Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2007.
24 G. Kudaisya, Region, Nation, “Heartland”: Uttar Pradesh in India’s Body Politic,
New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage Publications, 2006.
25 J. Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, p. 211.
26 See particularly, Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men; Chatterji, ‘Right or Charity?’ in
Kaul, The Partitions of Memory; and van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland.
27 For a detailed analysis of the economic consequences of Partition, see C.N. Vakil,
Economic Consequences of Divided India: A study of the economy of India and
Pakistan, Bombay: Vora, 1950.
190 Notes
28 R. Samaddar thus writes: ‘Writing on partition, therefore, means understanding the
birth of a nation – a birth that was not simply a synonym for independence, but
also indicative of a more fundamental process of decolonization.’ R. Samaddar, A
Biography of the Indian Nation 1947–1997, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001, p. 20.
In his other book on Partition, Ranabir Samaddar has argued that: ‘Partition shows, as
against events-in-history, we also witness history-in-event, in other words, as against a
history that had never anticipated Partition, we now have a history of the region created
by Partition and a history that lives under it.’ R. Samaddar, ‘The History that Partition
Creates’, in R. Samaddar (ed.) Reflections on Partition in the East, p. 7.
29 For example, G. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in
India, New York, Columbia University Press, 1989; P. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its
Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1993; D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
30 S. Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’, in P. Chatterjee and G. Pandey (eds)
Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1993, pp. 1–39; also his ‘In Search of Civil society’, in S. Kaviraj
and S. Khilnani (eds) Civil Society, History and Possibilities, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2002; P. Chatterjee (ed.) State and Politics in India, Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1997; S. Khilnani, The Idea of India, London: Hamish Hamilton,
1997; F. Frankel, Z. Hasan, R. Bhargava and B. Arora (eds) Transforming India: Social
and Political Dynamics of Democracy, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2000;
Samaddar, A Biography of the Indian Nation.
31 G. Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999; B. Chakrabarty, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and
Administrative Reconstruction in India: A Mere Imitation of the Past or a Creative
Initiative?’, South Asia, vol. XXIX, no. 1, 2006, pp. 83–99; D. Chakrabarty, ‘“In the
Name of Politics”: Sovereignty, Democracy, and the Multitude in India’, in
Chakrabarty et al., From the Colonial to the Postcolonial.
32 Duara, ‘Introduction: The decolonization of Asia and Africa in the twentieth century’,
in Duara, Decolonization, p. 1.
33 D. Chakrabarty, ‘Introduction’, in Chakrabarty et al., From the Colonial to the
Postcolonial, p. 3.
34 Samaddar, A Biography of the Indian Nation, p. 41.
35 Chandra et al., India after Independence, p. 1.
36 Gupta, Power, Politics and the People, p. 41.
37 Zachariah, Nehru, pp. 140–41.
38 See, for example, Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest.
39 M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, A.J. Parel (ed.) Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 28.
40 See H.K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction: narrating the nation’, in H.K. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and
Narration, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 1–7; Gyan Prakash has raised
such questions for understanding Nehruvian modernity. See Prakash, Another Reason,
pp. 236–37.
41 See, for example, Le Sueur, ‘An Introduction’, in Le Sueur (ed.) The Decolonization
Reader, pp. 1–6; and Chakrabarty, ‘Introduction’, in Chakrabarty et al., From the
Colonial to the Postcolonial, pp. 3–4, 7.
42 Gupta, Power, Politics and the People, p. 41.
43 A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
44 Khilnani, The Idea of India; Guha, India after Gandhi.
45 See H.K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern
Nation’, in H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 139–70.
46 In British India, voting rights were dependent on ownership of property and higher
educational qualifications. The Government of India Act of 1935 had enfranchised at
best about 14 per cent of the adult population of India.
Notes 191
1 Arrival of freedom: celebrations, anxieties and realities
1 In his book The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen remembers that moment of arrival
in the following way:
It was a thrilling moment. On 14 August 1947, on the eve of India’s independence, we
glued ourselves to the radio in our little school a hundred miles from Calcutta . … In cel-
ebration of independence and in welcoming a democratic India, Jawaharlal Nehru’s
voice roared loud and clear over the radio, telling us about India’s ‘tryst with destiny’.
The ‘task ahead’ included ‘the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and
inequality of opportunity’. We heard with rapt attention and we felt powerfully
inspired. A. Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and
Identity, London: Penguin Books, 2005, p. 193.

2 Heads of provincial governments were also called Prime Minister until the promulga-
tion of the new constitution on 26 January 1950. After that they were called Chief
Minister.
3 Anandabazar Patrika, 17 August 1947.
4 The Statesman, 18 August 1947.
5 Anandabazar Patrika, 17 August 1947. It was not surprising that Calcutta, the home-
town of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, would respond so exuberantly with that slogan –
Jai Hind – his Indian National Army’s most important contribution to the nationalist
vocabulary.
6 J. Masselos, ‘“The magic touch of being free”: the rituals of independence on 15
August’, in J. Masselos (ed.) India: Creating a Modern Nation, New, Delhi: Sterling
Publishers, 1990, p. 44.
7 Anandabazar Patrika, 17 August 1947; The Statesman, 18 August, 1947.
8 The Statesman, 18 August 1947. Harijan means ‘children of god’; a word coined by
Mahatma Gandhi to describe people of the so-called lowest castes. The term Dalit is
now used instead.
9 For more on this see T.Y. Tan and G. Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South
Asia, London and New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 38–43.
10 The Statesman, 15 August 1947; Anandabazar Patrika, 16 August 1947.
12 B. Chatterji, Superintendent of Police, Howrah, to Assistant Inspector General Bengal,
17.8.47, Government of Bengal [hereafter GB], Home (Poll), Confidential File No.
212/47, West Bengal State Archives [hereafter WBSA].
13 A.S. Roy, Jukta Banger Smriti [Memories of united Bengal], Calcutta: Mitra & Ghosh
Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1990, p. 118.
15 The Statesman, 1 September 1947.
18 For a discussion on the Boundary Commission Award, see J. Chatterji, The Spoils of
Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007, chapter 1. In this riot 291 people were killed and 292 were injured. See
S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy and other Chief Ministers, Calcutta, Benson’s,
1974, pp. 59–60.
20 Anandabazar Patrika, 7 September 1947.
21 These five leaders were N.C. Chatterjee, the President of the Bengal Provincial Hindu
Mahasabha; Debendra Nath Mukherjee, Secretary, Hindu Mahasabha; H.S.
Suhrawardy, ex-Premier of Bengal; R.K. Jaidka, a Punjabi businessman; and Sardar
Niranjan Singh Talib, the Editor of Desh Darpan, a Sikh daily. See The Statesman,
5 September 1947.
22 Anandabazar Patrika, 8 September 1947; The Statesman, 7 September, 1947.
192 Notes
23 Report on the ‘New Bengal Socialist Party’ in Government of West Bengal, Police
Department File No. TJ – 501/47; I am indebted to Rajsekhar Basu for this reference.
24 ‘General and Communism’ (From 15.8.47 to 31.12.47), GB, Intelligence Branch
Records [hereafter IB Records], S.No. 207/28, F.No. 32/28 (1947), WBSA.
25 L.A. Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Sarat and Subhas Chandra
Bose, New Delhi: Viking, 1989, pp. 587–88.
26 ‘Samayik Prasanga’ [Current issues], Masik Basumati, 26th year, vol. 1, no. 4, Sraban
1354 BS, p. 474.
27 A.S. Roy, Jukta Banger Smriti, pp. 112–13, 118, 123.
28 G. Haldar, ‘Bhumika’ [Foreword], in A. Pal, Bharater Muktisangram [India’s struggle
for freedom], Calcutta, Pustakalaya, not dated [1947?], pp. iii–iv.

31 T. Ray, ‘Prajatantra’ [Republic], Masik Basumati, 28th year, vol. 2, no. 4, Magh 1356
BS, p. 453.
32 H.K. Chattopadhyay, ‘Desher katha’ [News of the Country ], Masik Basumati, 26th
year, vol. 1, no. 4, Sraban 1354 BS, p. 448.
37 B.K. Bhadra, Birupaksher Bisham Bipad [Birupaksha’s serious crisis], Calcutta: The
Bihar Sahitya Bhavan Ltd., 1357 BS, second print 1361 BS, pp. 6–7, 10, 12, 14–15,
130–35.
38 B.K. Bhadra, Birupaksher Nidarun Abhignata [Birupaksha’s unbearable experience],
Calcutta: The Bihar Sahitya Bhavan Ltd., 1359 BS, pp. 72–73.
39 For example, a letter to the editor in The Statesman of 10 December 1947 observed: ‘A
feeling has gained ground that with independence all restraining influences have gone.’
Another letter on 24 January 1948 observed that:
In discipline, devotion to duty, respect for law, security of life and property, regards for
justice and impartiality, moral restraint, non-interference in religious matters, in fact in
everything which constitutes a good life for an average citizen unconnected with poli-
tics, conditions were much better than they are now – when we have won freedom.
40 R. Desmukhya, ‘Swadhinata o Bastusankat’ [Independence and the problem of dis-
placement], Sishu Sathi, vol. 27, Bhadra 1355 BS, p. 242.
41 ‘Bharater jatiya pataka’ [India’s national flag], Masik Basumati, 26th year, vol. 1, no.
4, Sraban 1354 BS; M. Chattopadhyay, ‘Swadhinatar Udbodhan-smriti’ [Memories of
the initiation of independence], Sishu Sathi, vol. 27, Bhadra 1355 BS, p. 253.
42 Sonar Bharat [Golden India], Kolkata: Deb Sahitya Kutir [author unknown – not
dated].
44 For the evolution of the Congress flag, see A. Virmani, ‘National Symbols under
Colonial Domination: The Nationalization of the Indian Flag, March–August 1923’,
Past and Present, no. 164 (Aug., 1999), pp. 171, 178, 180. An oleograph from Bengal
in 1947 depicts Bharat Mata in all her material glory, sitting on the map of ‘Swadhin
Bharat’ or independent India, with a national flag in her hand. Interestingly, the picture
shows the evolution of the flag – from the Congress flag designed in 1931 to the
national flag of 1947. The oleograph appeared on the cover page of History Today,
vol. 47, no. 9, September 1997.
45 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 23 March 1952.
46 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 22 November 1951.
47 R.H. Davis, ‘Introduction’, in R.H. Davis (ed.) Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of
Modern India, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007, p. 11.
48 See the following correspondence: B.S. Tiagi to Secretary, All-India Congress
Notes 193
Committee [hereafter AICC], 24 July 1948; P. Chakravarti, Secy AICC to B.S. Tiagi, 28
July 1948; Raghunath Barua to General Secretary AICC, 15 August 1948; AICC Papers,
File No. G-20/ 1946–48, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library [hereafter NMML].
49 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 25 December 1949. Dharma chakra is the wheel of righteous
duty. The Sudarshan chakra is a divine weapon that consists of a spinning disc with a
sharp serrated edge, borne by the Hindu gods Vishnu and Krishna.
50 ‘Exct from W.B.P.A.[West Bengal Police Abstract] dated 22.11.47’, GB, IB Records,
S.No. nil/42, F.No. 505/42 (Malda), WBSA.
51 B.C. Roy to Jawaharlal Nehru, 14 June 1948, in S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy,
pp. 101–2. Perhaps Roy was justified in his claim to represent public opinion, as a let-
ter to the editor in The Nation on 16 September 1948 testifies to that. See A. Bera (ed.)
Interpreting A Nation: Selections from Sarat Chandra Bose’s The Nation, Kolkata:
Netaji Institute of Asian Studies, 2001, p. 353.
52 Nehru to Roy, 15 June 1948, in S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy, pp. 102–3.
53 J. Masselos, ‘India’s Republic Day: The Other 26 January’, South Asia, vol. XIX,
Special Issue (1996), pp. 183–203, especially, p. 184.
55 The Statesman, 18 January 1950.
56 N.C. Chanda, ‘Dhyaner Bharat’ [The spiritual India], Sishu Sathi, vol. 27, Bhadra 1355
BS, p. 231.
58 The Statesman, 26, 28 January 1951.
59 Chanda, ‘Dhyaner Bharat’, p. 231.
60 ‘Jagater itihaaser darbaare Bharat’ [India in world history], cartoon, Sishu Sathi, vol.
27, Bhadra 1355 BS, p. 292.
61 T. Guha-Thakurta, The making of a new ‘Indian’ art: Artists, aesthetics and national-
ism in Bengal, c.1850-1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 255.
62 For discussion on the modernity of this iconography, see S. Ramaswamy, ‘The
Goddess and the Nation: Subterfuges of Antiquity, the Cunning of Modernity’, in G.
Flood (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2003.
63 Sonar Bharat, Kolkata: Deb Sahitya Kutir [author unknown – not dated].
64 See S. Ramaswamy, ‘Visualising India’s geo-body: Globes, maps, bodyscapes’, in
S. Ramaswamy (ed.) Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern
India, New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage Publications, 2003, pp. 166–72.
65 P. Mukhopadhyay, Hey more durbhaga desh [O my unfortunate country], 2nd part,
Calcutta: Jyoti Prakashalay, 1947, p. 228.
66 Quotation from Lila Roy’s English translation of T. Banerjee, Ganadevata: The
Temple Pavilion, Bombay: Kutub-Popular, 1969, p. 247.
67 See S. Mukhopadhyay, Gadya Samgraha [Prose collection], Calcutta: Dey’s
Publishing, 1994.
68 ‘Extract from Daily Report on the political situation in West Bengal dated the 30th July
1948 (No.86)’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 200/26, F.No. 166/26, WBSA.
69 ‘Samayik prasanga’ [Current issues], Masik Basumati, 27th year, vol. 1, No. 4, Sraban
1355 BS, p. 531. This note of frustration was repeated again in the next month’s column
as well, see ‘Samayik prasanga’ [Current issues], Masik Basumati, 27th year, vol. 1, no.
5, Bhadra 1355 BS, p. 680.
70 ‘Samayik prasanga’ [Current issues], Masik Basumati, 28th year, vol. 2, no. 2,
Agrahayan 1356 BS, p. 293.
71 Quoted in ‘Desher Katha’ [News of the Country ], Masik Basumati, 27th year, vol. 1,
no. 5, Bhadra 1355 BS, pp. 651–53.
72 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 28 January 1950.
73 S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy, p. 105.
74 Quoted in Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj, p. 603; also see The Nation, 22 January
1950, in Bera, Interpreting A Nation, pp. 327–29.
194 Notes
75 The Nation, 27 January 1950, in Bera, Interpreting A Nation, pp. 131–32.
77 Colonial food and procurement policies in relation to the famine of 1943 have been
recently revisited by Bikramjit De in ‘Imperial Governance and the Challenges of War:
Management of Food Supplies in Bengal, 1943–44’, Studies in History, vol. 22, no. 1,
n.s., 2006, pp. 1–43.
78 The Statesman, 31 December 1947.
79 For a discussion on the debates on planning, see B. Zachariah, Developing India: An
Intellectual and Social History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.
80 The Statesman, 26 April 1948.
81 Being aware of the First Five Year Plan’s limitations, Nehru tried to pre-empt criticism:
‘If some people or groups or parties think that the plan does not go far, I think they are
indulging in wishful thinking.’ Amrita Bazar Patrika, 16 October 1951.
82 Anandabazar Patrika, 28 September 1947; Deputy High Commissioner [hereafter Dy
HC] to High Commissioner [hereafter HC] for UK in India, Calcutta, 17 February
1948, India Office Records, British Library [hereafter IOR]: L/P&J/5/316.
83 The Statesman, 13, 19 September 1947.
84 Acting Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 3 August 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/317.
85 Anandabazar Patrika, 11 July 1948.
86 Acting Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 20 April 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.
87 The Statesman, 18, 20, 29 April 1948; Acting Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta,
6 April 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.
88 The Statesman, 5, 6, 10 August 1948.
90 The Statesman, 13 July, 8, 11 October 1950.
91 Acting Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 15 June 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.
92 West Bengal Legislative Assembly Proceedings [hereafter WBLAP], vol. V, no. 2, 22
March 1949, p. 115.
93 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 7 October 1949; Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 21
October 1949, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
94 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 4 August 1949.
95 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 8 December 1949.
96 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 24 July 1949.
97 WBLAP, vol. III, no. 1, 19 February 1951, pp. 177–78.
98 It has been argued that agricultural production in West Bengal stagnated in the 1950s
and its growth rate lagged behind the rate of a population growth because of lack of
institutional changes that could ensure easy access for poor peasants to water, fertiliz-
ers and credit, but above all, due to the inequalities of the distribution of holdings. The
situation only improved in the 1970s after the leftist government initiated land reforms.
See A. Bagchi, ‘Studies on the Economy of West Bengal since Independence’,
Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XXXIII, nos 47–48, November 21–27/
28–December 4, 1998, pp. 2974–75.
100 The Statesman, 16 March 1948.
101 The Statesman, 18 May 1948.
103 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 1 October 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/317; Dy HC to
HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 25 March 1949, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
104 See for details, P. Reeves, Landlords and governments in Uttar Pradesh: a study of
their relations until zamindari abolition, Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1991.
105 WBLAP, vol. II, 26 September 1950, p. 19, 27 September 1950, p. 38, 28 September
1950, p. 83; vol. III, No. 1, 12 February 1951, p. 28.
108 ‘Confidential Note on the Food Situation in West Bengal during 1950’, S.P. Mukherji
Notes 195
Papers, II-IV Instalment, File No. 160, NMML; The Statesman, 2, 8, 9, 20, 26 August
1950; also see ‘Copy of report O.C., Bishnupur PS, dated 14.8.50, GB, IB Records,
S.No. 289/26, F.No. 35/26 (24 Parganas), Part II, WBSA.
109 The Statesman, 24 October 1950.
110 Bhadra, Birupaksher Bisham Bipad, pp. 11, 13, 21, 37, 47, 65, 81–82, 91, 97–98, 119,
127, 131, 149–53. A short story in Masik Basumati called ‘Muktir swad’ [the taste of
freedom], published in 1947, describes the frustration of the hero who had to take two
days’ leave from office to stand in queues – one day for cloth, another for oil.
P. Goswami, ‘Muktir swad’, Masik Basumati, 26th year, vol. 1, no. 1, Baisakh 1354 BS,
pp. 26–27.
111 See the advertisement in Anandabazar Patrika, 13 December 1947.
112 The Statesman 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 April 1951.

113 The Statesman 24, 25, 26, 27, 29 April 1951.
114 Copy of an IB Officer’s Report dated 22.5.51, GB, IB Records, S.No. 65/30, F.No.
103/30, WBSA.
116 See various reports on Hindu Mahasabha meetings in GB, IB Records, S.No. 65/30,
F.No. 103/30, WBSA.
117 The Statesman, 25, 26 April 1951.
119 In April 1951 the average price of rice rose to Rs 27.6 per maund compared with Rs
18.12 during the corresponding period last year and the government controlled price of
Rs 16.12. The Statesman, 3 May 1951.
120 G. Tyson, ‘Economic Consequences of Partition’, The Statesman, 15 August 1948.
Also for another contemporary analysis of economic implications of Partition, see
‘Samayik Prasanga’ [Current issues], Masik Basumati, 26th year, vol. 1., no. 2, Jaishtha
1354 BS, p. 239.
121 WBLAP, vol. II, no. 1, 17 February 1948, pp. 18–19.
123 WBLAP, vol. III, no. 1, 19 February 1951, pp. 185.
125 See A. Bagchi, ‘Studies on the Economy of West Bengal’, p. 2975.
126 WBLAP, vol. III, no. 1, 19 February 1951, p. 185.
127 The Statesman, 21 February 1948.
128 The Statesman, 31 July 1948; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 2 July 1949.
129 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 8 July 1949, IOR: L/P&J/5/320; for more on
the problems of the jute industry, see The Statesman, 8 March 1948, 19 February 1949.
131 Fortnightly Report [hereafter FR] no. 4 for the period ending 1 December 1949, IOR:
L/P&J/5/320.
132 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 2 July, 16, 25 December 1949.
134 The Statesman, 20 July, 23 August, 8 November 1950.
135 WBLAP, vol. III, no. 1, 19 February 1951, pp. 176, 179.
136 Anandabazar Patrika, 5 September 1948.
137 F.J. Burrows to Mountbatten, 11 July 1947, IOR: L/P&J/5/154.
143 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 10 December 1947, p. 118.
144 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 10 December 1947, p. 108.
145 The Statesman, 8 October 1947; Anandabazar Patrika, 9 October 1947.
196 Notes
148 Anandabazar Patrika, 21 July, 27 August 1948.
149 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 10 December 1947, pp. 106–8.
150 H.K. Chattopadhyay, ‘Desher Katha’ [News of the Country ], Masik Basumati, 26th
year, vol. 1, no. 5, Bhadra 1354 BS, p. 598.
151 WBLAP, vol. III, no. 2, 21 September 1948, pp. 48–49, 53–54, 56.
153 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 August 1949, 21 January 1950.
154 The Statesman, 19 July 1950.
156 WBLAP, vol. V, no. 2, 24 March 1949, p. 208.
157 WBLAP, vol. II, 28 September 1950, p. 85. A report in The Statesman on 1 September
1950, however, stated that since 1 January 1949, 8,724 cases were sent up for trial
under the Essential Supplies Act; of these there were 7,855 convictions, resulting in
punishment varying from a year’s rigorous imprisonment to one day’s detention in
court.
158 Bhadra, Birupaksher Bisham Bipad, p. 122.
159 Bhadra, Birupaksher Nidarun Abhignata, pp. 18, 55.
160 Pro.Na.Bi, ‘Timingil’, Sanibarer Chithi, vol. 23, no. 12, Ashwin 1358 BS, p. 680.
161 Daybhagi, ‘Bangla o Bangali’ [Bengal and the Bengalis], Sanibarer Chithi, vol. 23,
no. 3, Poush 1357 BS, p. 250.
163 P. Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–44, New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 127–28; Srimanjari, ‘Denial,
Dissent and Hunger: Wartime Bengal, 1942–44’, in B. Pati (ed.) Turbulent Times:
India 1940–44, Mumbai: People’s Publishing House, 1998, pp. 148 and passim.
164 De, ‘Imperial Governance’, pp. 3–6, 14, 31, 36.
166 See for details, Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, pp. 229–38.
167 Bhadra, Birupaksher Nidarun Abhignata, p. 18.
168 A. Abraham (ed.) The Penguin Book of Indian Cartoons, New Delhi: Penguin Books,
1988 [no page number].
169 Acting Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 18 May 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.
174 It seems G.D. Birla was a close personal friend of B.C.Roy. See Chakrabarty, With
Dr.B.C. Roy, p. 176.
175 WBLAP, vol. III, no. 1, 12 February 1951, p. 35; 28 February 1951, pp. 389–90. B.C.
Roy ultimately, under public pressure, referred the Birla House case to the Sales Tax
Tribunal, which gave its report in November 1951 completely exonerating the Birlas of
any wrongdoing. See Amrita Bazar Patrika, 2 November 1951.
177 For civil society we take Ernest Gellner’s definition:
Civil Society is that set of diverse non-governmental institutions which is strong
enough to counterbalance the state and, while not preventing the state from fulfilling its
role of keeper of the peace and arbitrator between major interests, can nevertheless pre-
vent it from dominating and atomizing the rest of society.
E. Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals, New York: Penguin
Books, 1994, p. 5. Also see S. Kaviraj, ‘In Search of Civil society’, in S. Kaviraj and
S. Khilnani (eds) Civil Society, History and Possibilities, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
178 For an excellent discussion on corruption in Indian society, see C. Mitra, The Corrupt
Notes 197
Society: The Criminalization of India from Independence to the 1990s, New Delhi:
Viking, 1998; quotations from pp. 8–9, 12.
179 I would agree with this observation made by Joya Chatterji in her The Spoils of
Partition, p. 237.
180 See, for example, I. Klein, ‘Imperialism, ecology and disease: Cholera in India,
1850–1950’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 31, no. 4, 1994,
pp. 491–518; A. Samanta, Malarial Fever in Colonial Bengal 1820–1939, Kolkata:
Firma KLM Pvt. Ltd, 2002.
181 Cited in De, ‘Imperial Governance’, p. 23.
183 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 5 January, 9 February 1949; The Statesman, 31 March 1948; Dy
HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 10 February 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.

185 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 18 February 1949, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
186 Anandabazar Patrika, 9 July 1948; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 6 July 1949.
187 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 1 July 1949, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
188 FR No. 9 for the period ending 20 April 1950; FR No. 9 for the period ending 4 May
1950, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
189 FR No. 9 for the period ending 9 May 1950, IOR: L/P&J/5/320; The Statesman,
11 January, 30 August 1950.
190 The Statesman, 11 November 1950.
191 The Statesman, 17, 18, 19, 23, 29 April, 2, 4, 12 May 1948.
193 The Statesman, 2 June 1949; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 6 July 1949.
194 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 22 April 1949, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
195 The refugee problem has been discussed in detail in recent times in a number of works,
most notably in R. Samaddar (ed.) Reflections on the Partition in the East, New Delhi
and Calcutta: Vikas Publishing House, 1997; P.K. Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men:
The Refugees and the Left Political Syndrome in West Bengal, Calcutta: Naya Udyog,
1999; T.Y. Tan, and G. Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, London
and New York: Routledge, 2000; T. Roy, A Suppressed Chapter in History: The
Exodus of Hindus from East Pakistan and Bangladesh, 1947–2006, New Delhi:
Bookwell, 2006; Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition. We will therefore discuss the issue
briefly, only in order to contextualize some other problems in the social life of post-
independence West Bengal.
196 See G. Kudaisya, ‘The Demographic Upheaval of Partition: Refugees and Agricultural
Resettlement in India, 1947–67’, South Asia, vol. XVIII, Special Issue (1995),
pp. 73–94, especially, p. 86.
197 Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men, p. 1.
198 By June 1948, roughly 192,000 of them were in Nadia, 43,000 in 24-Parganas, 41,000
in Burdwan, 32,000 in Hooghly, 30,000 in Jalpaiguri, 27,000 in Murshidabad, 20,000
in Midnapur, and 23,400 in the remaining six districts. The Statesman, 6 June 1948.
199 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 8 October 1948.
201 For details on the government’s refugee policy during this period, see Chakrabarti, The
Marginal Men, pp. 28–32.
202 From Nehru to Roy, 25 August 1948, in S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy, p. 109.
203 For more discussion on Roy’s views on the refugee problem, see Chakrabarti, The
Marginal Men, pp. 19–21, 26–27; for a different perspective on Roy’s attitudes, see
Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, pp. 130–54.
204 The Statesman, 10 April, 1948.
207 See, for example, ‘Samayik Prasanga’ [Current issues], Masik Basumati, 28th year, vol. 2,
no. 5, Phalgun 1356 BS, pp. 734–36; also in vol. 2, no. 6, Chaitra 1356 BS, pp. 873–77.
198 Notes
209 Gargi Chakravarty has argued that there was a ‘total loss of social status, previously
enjoyed by the Hindu middle class’ in East Bengal and that was the primary reason
behind their migration. See G. Chakravartty, Coming out of Partition: Refugee Women
of Bengal, Delhi, Calcutta: Bluejay Books, 2005, p. 15. For further evidence, also see
S. Bandyopadhyay, Deshbhag Smriti o Satta [Partition: Memories and Truth], Kolkata:
Progressive Publishers, 1999; H. Bandyopadhyay, Udbastu [Refugees], Kolkata:
Sahitya Sansad, 1970; N. Mitra, ‘Partition and Associated Memories’, in J. Bagchi and
S. Dasgupta (eds) The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern
India, Kolkata: Stree, 2003, pp. 137–42.
210 S. Bandyopadhyay, ‘The Riddles of Partition: Memories of the Bengali Hindus’, in
Samaddar, Reflections on Partition in the East, pp. 66–69.

211 N.C. Chatterjee, ‘The East Bengal Refugees: A Lesson in Survival’, in S. Chaudhuri
(ed.) Calcutta: The Living City, vol. II, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 72.
212 For more discussion of motives, see Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, pp. 111–19.
213 The Statesman, 6 June 1948.
214 FR for Bengal for the second half of July 1947, IOR: L/P&J/5/154.
216 Extract from statement of B.7 dated 19.4.48, Government of West Bengal Police File
No. TJ – 589/47-48; I am indebted to Rajsekhar Basu for this reference.
223 Samir Das has argued that this endeavour to settle East Bengali refugees outside the
province of West Bengal was ‘inseparably connected with the question of its [Congress
government’s] nation-building enterprise’. While this might be true to some extent as
Nehru was still averse to the idea of linguistic provinces, the main reason perhaps was
scarcity of land in West Bengal. See S. Das, ‘State response to the refugee crisis: relief
and rehabilitation in the east’, in R. Samaddar (ed.) Refugees and the state: practices of
asylum and care in India, 1947–2000, New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage
Publications, 2003, pp. 106–51, especially, 112–13. On the issue of scarcity of land for
rehabilitation, see Kudaisya, ‘The Demographic Upheaval of Partition’, pp. 89–91.
224 The Statesman, 17 April, 26 October 1948; also see Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition,
p. 133.
228 Squatter colonies came up in various parts of south Calcutta, like Jadavpur, Bejoygarh,
Jodhpur military barracks, unoccupied lands in Sahapur, Durgapur, and Dharmatala.
See for details, Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men, pp. 33–37, 64–66.
234 From Acting Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 4 May 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.
237 The Statesman, 4, 5 October 1948.
238 Roy to Nehru, 1 December 1949; Vallabhbhai Patel to Roy, 6 December 1949, in
Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy, pp. 140–42, 144–45.
Notes 199
240 Under this scheme the refugees would be divided into two groups, urban and rural, the
former would be given support for accommodation and employment, while the latter
would receive land, cattle, seeds and some monetary subsistence for the initial period.
Of the 1,500,000 refugees, about 1,000,000 were to be absorbed in West Bengal proper,
while the rest were to be rehabilitated in Cooch Behar (still a Princely State), Assam and
Orissa. The Statesman, 27 February 1949.
241 See for details, P. Oberoi, Exile and Belonging: Refugees and State Policy in South
Asia, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 64ff.
242 The Statesman, 23 August 1950. In September 1950 about 3,000 of them came back
from Orissa complaining of ill treatment by the local officials. The Statesman, 26
September 1950.
243 Samir Das mentions that when on 2 March 1950 Mohanlal Saksena came to Calcutta in
the wake of the Khulna riots and resultant fresh exodus of refugees, he still insisted on
relief rather than rehabilitation, hoping that these refugees would go back after the sit-
uation had settled down. See Samir Das, ‘State response to the refugee crisis’, in
Samaddar (ed.) Refugees and the state, pp. 117–18.
245 From Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 29 October 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/317.
248 H.K. Chattopadhyay, ‘Desher katha’ [News of the Country ], Masik Basumati, 28th year,
vol. 2, no. 5, Phalgun 1356 BS, p. 706; also vol. 2, no. 6, Chaitra 1356 BS, pp. 829–32.
249 WBLAP, vol. II, 25 September 1950, pp. 3–4. However, the opposition called the
government claim of rehabilitating 1,100,000 refugees a ‘bluff’. The Statesman,
27 September 1950.
250 See Oberoi, Exile and Belonging, p. 65.

1 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta 13 January 1948, IOR L/P&J/5/316.
2 See middle-class social commentator Birupaksha’s comments in Chapter 1.
4 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 9 March 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.
5 Extract from fortnightly report on the political situation in West Bengal for the first half
of January, 1948, GB, IB Records, S.No. 195/1930, F.No. 451/30, WBSA.
8 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 23 February 1949.
9 By 1949 there were four organized trade unions in West Bengal: the Congress con-
trolled Indian National Trade Union Congress, the communist dominated All India
Trade Union Congress, the Socialist controlled Hind Mazdoor Sabha and the smallest
of all, the United Trade Union Congress, associated with the smaller leftist parties.
They failed to unite because of mutual distrust and fear of political domination and this
situation continued well into the 1950s. For details, see M. Weiner, Party Politics in
India: The Development of a Multi-Party System, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1957, pp. 153–55.
11 Government of West Bengal, Labour Dept., Report on the Activities of the Labour
Department, Government of West Bengal, vol. II, (May–December 1948), Alipore:
Superintendent of Bengal Government Press, 1950, pp. 24, 26, 65.
13 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 11, 12, 13 July 1949. For more on Tramwaymen’s organization,
see S. Guha Ray, Calcutta Tramwaymen: A Study of Working Class History, Kolkata:
Progressive Publishers, 2007, pp. 129–37.
200 Notes
15 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 22, 24, 25, 30 October 1949.
16 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 12, 13, 14, 16 November 1949.
17 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 8, 11 December 1949.
20 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 8 April 1949; Dy HC to HC for UK in India,
Calcutta, 22 April 1949, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.

26 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 12 August 1949, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
27 S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy and other Prime Ministers, Calcutta: Benson’s,
1974, p. 115; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 27 February 1949.
28 WBLAP, vol. V, no. 1, 4 March 1949, pp. 131–35; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 28 February
1949.
29 The Statesman, 5 March 1949; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 5 March 1949.
30 From H.V.R. Iengar, Secy. Govt. of India, to all Provincial Governments and Prime
Commissioners, 31 May 1949, GB, IB Records, S.No. 9/1926, F.No. 35/26, Part XI,
WBSA.
31 ‘Extract from D.O.No.3265/31–49 dated 8th July 1949, from Superintendent of Police
Darjeeling’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 9/1926, F.No. 35/26, Part XI, WBSA.
32 From Commissioner, Burdwan Division to District Magistrate, Burdwan, 8 June 1949,
GB, IB Records, S.No. 9/1926, F.No. 35/26, Part XI, WBSA.
33 M.K.V. Venkata Rao, Diamond Harbour Road, Calcutta to Sarat Chandra Bose, 8 June
1948, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 145/30, F.No. 451/30, WBSA.
34 ‘Confidential report dated 30.11.51 regarding the meeting held at Chittaranjan Avenue
in front of “Jabakusum House” under the auspices of the P & T workers Union’, GB, IB
Records, F.No. 1554/32, WBSA.
36 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 2 May 1952. Historian Jadunath Sarkar was requested to chair
the committee, but he refused to accept it on the ground that these statues were also
historical evidence and therefore should not be removed or destroyed.
37 Acting Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 27 April 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316; Dy HC
to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 24 September 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/317. The Bengal
Club in October 1948 decided to break away from its European-only membership policy.
See Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 22 October 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/317.
38 Acting Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 30 March 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316; also
see The Statesman, 26 March 1948.
39 Acting Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 6 July 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/317.
40 Government of West Bengal, Labour Dept., Report on the Activities of the Labour
Department, p. 2.
41 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 25 March 1949; Dy HC to HC for UK in India,
Calcutta, 1 April 1949, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
43 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 5 November 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/317; Dy HC
to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 17 November 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/317; also WBLAP,
vol.V, no. 2, 28 March 1949, p. 327.
44 The Statesman, 27 February 1948; Anandabazar Patrika, 3 April, 1 May 1949.
45 Fortnightly Report [hereafter FR] No. 3 for the period ending 9 February 1950, IOR:
L/P&J/5/320.
47 WBLAP, vol. II, no. 2, 10 March 1948, pp.15–20; also see The Statesman, 25 March
1948.
Notes 201
48 Extract from Daily Report on the political situation in West Bengal dated 30 July 1948
(No. 86), GB, IB Records, S.No. 200/26, F.No. 166/26, WBSA.
49 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 2 March 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.
52 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 6 May 1949, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
53 The Statesman, 12, 13 December 1950.

60 Anandabazar Patrika, 19 October 1947.
61 Anandabazar Patrika, 5 January 1948; Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 13
January 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.
63 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 26 February, 1 March 1949.
65 The Statesman, 1, 2 April, 1948.
69 Acting Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 23 March 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.
70 The Statesman, 15, 16, 17 July 1948.
71 The Statesman, 30 September 1947; Anandabazar Patrika, 1 October 1947.
72 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 21 November 1947, p. 3, 25 November 1947, pp. 14–17.
73 See for more details, A. Lahiri, Postwar Revolt of the Rural Poor in Bengal: Memoirs
of a Communist Activist, Calcutta: Seagull, 2001, pp. 109–11.
74 ‘Annual Administration Report, 1949 – Section VIII’, GB, IB Records, S.No.
206/1928, F.No. 32/28 (1949), K.W. Folder, WBSA.
75 See B. Chandra, M. Mukherjee and A. Mukherjee, India after Independence
1947–2000, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 1–2.
77 B.K. Bhadra, Birupaksher Bisham Bipad [Birupaksha’s serious crisis], Calcutta: The
Bihar Sahitya Bhavan Ltd., 1357 BS, second print 1361 BS, pp. 8–9.
78 M. Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims since Independence, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 136–52.
81 WBLAP, vol. II, no. 2, 18 March 1948, p. 246; also see Acting Dy HC to HC for UK in
India, Calcutta, 23 March 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.
83 ‘Samayik prasanga’ [Current issues], Masik Basumati, 26th year, vol. 1, no. 5, Bhadra
1354 BS, p. 595.
84 ‘Shree Ashutosh Lahiry in course of a press conference at Cawnpore stated: June 8,
1948’, Ashutosh Lahiry Papers, Statements, Serial No. 8, NMML.
85 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 10 February 1948; Dy HC to HC for UK in
India, Calcutta, 17 February1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316. Anandabazar Patrika, 15
February 1948.
87 Maitra told the parliament: ‘… the situation that is fast developing in West Bengal
which threatens the peace and tranquillity of the province as a result of the large influx
of refugees as a result of the ruthless persecution of the minority Hindu community,
such as, murder, arson, looting, abduction and other outrages on women that is being
202 Notes
carried on at present in various parts of East Pakistan, particularly in the districts of
Khulna and Barisal, as a result of which there has been a fresh exodus of refugees from
East Pakistan to West Bengal.’ The Statesman, 2 February 1950.
89 ‘Statement made by the Hon’ble Prime Minister in Parliament on February 23, 1950,
regarding recent events in East and West Bengal’, S.P. Mukherji Papers, II–IV
Instalment, File No. 160, NMML.
90 For another version, with subtle but significant variations, see Amrita Bazar Patrika,
30 December 1949.
92 P.K. Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the Left Political Syndrome in
West Bengal, Calcutta: Naya Udyog, 1999, pp. 26–27.

94 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 8, 24 February 1950.
95 For details of the Dacca and Rajshahi riots, see S. Biswas and H. Sato, Religion and
Politics in Bangladesh and West Bengal, A Study of Communal Relations, Joint Research
Programme Series No. 99, Tokyo: Institute of Developing Economies, 1993, pp. 34–41.
97 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 9 February 1950, pp. 96–97.
104 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 15, 16, 17, 18 February 1950.
106 As it has been argued, the sexual possession of Hindu women by Muslim men was
always regarded as symbolic of Muslim domination and humiliation of the Hindu self.
See J. Bagchi and S. Dasgupta, ‘Introduction’, in J. Bagchi and S. Dasgupta (eds) The
Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India, Kolkata: Stree, 2003,
pp. 4–5.
109 Anandabazar Patrika, 28 March 1950.
111 See for details, J. Chatterji, ‘Of Graveyards and Ghettos: Muslims in Partitioned West
Bengal 1947–67’, in M. Hasan and A. Roy (eds) Living Together Separately: Cultural
India in History and Politics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 228–29.
For evidence of widespread anti-Muslim attitudes in Nadia in 1950, also see W. van
Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia, London:
Anthem Press, 2005, p. 99.
112 FR for 2nd half of July 1947, IOR: L/P&J/5/154.
113 Bidyut Chakrabarty has recently discussed the existential absurdity of the
Hindu–Muslim hatred in the quotidian lives of the masses in post-partition Bengal. See
B. Chakrabarty, The Partition of Bengal and Assam, 1932-1947: Contour of freedom,
London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2004, chapter 7.
114 Nehru to B.C. Roy, 25 August 1948, in S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy, p. 109.
115 Willem van Schendel has observed that in both India and Pakistan, the members of the
minorities were ‘often perceived and treated as internal enemies.’ See van Schendel,
The Bengal Borderland, p. 98.
116 ‘Samayik Prasanga’ [Current issues], Masik Basumati, 28th year, vol. 2, no. 6, Chaitra
1356 BS, p. 878.
117 Niranjan Bose to V.D. Savarkar, 14 January 1948, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records,
S.No. 22/1923, F.No. 254/23 (1), WBSA.
Notes 203
118 Krishna Chandra Chattopadhyay to Sarat Chandra Bose, 3 February 1950, intercepted
letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 257/30, F.No. 451/30(1), Part VIII, WBSA.
119 See Police Abstract: General and Communism (From 15.8.47 to 31.12.47), GB, IB
Records, S.No. 207/28, F.No. 32/28 (1947), WBSA. Another report on the RSS argued
that the organization became ‘rabidly communal’ only because of ‘the communally
disturbed conditions, engineered by the Muslim National Guards’. See ‘The Rashtriya
Swayam Sevak Sangh’ by Deputy Director (A), dated 18.11.47, GB, IB Records, S.No.
nil/42, F.No. 505/42 (24-Parganas), WBSA.
120 Charu Chandra Bhandari, the Secretary of the WBPCC, and the Muslim MLA
Badruddoza both complained before the Inquiry Commission that the police were not
impartial and some of the incidents could have been avoided if they had acted properly
and promptly. The Statesman, 4, 27 August 1950.

121 Anandabazar Patrika, 11 March, 2, 5 April 1950.
125 See Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation, pp. 136–52.
126 Full transcript of the press conference in GB, IB Records, S.No. 35/1920, F.No.
210/20(1), WBSA.
127 A.K. Sanyal to Ashutosh Lahiry, 19 April 1951, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records,
S.No. 22/1923, F.No. 254/23(1), WBSA.
128 ‘Brief History of Sri Ashutosh Lahiry’; also, ‘History sheet of Shri Ashutosh Lahiry’,
GB, IB Records, S.No. 45/1920, F.No. 210/20, WBSA; see also the intelligence report
on Ashutosh Lahiry in GB, IB Records, S.No. 158/20, F.No. 210/20, WBSA.
129 ‘Brief History of Sri Ashutosh Lahiry’; also, ‘History sheet of Shri Ashutosh Lahiry’,
GB, IB Records, S.No. 45/1920, F.No. 210/20, WBSA.
130 Pranab Kumar Ghoshal, Sarat Kumar Sengupta to Ashutosh Lahiry, n.d., letter inter-
cepted on 1 March 1950, GB, IB Records, S.No. 8/1920, F.No. 210/20(1) Part II,
WBSA.
131 Hindustan Standard, 27 July 1950, paper cutting, GB, IB Records, S.No. 158/1920,
F.No. 210/20(1), WBSA.
133 FR No. 6 for the period ending 23 March 1950, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
134 For example, even Bagchi and Dasgupta observe that ‘a massive two-way exodus in
Punjab was not repeated in the East.’ See their ‘Introduction’ in Bagchi and Dasgupta,
The Trauma and the Triumph, p. 2.
135 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 22 February 1950; FR No. 6 for the period ending 23 March
1950, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
136 Supplement to FR No. 4 for the period ending 23 February 1950; FR No. 6 for the
period ending 23 March 1950, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
137 Anandabazar Patrika, 27 May 1950.
138 ‘Some Salient Features Regarding the East Bengal Refugee Problem and their bearing
on the Delhi Pact’, S.P. Mukherji Papers, 1st Instalment, File No. 33, NMML.
139 Of these Muslim refugees, between 100,000 to 200,000 had fled from Nadia and the
census of 1951 found that the number of Muslims in Calcutta was about 130,000 less
than what was expected. See J. Chatterji, ‘Of Graveyards and Ghettos’, pp. 228–29.
140 Nehru told the parliament: ‘Tens of millions of people cannot be uprooted or trans-
ported to distant places.’ See ‘Statement made by the Hon’ble Prime Minister in
Parliament on February 23, 1950, regarding recent events in East and West Bengal’,
S.P. Mukherji Papers, II–IV Instalment, File No. 160, NMML. Also see Amrita Bazar
Patrika, 24 February 1950.
141 FR No. 7 for the period ending 6 April 1950, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
143 Anandabazar Patrika, 29 March 1950.
144 See, for example, the regular column ‘Samayik prasanga’ [Current issues] in Masik
204 Notes
Basumati, 27th year, vol. 1, no. 4, Sraban 1355 BS, p. 534; no. 5, Bhadra 1355 BS,
p. 683; no. 6, Aswin 1355 BS, pp. 821–22.
145 Sree Ashutosh Lahiry: Jibanbyapi Atmatyager Kahini [Mr Ashutosh Lahiry: the story
of lifelong sacrifice], Calcutta, December 1951, p. 16, Ashutosh Lahiry Papers,
Pamphlets, Serial No. 69, NMML.
150 While 21 women’s organizations in late February 1950 sent a memorandum to Nehru
attracting attention to alleged large-scale abduction and torture of women in East
Pakistan, the left-dominated Women’s Conference urged the government not to

rescue them, as most of them had already integrated into their new families. See
G. Chakravartty, Coming out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal, Delhi, Calcutta:
Bluejay Books, 2005, p. 42. In West Bengal out of 74 women reported to have been
abducted, 55 were later found to have been living with their relatives. The Statesman, 11
July 1950. There was no official programme of recovery of abducted women in Bengal.
See ‘Introduction’, in Bagchi and Dasgupta, The Trauma and the Triumph, p. 25.
152 FR No. 9 for the period ending 4 May 1950, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
153 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 27 April 1950.
154 FR No. 10 for the period ending 18 May 1950; FR No. 11 for the period ending 1 June
1950, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
157 The Statesman, 10, 12 June, 30, 31 July, 2, 9, 12 August, 4 September 1950; FR No. 10
for the period ending 18 May 1950, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
158 The Statesman, 28 September, 15 October 1950; FR No.10 for the period ending 18
May 1950, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
159 WBLAP, vol. II, 26 September 1950, pp. 12–13.
160 The Statesman, 2, 8, 10 August 1950.
161 The Statesman, 13 September 1950. Nehru’s differences with Patel and the newly
elected Congress President Purushottamdas Tandon on this issue are well known and
have been discussed in R. Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest
Democracy, London: Macmillan, 2007, pp. 129–31; and J.M. Brown, Nehru: A
Political Life, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003, pp. 194–95.
Indeed, in July 1950, shortly before he became Congress President, Tandon presided
over an All India Refugee Conference in Delhi, which recommended three measures as
the preferred solution to the refugee problem in the East: annulment of Partition, claim-
ing sufficient territory from Pakistan to rehabilitate the refugees, and planned exchange
of population. However, after becoming Congress President he never publicly sup-
ported this proposed solution. These were exactly the same measures which S.P.
Mukherji recommended a month later. See N.B. Khare, Presidential Address, Akhil
Bharat Hindu Mahasabha, 20th Session, Poona, 1950, p. 22, Ashutosh Lahiry Papers,
162 FR No. 8 for the period ending 20 April 1950, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
163 FR No. 9 for the period ending 4 May 1950, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
164 WBLAP, vol. II, 25 September 1950, p. 2.
166 ‘Speech delivered by Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee at Deshbandhu Park, Calcutta, on
3rd September, 1950’, S.P. Mukherji Papers, 1st Instalment, Speeches and Statements,
Serial No. 11, NMML.
167 M.V. Ganapati to Ashutosh Lahiry, 25 March 1950, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records,
S.No. 8/1920, F.No. 210/20(1) Part II, WBSA.
Notes 205
172 See G. Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories, Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press, 2006.
173 For details, see S. Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social Dominance
in Colonial Bengal, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004, chapter 5.
174 J. Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 227–28.
175 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, 24 September 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/317.
177 See Kafi Khan’s cartoon in Jugantar, 14 October 1951.

178 Recently this assumption has been questioned in Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Culture and
Hegemony.
180 Jugantar, 16 October 1951.
184 B. Chandra, et al., India after Independence, pp. 203–4.
185 J. Basu (ed.) Documents of the Communist Movement in India, vol. V, Calcutta:
National Book Agency Ltd., 1997, pp. 600–1, 643.
186 S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy, pp. 92–94.
187 WBLAP, vol. II, no. 2, 8–30 March 1948, p. 346.
194 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 15 January 1948, p. 353.
196 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 7 February 1950, p. 52.
202 Ashani Bhushan Majumdar to Sarat Chandra Bose, 10 May 1949, intercepted letter,
GB, IB Records, S.No. 205/30, F.No. 451/30, Part VI, WBSA.
203 H.L. Karmokar to Sarat Chandra Bose, 9 September 1948, intercepted letter, GB, IB
Records, S.No. 199/30, F.No. 451/30, Part VII, WBSA.
204 Employees of the Fire Brigade, West Bengal Govt. to Sarat Chandra Bose, intercepted
letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 199/30, F.No. 451/30(1), Part VII; ‘One who is waiting
for the return of “Netaji”’ to Sarat Chandra Bose, 15 August 1949, intercepted letter,
205 Ashutosh Sen to Sarat Chandra Bose, 4 October 1948, intercepted letter, GB, IB
Records, S.No. 178/30, F.No. 451/30, WBSA.
206 Dwarka Nath Sen to Sarat Chandra Bose, 25 August 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB
Records, S.No. 199/30, F.No. 451/30(1), Part VII, WBSA.
207 Shibnarayan Bagali to Sarat Chandra Bose, 9 August 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB
Records, S.No. 199/30, F.No. 451/30(1), Part VII; Pranata Ranjan Ray to Sarat
Chandra Bose, 7 May 1948, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 145/30, F.No.
451/30; Kishor Mukherjee to Sarat Chandra Bose, 8 April 1949, intercepted letter, GB,
IB Records, S.No. 169/30, F.No. 451/30(1), Part V, WBSA.
206 Notes
208 Nirod Baran Das to Sarat Chandra Bose, 18 June 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB
209 H. Chattopadhyay, ‘Bhanga Banshir Andolan’ [Movement of a broken flute], Sishu
Sathi, vol. 27, Bhadra 1355 BS, p. 258.
210 D. Dhar, ‘Ek bachhar pawre’ [After one year], Sishu Sathi, vol. 27, Bhadra 1355 BS,
pp. 295–301.
211 These ten pictures had ten distinct captions: starting with ‘Abhishek’ (investiture), then
moving through ‘Kashmir samasya’ (Kashmir problem), ‘Mahatmar tirodhan’ (depar-
ture of the Mahatma), ‘Hyderabad’, ‘Communist atanka’ (Communist terror),
‘Bastuhara samasya’ (refugee problem), ‘Chorakarbar’ (black marketing), ‘Kagaj
nai’ (paper scarcity), and then ‘Khadya chai, kapar chai, bari chai, oushadh chai,
daridrya, shoshan’ (we need food, cloth, medicines and shelter, [remove] poverty,
exploitation). S. Chakrabarty, Bharater swadhinata sishu’, Sishu Sathi, vol. 27, Bhadra
1355 BS, pp. 254–55.
212 ‘Masir taan’ [Auntie’s love], Masik Basumati, 27th year, vol. 1, no. 3, Ashadh 1355 BS,
p. 361.
213 K. Chattopadhyay, ‘Swadinata o Paschimbanga’ [Independence and West Bengal],
Sishu Sathi, vol. 27, Bhadra 1355 BS, pp. 268–76.
214 A.K. Chattopadhyay, ‘Swadhin Bharate ek bachhar’ [One year in independent India],
Sishu Sathi, vol.27, Bhadra 1355 BS, pp. 284, 286.
215 G. Vidyabinod, ‘Amader Bharat’ [Our India], Sishu Sathi, vol. 27, Bhadra 1355 BS, p. 294.
216 H. Chattopadhyay, ‘Agnisfulinga Subhash’ [Subhash the spark of fire], Sishu Sathi,
vol. 27, Magh 1355 BS, p. 512.
217 N. Dutta, ‘Swadhinatar pawre’ [After independence], Sishu Sathi, vol. 27, Paush 1355
BS, p. 495.
218 Biswadoot, ‘Nana Katha’ [Various issues], Sishu Sathi, vol. 27, Magh 1355 BS, p. 604.
219 Biswadoot, ‘Nana Katha’ [Various issues], Sishu Sathi, vol. 27, Paush 1355 BS, p. 501.
220 B.C. Sinha, Desher Katha [News of the Country], Calcutta: D.M. Library, 1951 [first
published in Sanibarer Chithi in 1950], p. 84.
221 Daybhagi, Kayekti prosno [A few questions], Sanibarer Chithi, vol. 23, no. 6, Chaitra
1357 BS, pp. 521–25.
222 Daybhagi, ‘Bangla o Bangali’ [Bengal and the Bengalis], Sanibarer Chithi, vol. 23,
no. 3, Poush 1357 BS, pp. 240, 250.
223 B.C. Sinha, Desher Katha, pp. 86, 88, 92, 93, 102.
225 I borrow this expression from Jurgen Habermas who acknowledges ‘the temptation to
choose models from the past for the interpretation of the future’; but a problem arises
when ‘the future is … perceived in the form of the past’. See J. Habermas, The Past as
Future, interviewed by Michael Haller, translated and edited by Max Pensky, Lincoln
and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994, p. 66.
226 These were of course in sharp contrast to Nehru’s modernist and futurist ideas that we
have referred to in the previous chapter.
227 S. Ghosh, ‘Bharater muktisangramer itihas’ [The story of India’s freedom struggle],
Masik Basumati, 27th year, vol.1, no. 4, Sraban 1355 BS, pp. 501–2; vol. 1, no. 5,
Bhadra 1355 BS, pp. 605–6; Vol.1, no. 6, Aswin 1355 BS, pp. 742–43; L. Hazra,
‘Bharater Jatiya Congresser utpatti’ [The origins of the Indian National Congress],
Masik Basumati, 27th year, vol. 1, no. 4, Sraban 1355 BS, pp. 492–501; vol. 1, no. 5,
Bhadra 1355 BS, pp. 601–5; vol. 1, no. 6, Aswin 1355 BS, pp. 740–42.
228 B.K. Gangopadhyay, ‘Biday o Abhishek’ [Farewell and investiture], Sishu Sathi, vol. 27,
Sraban 1355 BS, pp. 201–3; S. Maitra, ‘Patan o abhyuday’ [Decline and rise], Sishu
Sathi, vol. 27, Bhadra 1355 BS, pp. 223–229; R. Desmukhya, Swadhinata o Bastusankat
[Freedom and the refugee problem], Sishu Sathi, vol. 27, Sraban 1355 BS, pp. 242–46.
229 See J. Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’
Debate, edited and translated by W. Nicholson, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT
Press, 1989, pp. 234–35.
Notes 207
230 Habermas, The New Conservatism, p. 237.
231 Some of the examples are: Abhyuday [Emergence] (1947), Desher Dabi [Demands of
the country] (1947), Bhuli nai [We have not forgotten] (1948), Chattogram astragar
lunthan [Chittagong armoury raid] (1949) and Biplabi Khudiram [Khudiram, the
revolutionary] (1951).
232 Like Swadhinatar Sadhana [Struggle for independence] (1948) or Swadhinatar gaan
[Songs of independence] (1949).
233 Ritwik Ghatak’s trilogy consisted of ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ [The Cloud-Capped Star]
(1960), Komal Gandhar [At Soft Note on a Sharp Scale] (1961) and Subarnarekha
[The Golden Thread – name of a river] (1962). For more discussion, see S.
Bandyopadhyay, ‘The Riddles of Partition: Memories of the Bengali Hindus’, in
R. Samaddar (ed.) Reflections on Partition in the East, New Delhi: Vikas, 1997,
pp. 65–66. For the script of Meghe Dhaka Tara, see Bagchi and Dasgupta, The Trauma
and the Triumph, pp. 219–31.
234 J.Bagchi, ‘Women in Calcutta: After Independence’, in S. Chaudhuri (ed.) Calcutta:
The Living City. vol. II, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 46.
235 See Jugantar, 19, 26 October 1951; The Statesman, 18 January 1952.
236 The word Ramrajya literally means the kingdom of the Hindu mythical king Rama, but
Gandhi imputed a new political meaning into the term. Through this expression he con-
veyed his own utopian vision of popular sovereignty which would be administered by
a benevolent patriarch representing the collective will of all the people. This was his
alternative to the western model of parliamentary democracy, which he thought only
provided for the representation of specific classes and their interests. For more discus-
sion on this, see P. Chatterjee, ‘Gandhi and the critique of civil society’, in Ranajit Guha
(ed.) Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 3, Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 153–95.
237 See P. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations
26, Spring 1989, pp. 7–24.
238 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 25 November, 6 December 1949.
239 By ‘public life of history’, Dipesh Chakrabarty means the conditions where history and
historians are called upon as adjudicators in public debates on the past in popular cul-
ture. See D. Chakrabarty, ‘The Public Life of History: An Argument out of India’,
Public Culture, vol. 20, no. 1, 2007, pp. 143–68.
240 The Statesman, 27 December 1951; Jugantar, 27 December 1951.
241 Habermas, The New Conservatism, pp. 254–55.
242 I borrow the expression from Habermas who defines it as ‘a readiness to identify with
the political order and the principles of the Basic Law’. See Habermas, The New
Conservatism, pp. 256–57.
243 This is perhaps the closest approximation of what Partha Chatterjee, invoking
Foucault, would call ‘governmentalization of the state’, where the ‘regime secures
legitimacy not by the participation of citizens in matters of state but by claiming to
provide for the well-being of the population.’ See P. Chatterjee, The Politics of the
Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, New Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2004, p. 34.
244 For a discussion on this, see D. Chakrabarty ‘“In the Name of Politics”: Democracy and
the Power of Multitude in India’, in D. Chakrabarty, R. Majumdar and A. Sartori (eds)
From the Colonial to the Postcolonial. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.
245 In West Bengal it was the Left which fought back to reclaim this right in the 1960s.

2 B. Chandra, M. Mukherjee and A. Mukherjee, India after Independence 1947–2000,
New Delhi, Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 186, 193.
3 These two trends incorporated in the Nehruvian consensus have been discussed by a
208 Notes
number of historians in recent years. See G. Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the
Imagination of Modern India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999,
pp. 210–23; J.M. Brown, Nehru: A Political Life, New Haven, London: Yale
University Press, 2003, pp. 195–204; B. Zachariah, Nehru, London, New York:
Routledge, 2004, pp. 140–41.
4 See the editorial in The Statesman, 10 January 1950.
5 R. Kothari, ‘The Congress “System” in India’, in Z. Hasan (ed.) Parties and Politics in
India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 40.
6 P. Chatterjee, Nationalist thought and the colonial world: A derivative discourse?,
London: Zed Books, 1986.
7 Samayik prasanga’ [Current issues], Masik Basumati, Ashadh 1354 BS; also see FR
for the first half of July 1947, IOR L/P&J/5/154.

8 FR for the second half of July 1947, IOR: L/P&J/5/154.
9 From F.J. Burrows to Mountbatten, 11 July 1947, IOR: L/P&J/5/154. In the end how-
ever, only one British ICS and one IPC officer had opted to remain in service in West
Bengal, but they too retired soon after. See S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy and
Other Chief Ministers, Calcutta: Benson’s, 1974, p. 45.
10 H.K. Chattopadhyay, ‘Desher Katha’ [News of the Country], Masik Basumati, 28th
year, vol. 2, no. 1, Karttik 1356 BS, p. 109. A retired ICS officer while reminiscing
about his early days in independent India thinks that all his colleagues in the bureau-
cracy, ‘without exception’, were working with a ‘spirit’ to rebuild India in the shortest
possible time. See H.M. Patel, The First Flush of Freedom: Recollections and
Reflections, A. Abraham (ed.) New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2005, p. 116.
12 Anandabazar Patrika, 12 September 1947. Dr Suresh Chandra Banerji became the
deputy leader, Amar Krishna Ghosh the Prime Whip, Debendranath Sen the Secretary,
Sushil Kumar Banerjee the Assistant Secretary, Ardhendu Naskar and Kanailal De the
Deputy Whips. The members of his cabinet were Annada Prasad Chaudhury, Kalipada
Mukherjee, Charu Chandra Bhandari, Kamal Krishna Roy, Hemchandra Naskar,
Mohini Mohan Barman, Bhupati Majumdar, Shyamapada Bhattacharya, J.C. Gupta,
Niharendu Dutta Majumdar, Dhirendra Narayan Mukherjee, Bepin Behary Ganguly,
Hemanta Kumar Basu, Banku Behary Mandal, Bimal Kumar Ghosh, Bimal Chandra
Sinha, and the only female member Bina Das.
15 For details on Congress factionalism, see P. Sen Gupta, The Congress Party in West
Bengal: A Study of Factionalism 1947–86, Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 1988,
chapter 2.
16 Bidhan Roy in a letter to Nehru on 22 June 1949 complained that the incorporation of 147
East Bengali leaders into the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee (BPCC) because of
a directive from the Congress President Rajendra Prasad, greatly complicated the struc-
ture of the BPCC and affected its smooth functioning. See S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C.
Roy, p. 127. For more discussion on the squabbles between the leaders from the two
Bengals, see J. Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, chapter 5.
17 The Statesman, 23 August, 5 September 1947.
22 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 25 November 1947, p. 17.
24 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 30 December 1947, IOR: L/P&J/5/315.
25 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 27 November 1947, pp. 48–50, 55; 8 December 1947, p. 69; 10
December 1947, p. 104.
Notes 209
27 Anandabazar Patrika, 6, 9 December 1947; From Dy HC to HC for the UK in India, 30
December 1947, IOR: L/P&J/5/315; Government of West Bengal Police file No. TJ-
589/47–48; I am indebted to Rajsekhar Basu for this reference.
28 The Statesman, 9 December 1947; Anandabazar Patrika, 12 December 1947.
29 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 10–11 December 1947, pp. 103, 131–150.
31 Anandabazar Patrika, 17 December 1947.
33 Anandabazar Patrika, 28 November 1947.

37 Anandabazar Patrika, 22 December 1947; also see the police intelligence report on this
meeting in GB, IB Records, S.No. 195/30, F.No. 451/30, WBSA.
38 Extract from West Bengal Police Abstract [hereafter WBPA] dated 6.12.47; Extract
from WBPA dated 20.12.47; Extract from WBPA dated 3.1.48, GB, IB Records, S.No.
195/30, F.No. 451/30, WBSA.
39 Sasankasekhar Sanyal to Sarat Chandra Bose, 29 December 1947, intercepted letter,
GB, IB Records, S.No. 145/30, F.No. 451/30 (Part II), WBSA.
40 Anandabazar Patrika, 3 January 1948.
41 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 13 January 1948, IOR/L/P&J/5/316; Extract
from FR for the first half of January 1948, GB, IB Records, S.No. 195/30, F.No. 451/30,
WBSA.
42 Anandabazar Patrika, 5 January 1948.
43 Government of West Bengal, Judicial and Legislative (Legislative) Department, The
West Bengal Security Act 1948, Alipore: West Bengal Government Press, 1948, see
especially, pp. 8–9, 15.
44 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 15 January 1948, p. 353.
45 Extract from FR for the first half of January 1948, GB, IB Records, S.No. 195/30, F.No.
451/30, WBSA. Roy later claimed that he accepted the premiership because
Gandhi had called and requested him to take it. See S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy,
p. 135.
47 Report on the ‘Jugantar Party’ in Government of West Bengal, Police Department file
No. T.J.501/47; I am indebted to Rajsekhar Basu for this reference.
48 ‘Ministerial Affairs – 3.11.47’, in Government of West Bengal, Police Department file
No. T.J.589/47–48; I am indebted to Rajsekhar Basu for this reference.
49 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 5 July 1949; S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy, p. 65.
50 S. Raychaudhury, Banglar Rupakar Dr Bidhan Chandra Ray [Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy,
the architect of Bengal], Calcutta, Samparka, 1999, p. 93.
51 Extract from FR for the first half of January 1948, GB, IB Records, S.No. 195/30, F.No.
451/30, WBSA.
54 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 20 January 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.
56 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 9 March 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316; Acting Dy
HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 20 April 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.
59 The Statesman, 29, 30 April, 2 May 1948.
60 These 22 signatories included A.K. Ghosh, P.C. Sen, Debendranath Sen, J.C. Gupta,
Charu Bhandari, Maharaja S.C. Nandy of Kasimbazar, B.C. Ghosh, M.M. Burman
(Minister), Bina Bhowmik, S.C. Banerji, A.P. Chowdhury, B.B. Mondal, S.P.
210 Notes
Chatterji, Hem Chandra Naskar (Minister), K.L. De, K.N. Dasgupta, S. Chakravarti, A.
Naskar, Jogneswar Roy, K.C. Haldar, A. Guin and K.P. Mondal.
68 WBLAP, vol. II, no. 1, 10 February-5 March 1948, p. 130–63; vol.V, no. 1, 23
February–16 March 1949, pp. 65–73, 97.

70 These women protest marchers belonged to the Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti. See
Anandabazar Patrika, 28 April 1949.
71 Anandabazar Patrika, 18, 22 November 1947. Ghosh polled 22,480 votes against
10,942 by Mukherjee.
72 A. Lahiri, Postwar Revolt of the Rural Poor in Bengal: Memoirs of a Communist
Activist, Calcutta, Seagull, 2001, p. 93.
73 S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy, pp. 111–12.
74 Secretary, Malda District Congress Organizing Committee, to Secretary, West Bengal
Provincial Congress Committee, 5 October 1948, AICC Papers, File No. PC-4/1947,
Part I, NMML.
75 Anandabazar Patrika, 7, 22, 25, 28 May 1949.
76 Leela Roy to R.S. Ruikar, 7 June 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No.
195/1930, F.No. 451/30, WBSA.
77 See, for example, Dr Srikumar Banerjee to Sarat Chandra Bose, 24 July 1948, inter-
cepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 145/30, F.No. 451/30 (Part II), WBSA;
Anonymous to Sarat Chandra Bose, 9 May 1949, intercepted letter; Jiten to Sarat
Chandra Bose, 18 May 1949, intercepted letter; Anil Gupta to Sarat Chandra Bose, 15
June 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 205/30, F.No. 451/30 (1) (Part
VI), WBSA.
78 S. C. Bose, I warned my countrymen, Calcutta: Netaji Research Bureau, 1996,
p. 242.
79 The Nation, 1, 4 June 1949.
80 The Nation, 2 June 1949.
81 The Nation, 5, 6 June 1949.
84 Anandabazar Patrika, 30 May, 12 June 1949.
85 This strange aspect of the Congress election campaign was pointed out in a letter to the
editor in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 14 July 1949.
86 Anandabazar Patrika, 7, 8, 10 June 1949; The Nation, 6, 10 June 1949; The Statesman,
9 June 1949, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 5 July 1949.
87 ‘List of C.P.I. Outrages in Calcutta from 1.5.49 to 31.12.49’, GB, IB Records, S.No.
92 Anandabazar Patrika, 16 June 1949.
97 See AICC Papers, File No. PC-4/1947, Part 1, NMML.
Notes 211
98 B.C. Roy to Nehru, 20 June 1949, in S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy, pp. 122–23.
100 There were charges of defalcation of electoral funds to the tune of Rs. 23,000 and mis-
use of ‘a considerable quantity of petrol and a fleet of cars.’ N.R. Sarkar to Jawaharlal
Nehru, 31 August 1949, N.R. Sarkar Papers, Correspondence with Jawaharlal Nehru,
NMML.
102 Nehru to N.R.Sarkar, 27 June 1949, N.R. Sarkar Papers, Correspondence with
Jawaharlal Nehru, NMML.

107 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 5, 6, 11 July 1949.
108 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 4, 12 July 1949.
112 From Jawaharlal Nehru to N.R. Sarkar, 1 July 1949; also, ‘Confidential – not for
publication: Allegations against the West Bengal Ministry’, N.R. Sarkar Papers,
Correspondence with Jawaharlal Nehru, NMML.
113 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 23 July 1949. At a camp of Congress workers in November
1949, Dr Rajendra Prasad made a similar comment that the ‘tired men must make room
for new blood’. See Amrita Bazar Patrika, 3 November 1949.
120 Among these calamities he mentioned famine, bombing, flood, cyclone, partition and
the recent refugee influx. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 26 July 1949.
121 Among the economic woes of Bengal, he mentioned food shortages, unemployment
and want of land for the resettlement of the refugees. See Nehru to Roy, 25 December
1949 and Roy to Nehru, 30 December 1949, in S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy,
pp. 147–50.
123 S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy, pp. 138–39; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 4, 8, 11, 12, 13
September 1949.
124 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 14 September 1949.
125 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 9 January 1950; The Statesman, 9 January 1950.
126 Brown, Nehru: A Political Life, p. 221.
127 ‘Desher Katha’ [News of the Country ], Masik Basumati, 26th year, vol. 1, no. 5, Bhadra
1354 BS, p. 578.
128 Shankarrao Deo, ‘The Task Before the AICC – I’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 14 February
1950.
129 The Statesman, 22 March, 13 June 1948.
130 See the editorial in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 8 July 1949.
133 Thus, it is not correct to conclude that the Hooghly group, of which Atulya Ghosh was
the leader, since the early days of independence had been continually at logger heads
with the East Bengalis under the leadership of P.C. Ghosh. There are also instances of
strategic alliances between the two groups.
212 Notes
135 The Congress around this time remained divided into three factions, namely the West
Bengal Congress Workers’ Group or the Ministerial party supporting the Roy ministry
(this group was dominated by the Hooghly group mentioned earlier), the Khadi (also
known as the Abhoy Ashram) group of the old Gandhians led by the East Bengali
Dr P.C. Ghosh, and the Jugantar group of old revolutionaries, led by Surendra Mohan
Ghosh.
137 WBLAP, vol. III, no. 2, 27 September 1948, p. 109.
138 WBLAP, vol. II, no. 1, 17 February 1948, pp. 16–33.
139 N.R. Sarkar to Jawaharlal Nehru, 4 August 1948, N.R. Sarkar Papers, NMML.
140 WBLAP, vol. II, no. 1, 24 February 1948, pp. 130–31, 140, 146; 25 February 1948,
p. 160.
141 For Gandhi’s idea of development, see B. Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual
and Social History, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 46 and passim.
142 WBLAP, vol. V, no. 1, 24 February 1949, pp. 5–26.
145 See for details, R.K. Ray, Industrialization in India: Growth and Conflict in the Private
Corporate Sector 1914–47, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1979. pp. 332–37;
Zachariah, Developing India, pp. 217–26.
147 At the Jaipur session of the Congress in December 1948, an amendment was added to
the economic resolution recommending the establishment of a commission to draft a
five-year plan. This amendment suggested that the aim of the economic policy would
be to establish a society based on the principle of social justice to be achieved through
peaceful means. The Statesman, 19 December 1948.
148 WBLAP, vol. V, no. 1, 1 March 1949, pp. 54–56, 65–67, 72–73.
149 WBLAP, vol. V, no. 1, 3 March 1949, pp. 100–2, 106–9, 116–17.
153 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 17, 21 August, 1949.
154 WBLAP, vol. II, no. 1, 10 February 1948, p. 2.
156 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 8 February 1950, p. 70, 75.
157 Ibid.
158 The Statesman, 13, 20 September, 3 October 1950.
160 WBLAP, vol. I, no.1, 22 February 1950, pp. 230–33, 237–40, 244; 23 February 1950,
pp. 260–63, 273, 276–77; 24 February 1950, pp. 312–13.
161 Benjamin Zachariah has called this the ‘indegenist’ theme in the nationalist discourse
on development. See Zachariah, Developing India, p. 293.
166 B.C. Sinha, Desher Katha [News of the Country], Calcutta, D.M. Library, 1951 [first
published in Sanibarer Chithi in 1950], pp. 86, 88, 92, 93, 102.
172 Shankarrao Deo, ‘The Task Before the AICC – I’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 14 February
1950.
Notes 213
173 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 12 July 1949; also see editorial in Anandabazar Patrika, 6 May
1949.
180 WBLAP, vol. III, no. 1, 7 September 1948, pp. 15–30.
181 WBLAP, vol. III, no.2, 27–28 September 1948, pp. 106–57.
183 WBLAP, vol. V, no. 1, 5 March 1949, pp. 163–65.

186 For some examples of complaints of such misuse, see Chandrika Singh to Gen. Secy.,
AICC, 15 November 1948, AICC Papers, File No. PC-4/1947, Part 1, NMML;
Sandhya Rani Ghosal to Sarat Chandra Bose, 5 May 1949, GB, IB Records, S.No.
205/1930, F.No. 451/30(1), Part VI; Copy of Report of a D.I.O, dated 2 September
1948, GB, IB Records, S.No. 190/1926, F.No. 35/26, WBSA.
187 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 6 February 1950, pp. 14–16, 7 February 1950, pp. 19, 35, 40, 48.
188 See, for example, Report dated 11.6.1949 on the situation in Malda district, GB, IB
Records, S.No. nil/42, F.No. 505/42 (Malda), WBSA.
190 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 2, 22 March 1950, pp. 313–15; 23 March, pp. 337–45.
192 WBLAP, vol. II, 5 October 1950, pp. 268–84.
194 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 9 September 1949, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
195 The Statesman, 1, 2 June 1951. It has been argued that this amendment was in response
to a number of court cases where the court almost literally interpreted Clauses 19 (1)
and 19 (2) guaranteeing ‘freedom of speech’. But subsequent to that, press freedom was
further curbed in another legislation, Press (Objectionable Matters) Act, passed on 23
October 1951, reinvoking provisions of some of the notorious colonial anti-press laws.
See for details, S. Karkhanis, Indian Politics and the Role of the Press, New Delhi:
Vikas, 1981, pp. 84–87.
196 Anandabazar Patrika, 4, 7 October 1951.
201 It was speculated that women were recruited to the Calcutta police force to deal with the
women demonstrators who were often at the forefront of communist processions. See
Acting Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 1 June 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.
202 The Statesman, 3, 5 June 1950.
207 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 21 January, 25 February, 27 July 1949.
208 ‘Intelligence 32’ from U. Mukherji, Deputy Inspector General of Police, IB, West
Bengal, 14 December 1951, GB, IB Records, S.No. 207/28, F.No. 32/28 (1947),
WBSA.
209 See the orders in GB, IB Records, S.No. 76/24, F.No. 353/24, WBSA.
214 Notes
212 WBLAP, vol. IV, 24 September 1951, pp. 214–15, 221–24, 228–29; 25 September
1951, pp. 277–78.
213 See, for example, Sandhya Rani Ghosal to Sarat Chandra Bose, 5 May 1949, inter-
cepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 205/30, F.No. 451/30; Copy of a Calcutta Police
Special Branch Officer’s report dated 20.8.48, GB, IB Records, S.No. 168/26, F.No.
35/26 (Calcutta), WBSA.
214 These included Suresh Chandra Banerji, Pramatha Nath Bandyopadhyay, Hemanta
Kumar Basu, Charu Chandra Bhandari, Bivabati Bose (Sarat Bose’s wife), Haripada
Chatterjee, Annada Prasad Chaudhury, Kanailal De, Bimal Coomer Ghosh,
Debendranath Sen, Sibnath Banerjee and, of course, Dr P.C. Ghosh. WBLAP, vol. IV,
24 September 1951, pp. 234–35; 26 September 1951, p. 311.
215 ‘Samayik prasanga’ [Current issues], Masik Basumati, 28th year, vol. 2, no. 1, Karttik
1356 BS, p. 141; also vol. 2, no. 4, Magh 1356 BS, p. 588.
220 The Statesman, 2, 9 May 1948.
233 See Kalipada Mukherjee’s statement in the Assembly, in WBLAP, vol. V, no. 2, 29
March 1949, p. 346; and Suresh Chandra Banerji’s statement in WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1,
22 February 1950, p. 231.
235 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 July 1949, 24 February 1950.
237 M. Sen, Sediner Katha [Tales of those days], Calcutta, Nabapatra, 1982, pp. 185–98
and passim.
4 The communists: From insurgency to electoral politics

1 See A.K. Roy, Spring Thunder and After, Calcutta: Minerva Associates, 1975; S.
Banerjee, India’s Simmering Revolution: The Naxalite Uprising, London: Zed Books,
1984; R. Ray, The Naxalites and their Ideology, Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1998.
2 B. Chandra, M. Mukherjee and A. Mukherjee, India after Independence 1947–2000,
New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 203 and passim.
3 R. Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, London:
Macmillan, 2007, pp. 96–97.
4 T.J. Nossiter . Marxist State Governments in India. London and New York: Pinter
Publishers, 1988, pp. 16–17, 128–29.
5 See for details, S. Mahajan, Independence and Partition: The Erosion of Colonial
Power in India, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000, pp. 100–15.
6 G. Chattopadhyay, ‘The Almost Revolutions: A Case Study of India in February 1946’
Notes 215
in B. De (ed.) Essays in Honour of S.C. Sarkar, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House,
1976, pp. 427–50; ‘Bengal Students in Revolt Against the Raj, 1945–46’, in A.K.
Gupta (ed.) Myth and Reality: The Struggle for Freedom in India, 1945–47, New Delhi:
Manohar, 1987, pp. 152–71.
7 For details of the Tebhaga movement, see S. Sen, Agrarian Struggle in Bengal
1946–47, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1972; A. Cooper, Sharecropping
and Sharecroppers’ Struggle in Bengal 1930–1950, Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Co, 1988.
8 S. Joshi and B. Josh, Struggle for Hegemony in India 1920–47: Culture, Community
and Power, vol. III: 1941–47, New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage Publications,
1994: 335 and passim.
9 A. Lahiri, Postwar Revolt of the Rural Poor in Bengal: Memoirs of a Communist
Activist, Calcutta: Seagull, 2001, pp. 93–95.

10 ‘Extract from monthly review on Communist affairs in Bengal dated 10th October 1947
(No. 13)’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 7/1926, F.No. 35/26(M.F.) Part XIII, WBSA.
11 ‘Extract from Monthly Review on communist Affairs in West Bengal dated the 10th
November, 1947 (No. 14)’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 7/1926, F.No. 35/26(M.F.) Part
XIII, WBSA.
12 Copy of a DIB officer’s report dated 21.11.47, GB, IB Records, S.No. 285/1926, F.No.
35/26 (Midnapore), WBSA.
13 ‘Draft Annual Administrative Report 1948 – Section VII’, GB, IB Records, S.No.
205/1928, F.No. 32/28(1949), WBSA.
14 ‘Extracts from WBPA dated 15.11.47, 6.12.47, 13.12.47, GB, IB Records, S.No.
285/1926, F.No. 35/26 (Midnapore), WBSA.
15 See, R. Dasgupta, ‘Marxism and Middle Class Intelligentsia: Culture and Politics in
Bengal 1920s–1950s’, Unpublished D.Phil Thesis, Oxford University, 2003.
16 M.R. Masani, The Communist Party of India: A Short History, London: Derek
Verschoyle, 1954, p. 89.
17 Quoted in Guha, India after Gandhi, p. 97.
18 Chandra et al., India after Independence, pp. 203–4.
19 J. Basu (ed.) Documents of the Communist Movement in India, vol. V, Calcutta:
National Book Agency Ltd., 1997, pp. 600–1.
20 J. Basu (ed.) Documents, vol. V, p. 643.
21 ‘Against Imperialist Domination and Imperialist War: For Complete Independence and
People’s Democracy (Political Statement of the West Bengal Committee, C.P.I)’, GB,
IB Records, S.No. 9/1926, F.No. 35/26, Part XI, WBSA.
22 ‘Draft Thesis on the Peasant Situation in Bengal’, 26.5.48, GB, IB Records, S.No.
9/1926, F.No. 35/26, Part XI, WBSA.
23 In real terms this strategy meant: ‘Whenever we find the pulse of the workers going up,
an offensive coming which is acutely resented by the workers or some such thing,
immediately rouse them up and call them out as soon as you find that the workers will
respond to [the] call. During the struggle use every possible means which will be
acceptable to the general body of the strikers, hit your hardest. And then retreat quickly
with forces as intact as possible as soon as you see morale sagging or you find an open-
ing to continue the struggle in some other form.’ Provincial Circular No. 8. T.U.
Resolution (Adopted in Prosect Meeting D/-15.8.48), GB, IB Records, S.No. 9/1926,
F.No. 35/26, Part XI, WBSA.
24 Ibid.
25 Provincial Circular 5 (To all D. Cs & Local Units) ‘Some Observations on the Present
Situation and Our Activity’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 9/1926, F.No. 35/26, Part XI,
WBSA.
26 The Statesman, 4 February, 10 July 1949.
27 ‘Annual Administration Report, 1949 – Section VII’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 205/28,
F.No. 32/28, WBSA.
28 The Statesman, 6 May, 24 September 1948.
216 Notes
30 Anandabazar Patrika, 28 April 1949.
31 The above account of the refugee-student outburst is based on WBLAP, vol. IV, 21
January 1949, pp. 92–108; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 19, 20, 21, 22 January 1949; P.K.
Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the Left Political Syndrome in West
Bengal, Calcutta, Naya Udyog, 1999, pp. 53–54.
32 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 22, 23 January 1949.
33 Details in GB, IB Records, S.No. 206/1928, F.No. 32/28 (1949) K.W. Folder, WBSA.
The details on urban insurgency in Calcutta are from this document, unless otherwise
indicated.
35 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 8, 11 December 1949.
36 R. Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business strategies

and the working classes in Bombay, 1900–1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994, p. 402.
37 R. Chandavarkar, Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class Resistance and the State
in India, c.1850–1950, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 172.
38 ‘Draft Annual Administrative Report 1948 – Section VII’, GB, IB Records, S. No.
205/28, F. No. 32/28 (1948), WBSA.
39 WBLAP, vol. II, no. 2, 16 March 1948, pp. 188–89.
40 Acting Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 30 March 1948, IOR: L/P&J/5/316.
F.No. 32/28(1949), K.W. Folder, WBSA.
44 ‘A short note on the political situation in 24-Parganas and suggestion to tackle it’, GB,
IB Records, S.No. 190/1926, F.No. 35/26, WBSA.
45 ‘Report on Kakdwip situation’, GB, IB Records, File on Kakdwip, no file no., WBSA.
49 ‘Report on Kakdwip situation’, GB, IB Records, File on Kakdwip, no file no., WBSA.
F.No. 32/28(1949), K.W. Folder, WBSA.
53 Anandabazar Patrika, 18 April 1949.
54 From SP, DIB, Midnapore to Special SP, Intelligence Branch, CID, West Bengal, dated
1st/6th December 1950, GB, IB Records, S.No. 7/1926, F.No. 35/26(MF) Part XIII,
WBSA.
56 ‘Short note on communist activities and outrages in the district of Bankura’, GB, IB
Records, S.No. 171/26, F.No. 35/26 (Bankura), K.W. Folder, WBSA.
57 Report dated 11.6.49 on the situation in Malda district, GB, IB Records, S.No. nil/42,
F.No. 505/42 (Malda), WBSA.
58 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 3 August, 25 December 1949.
62 See GB, IB Records, S.No. 206/1928, F.No. 32/28(1949), K.W. Folder, WBSA.
63 D.A. Low, Eclipse of Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 42–46.
64 ‘Statement of Bhupati Ghorui @ [alias] Mete s/o late Rajaram Ghorui of Magurasini,
P.S. Joypur, Bankura’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 171/26, F.No. 35/26 (Bankura), Part I,
WBSA.
65 ‘C.P.I. Activities in the district of Bankura’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 171/1926, F.No.
35/26 (Bankura), Part I, WBSA.
Notes 217
67 ‘C.P.I. Activities in the district of Bankura’, GB, IB Records.
68 See details in ‘List of C.P.I. Outrages in the districts of West Bengal (except Calcutta)
from 1.5.49 to 31.12.49’ GB, IB Records, S.No. 206/1928, F.No. 32/28 (1949), K.W.
Folder, WBSA.
69 See, for example, Krishna Chandra Chattopadhyay to Sarat Chandra Bose, 3 February
1950, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 274/30, F.No. 1451/30(i), Pt VIII,
WBSA. Both Amrita Bazar Patrika and Anandabazar Patrika of this period are full of
such reports.
70 M. Sen, Sediner Katha [Tales of those days], Calcutta, Nabapatra, 1982, pp. 185–98
and passim.
F.No. 32/28(1949), K.W. Folder, WBSA; also, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 17, 18, 20, 22, 24
February, 8 March 1949.
73 These were Bengal Provincial Students’ Federation, Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti,
People’s Relief Committee, Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha, Kshet Majdoor Samity
and Majdoor Naojoan League. ‘Draft Annual Police Administration Report, 1950’,
GB, IB Records, S.No. 210/1928, F.No. 32/28 (1950), WBSA; also Amrita Bazar
Patrika, 6 January 1950.
74 ‘Action under the B.C.L.A. Act 1930 and the P.D. Act 1950 during the year 1950’, GB,
IB Records, S.No. 218/28, F.No. 32/28 (1950), WBSA.
75 A. Lahiri, Postwar Revolt of the Rural Poor, pp. 101, 128.
76 D. Menon, Caste, nationalism and communism in south India, Malabar, 1900–1948,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 194.
77 Nossiter, Marxist State Governments in India, p. 31.
78 ‘Draft Annual Police Administration Report, 1950’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 210/1928,
F.No. 32/28 (1950), WBSA.
80 The Statesman, 17 August 1951; also, M. Franda, Radical Politics in West Bengal,
Cambridge, Mass., London: The MIT Press, 1971, p. 55.
81 The Statesman, 28 January 1950; FR No. 2 for the period ending 28th January 1950,
IOR: L/P&J/5/320. Jim Masselos has reported similar public protests against commu-
nist volunteers disrupting Republic Day celebrations in the mill areas of Bombay. See
J. Masselos, ‘India’s Republic Day: The Other 26 January’, South Asia, vol. XIX,
Special Issue (1996), p. 200.
85 Report by B.B. Sarkar, Commissioner, Burdwan division, dated 20 September. 1949,
GB, IB Records, S. No. 171/1926, F.No. 35/26 (Bankura), WBSA.
86 Copy of an extract from letter No. 7/Com/57, dated 12/13 May 1949, GB, IB Records,
S. No. 9/26, F. No. 35/26, Part XI, WBSA.
87 For incidents of pulling down national flags, see GB, IB Records, Serial No. 171/26,
File No. 35/26 (Bankura), K.W. Folder, WBSA.
88 M. Welch, Flag Burning: Moral Panic and the Criminalization of Protest, New York:
Aldine de Gruyter, 2000, pp. 4–5.
91 WBLAP, vol. IV, 21 January 1949, p. 96.
96 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 16, 18 July, 18 August 1949.
218 Notes
97 Daybhagi, ‘Kayekti Prasna’ [A few questions], Sanibarer Chithi, vol. 23, no. 6, Chaitra
1357 BS, p. 524; B. Sinha, ‘Sapenastangamitamahima’, Sanibarer Chithi, vol. 23,
no. 11, Bhadra 1358 BS, p. 471.
98 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 16, 18 July, 18 August 1949.
100 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 27 November 1947, pp. 51–52.
102 Serial 63. P.C. Information Document 1. From W. Bengal Prov. Committee, CPI, to
S. Yazee, 10 July 1948, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 9/26, F.No. 35/26,
Part XI, WBSA.
104 ‘List of C.P.I. Outrages in Calcutta from 1.5.49 to 31.12.49’, GB, IB Records, S.No.
106 ‘South Calcutta By-election: A People’s Victory’, GB, IB Records, S. No. 9/26, F.No.
35/26, Part XI, WBSA.
107 A.H. Ahmed Kamal, ‘Peasant Rebellions and the Muslim League Government in East
Bengal, 1947–54’, in D. Chakrabarty, R. Majumdar and A. Sartori (eds) From the
Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2007, pp. 203–4, 217.
108 ‘Copy of an intercepted Booklet. “Statement of Policy of the Communist Party of
India”’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 7/1926, F.No. 35/26 (M.F.), Part XIII, WBSA.
109 ‘Extract from C.P.’s report for week ending 13/1/51’, GB, IB Records, S.No. nil, F.No.
1554/32, WBSA.
114 ‘Report On Left Deviation Inside the CPI’, Draft critique submitted by the members of
the Central Committee from Andhra and approved by the Central Committee in its
May–June 1950 meeting, published in May 1950. Documents, vol. VI (1949–51),
pp. 213–392, quotes from pp. 230–31, 392.
115 ‘A Note on the Present Situation in our Party’ prepared by Ajoy Ghosh, S.A. Dange,
S.V. Ghate and circulated on 30.9.50. Documents, vol. VI (1949–51), pp. 393–478,
quotes from pp. 394, 433.
116 Ibid. p. 436.
117 ‘Indian People’s Democratic Revolution And The Communist Party of India’. A draft
policy statement issued by the Polit Bureau of the CPI on November 15. Documents,
vol. VI (1949–51), pp. 479–530, quotes from pp. 489, 524, 527.
118 ‘Letter To All Party Members And Sympathisers’. Issued by the Central Committee of
the C.P.I. on December 18, 1950. Documents, vol. VI (1949–51), pp. 479–538, quotes
from pp. 531, 534.
121 WBPA dated 1 September 1951, GB, IB Records, S.No. 171/26, F.No. 35/26, WBSA.
122 WBPA dated 20 October 1951, GB, IB Records, S.No. 289/26, F.No. 35/26
(24-Parganas) (Pt I), WBSA.
123 WBPA dated 25 August 1951, GB, IB Records, S.No. 289/26, F.No. 35/26
(24-Parganas) (Pt II), WBSA.
126 Chandra et al., India after Independence, p. 204.
128 This has been discussed in detail in Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men; and Chatterji,
‘Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal,
Notes 219
1947–50’, in S Kaul (ed.) The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of
India, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001, pp. 74–110.

1 R. Kothari, ‘The Congress “System” in India’, in Z. Hasan (ed.) Parties and Politics in
India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 40. (Italics original.)
2 WBLAP, vol.V, no. 2, 26 March 1949, pp. 259–60.
3 Quoted in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 5 July 1949.

10 The Statesman, 5, 7 August 1950.
13 See B. Chandra, M. Mukherjee and A. Mukherjee, India after Independence
1947–2000, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 201.
15 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 21 August, 1 December 1949.
16 Kumar Chandra Jana to General Secretary, AICC, 4 December 1948; Atulya Ghosh to
Pattabhi Sitaramiyya, President, AICC, 29 December 1948, AICC Papers, File No. PC-
4/1947, Part 1, NMML.
19 The Statesman, 5, 12 November 1950.
20 The group included such former Congress ministers as Dr Suresh Chandra Banerji,
A.P. Chowdhury and Charu Chandra Bhandari.
22 The Statesman, 16 November, 1950, 6 February 1951.
23 See the debates in WBLAP, vol. III, no. 1, 8–28 February 1951.
25 The Statesman, 3 December 1950, 21 May 1951.
26 The Statesman, 9 December 1950, 25 January 1951.
28 The Statesman, 25, 30, 31 January 1951.
30 The Statesman, 23, 25, 26 February 1951.
33 The Statesman, 17, 18, 19, 27 May, 11, 13, 15, 18 June 1951.
34 The Statesman, 18 May, 16 June 1951.
35 Chandra, et al., India after Independence, p. 201.
36 Suresh Chandra Banerji to Hariharnath Shastri, 24 November 1950, intercepted letter,
37 Memo No. 15482/156.V.51/SB, dated 19 October 1951 from Bihar Criminal
Investigation Department, Patna, GB, IB Records, S.No. 37/17, F.No. 50/17, WBSA.
38 See the reports on these meetings in GB, IB Records, S.No. 37/17, F.No. 50/17, WBSA.
39 See the letters to the editor in The Statesman, 23, 27, 28 June 1951.
220 Notes
43 Asoka [sic] Mehta, ‘The Socialists’ Objectives’, The Statesman, 20 December 1951.
44 See the Government of West Bengal Police Department file No. TJ-589/47–48; I am
indebted to Rajsekhar Basu for this reference. For the historical background of the non-
communist leftist parties in Bengal, see M. Weiner, Party Politics in India: The
Development of a Multi-Party System, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1957, pp. 119–37.
45 Swami Sahajanand Saraswati to Soumyendranath Tagore, 29 October 1947, inter-
cepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 60/26, F.No. 166/26, WBSA.
46 Extract from FR on the political situation in West Bengal for the second half of
December 1947, GB, IB Records, S. No. 195/1930, F. No. 451/30, WBSA.
47 Anandabazar Patrika, 9 July 1948.
48 Weiner, Party Politics in India, p. 140.

49 K.G. Jodh to Sarat Chandra Bose, 23 June 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records,
S.No. 205/1930, F.No. 451/30(1), Part II, WBSA.
50 Radha Binod Pal to Sarat Chandra Bose, 19 June 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB
Records, S.No. 205/1930, F.No. 451/30(1), Part II, WBSA.
51 Mrinal Kanti Bose, General Secretary, United Trade Union Congress, to Sarat Chandra
Bose, 20 June 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 205/1930, F.No. 451/30,
Part VI, WBSA.
52 V.L. Sundarrao to Sarat Chandra Bose, 24 January 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB
53 S.P. Shome to Sarat Chandra Bose, 16 June 1949, intercepted letter; see also Nirod Baran
Das to Sarat Chandra Bose, 18 June 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No.
205/1930, F.No. 451/30, Part VI, WBSA. See also, copy of the intercepted Bengali letter
from ‘A certain Ex-Revolutionary Person of East Bengal’ to Sarat Chandra Bose, 9
August 1949, GB, IB Records, S.No. 199/30, F.No. 451/30(1), Part VII, WBSA.
54 Amiya Nath Bose to Sarat Chandra Bose, 18 June 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB
Records, S.No. 205/1930, F.No. 451/30, Part VI, WBSA.
55 Leela Roy to R.S. Ruiker, 8 July 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No.
195/1930, F.No. 451/30, WBSA.
56 ‘Extract from daily summary of information of West Bengal dated the 15th July 1949
(No. 99)’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 200/26, F.No. 166/26, WBSA.
58 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 27 July 1949; The Nation, 1 September 1949, in A. Bera (ed.)
Interpreting A Nation: Selections from Sarat Chandra Bose’s The Nation, Kolkata:
Netaji Institute for Asian Studies, 2001, pp. 212–13.
59 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 3, 21 August 1949.
61 See for details, The Nation, 20, 29, 30, 31 October 1950 in Bera, Interpreting A Nation,
pp. 215–32.
62 The Nation, 3 April 1950, in Bera, Interpreting A Nation, p. 240.
63 Sarat Chandra Bose to M.A. Kasem, 10 November 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB
64 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 7 October 1949, IOR: L/P&J/5/320. Also see
Weiner, Party Politics in India, p. 145.
65 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 4, 9, 20 August 1949.
66 See the editorial ‘Leftist Unity’ in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 24 August 1949.
67 See, Weiner, Party Politics in India, p. 142.
68 Extract from FR for the second half of December 1947, GB, IB Records, S.No.
195/1930, F.No. 451/30, WBSA.
69 Anil Roy to R.S. Ruikar, 3 March 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No.
195/1930, F.No. 451/30, WBSA.
70 Sarat Chandra Bose to Soumyendranath Tagore, 18 December 1949, intercepted letter,
71 See the two letters: Swami Sahajanand Saraswati to Soumyendranath Tagore, 12
Notes 221
December 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 13/26, F.No. 166/26;
Swami Sahajanand Saraswati to Sarat Chandra Bose, 15 December 1949, intercepted
letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 145/30, F.No. 451/30 (Part II), WBSA.
72 K.T. Shah to Soumyendranath Tagore, 11 December 1949, intercepted letter; Swami
Sahajanand Saraswati to Soumyendranath Tagore, 24 November 1949, intercepted let-
ter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 13/26, F.No. 166/26, WBSA.
73 WBLAP, vol. I, no. 1, 21 February 1950, p. 215.
75 Ram Narain Singh to S.N. Tagore, 30 June 1951, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records,
S.No. 13/1926, F.No. 166/26(1), WBSA. Also see M. Weiner, Party Politics In India,
p. 149.
76 The Statesman, 19, 20 July 1951.

77 The Statesman, 20 August, 12 October 1951.
79 Government of West Bengal, Police Dept File No. s 1103/51; I am indebted to
Rajsekhar Basu for this reference.
81 The Statesman, 26, 30 July, 7, 8, 12, 15, 17 August 1951.
82 The Statesman, 26 July, 15 August 1951.
83 Jugantar, 28 October 1951; The Statesman, 28 October 1951.
84 The Statesman, 3, 7 November 1951.
85 Jugantar, 28 October 1951; Anandabazar Patrika, 31 October 1951; The Statesman, 4,
15 November 1951.
86 Government of West Bengal, Police Dept File No. s 1103/51; I am indebted to
Rajsekhar Basu for this reference.
87 The Statesman, 5, 8 February, 5, 25 November 1951.
91 Swadhinata, 6 January 1952, paper cutting in GB, IB Records, S.No. 200/1925, F.No.
166/26(1), WBSA.
92 See S. Bose, ‘Nation as Mother: Representations and Contestations of “India” in Bengali
Literature and Culture’ in S. Bose and A. Jalal (eds) Nationalism, Democracy and
Development: State and Politics in India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp.
50–75; D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 174–75.
93 See S. Das, Communal Riots in Bengal 1905–1947, Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1993, chapter 5.
94 For details of this Hindu Mahasabha campaign for partitioning Bengal, see S.
Bandyopadhyay, Caste, culture and Hegemony: Social Dominance in Colonial
Bengal, New Delhi: Sage, 2004, chapter 5. Also, J. Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu
communalism and partition, 1932–1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995, chapter 6.
95 This point has been emphasized in J. Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and
India, 1947–1967, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 262–63.
96 Extract from statement of Sril Sailendra Kumar Mukherji, son of Sri Gopal Chandra
Mukherji of Baghati, Police station Magra, Hooghly and of 287, Upper Circular Road,
97 ‘Enclosure to intercepted letter from B.S. Munje to Asoke Kumar Chakravarty, 20
February 1948, GB, IB Records, S.No. 158/20, F.No. 210/20, WBSA.
98 Balai Chand Mukherjee to N.C. Chatterjee, 19 October 1947, intercepted letter, GB, IB
Records, S. No. 65/30, F.No. 103/30, WBSA.
99 Ashutosh Lahiry to N.C. Chatterjee Circular letter to all Provincial Sabha, dated nil,
letter intercepted on 17 October 1947, GB, IB Records, S.No. 65/30, F.No. 103/30,
WBSA.
222 Notes
100 ‘Extract from Secret information dated 13 January 1948’, GB, IB Records, S.No.
35/1923, F.No. 254/23, WBSA.
102 ‘Brief History of Shri Ashutosh Lahiry’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 45/1920, F.No.
210/20, WBSA.
103 Ashutosh Lahiry to N.C. Chatterjee, 11 December 1947, intercepted letter, GB, IB
104 Circular of All India Hindu Mahasabha, New Delhi, dated 23 December 1947, issued by
Ashutosh Lahiry, General Secretary, GB, IB Records, S.No. 35/1923, F.No. 254/23, WBSA.
210/20, WBSA.
106 Anandabazar Patrika, 15 February 1948.

107 Enclosure to intercepted letter from B.S. Munje to N.C. Chatterji, 24 February 1948,
108 Baroda Prasad Ghatak to Ashutosh Lahiry, 7 December 1948, intercepted letter, GB, IB
Records, S.No. 35/1920, F.No. 210/20(1), WBSA.
210/20, WBSA.
111 28 crores of Hindu Brothers and Sisters to General Secretary, All India Hindu
Mahasabha, 9 February 1948, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 35/1923, F.No.
254/23; Dewan Dwarka Khosla, Working President, All India Hindu Students
Federation to Ashutosh Lahiry, 28 August 1950, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records,
S.No. 8/1920, F.No. 210/20 (1), Part II, WBSA.
112 Ashutosh Lahiry to Narendra Nath Dass, Bengal Provincial Hindu Mahasabha, 25
February 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 35/1920, F.No. 210/20 (1),
Part I, WBSA.
113 See the leaflet in GB, IB Records, S.No. 8/1920, F.No. 210/20 (1), Part II, WBSA.
210/20, WBSA.
115 Diwan Chand, Tamluk, to Om Prakash Tyagi, 7 February 1948, intercepted letter, GB,
IB Records, S.No. 22/1923, F.No. 254/23(1); Sarat Chandra Choudhury,
Krishnanagar, to Ashutosh Lahiry, 2 November 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB
Records, S.No. 35/1920, F.No. 210/20(1) Part I, WBSA; Rabindranath Biswas,
Satyendranath Palit, Atul Kumar Biswas to Ashutosh Lahiry, 2 February 1950, inter-
cepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 8/1920, F.No. 210/20(1) Part I, WBSA; Swami
Sankarananda. Manbhum, Purulia, to Ashutosh Lahiry, 24 March 1950, intercepted
letter, GB, IB Records, S.No. 8/1920, F.No. 210/20(1) Part II, WBSA.
116 Ashutosh Lahiry to Ramendranath Ghosh, 19 April 1949, intercepted letter, GB, IB
118 All India Hindu Mahasabha, New Political & Economic Programme, New Delhi, 1948,
Ashutosh Lahiry Papers, Pamphlets, Serial No. 29, NMML.
210/20, WBSA.
121 Mahasabha’s New Stand, New Delhi, June 1949, pp. 5–6, Ashutosh Lahiry Papers,
122 See the transcript of the press conference in GB, IB Records, S.No. 35/1920, F.No.
210/20 (1), WBSA.
123 ‘History sheet of Shri Ashutosh Lahiry’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 45/1920, F.No.
210/20, WBSA.
124 Amrita Bazaar Patrika, 25, 26 December 1949.
125 Mahasabha and Its Ideals, Calcutta, December 1950, pp. 3–7, Ashutosh Lahiry Papers,
Notes 223
126 See, for example, from A.K. Sanyal, Vice President, Ward no. 1, Hindu Mahasabha,
Calcutta, to Ashutosh Lahiry, 19 April 1951, intercepted letter, GB, IB Records, S.No.
2/1923, F.No. 254/23 (1), WBSA.
127 The Statesman, 29, 30 April 1951.
128 ‘The Hindu Mahasabha: Constitution. Aims, Objects and Rules. As amended at the
Special Session of the All India Hindu Mahasabha held at Jaipur on 28th and 29th April,
1951’, Ashutosh Lahiry Papers, Pamphlets, Serial No. 42, NMML.
129 Joya Chatterji has argued that for the Mahasabha the refugees were never a priority.
This certainly does not seem to be the case. See her The Spoils of Partition, pp. 270ff.
130 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 31 January, 7 July 1949.
131 ‘Ext from W.B.P.A. [West Bengal Police Abstract] dt. 16.9.50’; ‘Copy of a report of
Nadia district at 7.9.1950’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 158/20, F.No. 210/20, WBSA.
133 For detailed reports on these tours, see S.P. Mukherji Papers, 1st Instalment, File No. 36,
NMML.
134 ‘Summary of Plan for Refugee Rehabilitation Drawn Up by the Rehabilitation Board
Formed by the Bengal Rehabilitation Organisation’, in S.P.Mukherji Papers, 1st
135 ‘Speech delivered by Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee at Deshbandhu Park, Calcutta on
3rd September, 1950’, S.P. Mukherji Papers, Speeches and Statements, Serial No. 11,
NMML; also, Extract from IB Officer’s report dated 4 September 1950, GB, IB
136 See, Bidhubhushan Chakrabarti to S.P. Mukherji, 27 December 1950; Debranjan
Guhathakurta to S.P. Mukherji, 30 June 1951; Subrata Chakrabarti to S.P. Mukherji,
28 August 1951, S.P. Mukherji Papers, II–IV Instalment, Subject File No. 164,
NMML.
137 FR No. 11 for the period ending 1 June 1950, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
138 See reports in GB, IB Records, S.No. 37/17, F.No. 50/17, WBSA.
139 ‘Draft Manifesto of the Proposed Bharatiya Jan Sangh’, S.P. Mukherji Papers, II–IV
140 The Statesman, 22 October 1951; ‘History sheet of Shri Manmatha Nath Das’, GB, IB
142 Srutinath Chakraborti to S.P. Mukherji, 12 July 1951, S.P. Mukherji Papers, II–IV
Instalment, Subject File No. 164; also see, ‘People’s Party: List of Candidates for West
Bengal Legislative Assembly, S.P. Mukherji Papers, II–IV Instalment, File No. 171,
NMML.
144 See various reports on the campaign in GB, IB Records, S.No. 68/1930, F.No. 140/30,
WBSA.
146 Appendix A. Intelligence Bureau. Subversive Organisations and measures for dealing
with them. Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, dated 18 November 1947, GB, IB
Records, S.No. nil/42, F.No. 505/42 (Birbhum), WBSA.
147 ‘Exct from W.B.P.A. dated 22.11.47’, GB, IB Records, S.No. nil/42, F.No. 505/42
(Malda), WBSA.
148 ‘The Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh’ by Deputy Director (A), dated 18 November
1947, GB, IB Records, S.No. nil/42, F.No. 505/42 (24-Parganas), WBSA.
149 ‘General and Communism (From 15.8.47 to 31.12.47)’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 207/28,
F.No. 32/28 (1947), WBSA.
150 ‘List of RSS workers arrested in specific cases in connection with the Satyagraha
movement staged by the party’; ‘Report on the happenings at Malda in connection with
the Satyagraha movement started by the RSS’ ‘Ext from the weekly confidential report
of Malda district for the week ending 7.2.48’, GB, IB Records, S.No. nil/42, F.No.
505/42 (Malda), WBSA; ‘Statement showing the number of persons detained or
224 Notes
otherwise dealt with for participation in R.S.S.S. movement for the period ending
16.3.49’, GB, IB Records, S.No. nil/42, F.No. 505/42 (24-Parganas), WBSA.
152 Dy HC to HC for India, 9 September 1949, IOR: L/P&J/5/320.
153 For more details on RSS activities see numerous reports in GB, IB Records, S.No.
nil/42, F.No. 505/42 for the districts of 24-Parganas, Malda, Hooghly, Howrah,
Birbhum and Bankura, WBSA.
154 See various reports on such meetings in 1951 in GB, IB Records, S.No. nil/42, F.No.
505/42 for the districts of Malda, Howrah and Bankura, WBSA.
155 Report dated 11.6.1949 on the situation in Malda district, GB, IB Records, S.No. nil/42,
F.No. 505/42 (Malda), WBSA.
156 N.C. Chatterjee to Ashutosh Lahiry, 5 June 1951; Ashutosh Lahiry to N.C. Chatterjee,
10 June 1951; Ashutosh Lahiry Papers, NMML.
157 Debendranath Mukherjee to Mahant Digvijaynath, 15 July 1951, quoted in Chatterji,
The Spoils of Partition, p. 273, fn. 40.
158 For more discussion on this, see J. Chatterji, ‘Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief
and Rehabilitation in West Bengal, 1947–50’, in S. Kaul (ed.) The Partitions of
Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001.
159 ‘Extract from Summary report of a public meeting organised by the Hindu Mahasabha
at Rampurhat Gandhi Park, Birbhum, on 24.3.51 and 25.3.51’; ‘Extract from Summary
Reports of the Bankura District Hindu Mahasabha Conference held at Kenjekura on
16.6.51 and 17.6.51 under the presidency of Mr. N.C.Chatterjee’, GB, IB Records,
S.No. 65/30, F.No. 103/30, WBSA.
160 ‘Extract from proceedings of the meeting held on the municipal ground on 11.5.51 …
Cooch Behar’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 158/20, F.No. 210/20, WBSA.
161 Ashutosh Lahiry to N.C. Chatterjee, 25 November 1951, intercepted letter, GB, IB
Records, F.No. 238/42 (Part I), WBSA.
162 ‘Ext B.P.Abst’, dated 26 May 1951, GB, IB Records, S.No. 65/30, F.No. 103/30,
WBSA.
6 The ‘great adventure’: the election of 1952

3 For more on the enormity of this exercise, see R. Guha, India after Gandhi: The History
of the World’s Largest Democracy, London: Macmillan, 2007, p. 134.
4 The Statesman, 23, 30 November, 14, 29 December 1951. Because of the shortage of
personnel and variation in weather patterns in different parts of the country, the election
could not be conducted simultaneously on one day.
5 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 29 October, 5 November 1951; Jugantar 16 November 1951, 3
January 1952; The Statesman, 14 December 1951.
8 Sibnath Banerjee to Chief Election Commissioner, 26 January 1952, intercepted letter,
9 Bhupesh Chandra Gupta, Detenu, Dum Dum Central Jail, to the Assistant Secretary,
Govt. of West Bengal, Home Dept., Special Section, 12 June 1951, ‘Representation to
be placed before Advisory Board’, GB, IB Records, F.No. K.W. 731–33, WBSA.
11 Jugantar 12, 23 November 1951.
12 Jugantar, 7 November 1951.
13 The Statesman, 22 July, 12 August 1950.
Notes 225
17 See the letters to the editor in The Statesman, 17, 22 November 1951.
19 R. Guha, India after Gandhi, p. 133.
20 B.R. Ambedkar, ‘The Scheduled Castes: Claim to Clear-cut Policy and Programme’,
The Statesman, 23 December 1951.
22 Afingkhor, ‘Barshaphal [Yearly predictions], Sanibarer Chithi, Magh 1357 BS,
vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 361–63.
23 See, for example, letters to the editor in The Statesman, 31 December 1951, 27 January
1952.
25 The Statesman, 29 December 1951. Among other parties, Congress fielded 237 candi-
dates for 238 Assembly seats, KMPP 126, CPI 86, Jan Sangh 85, Socialist Party 63,
Forward Bloc (Marxist) 49, Forward Bloc (Subhasist) 33, Hindu Mahasabha 32,
Revolutionary Socialist Party 14, Ram Rajya Parishad 13, Revolutionary Communist
Party 10, Bolshevik Party 6. For 34 parliamentary seats, Congress fielded 34 candi-
dates, KMPP 11, CPI 9, Socialist Party 7, Jan Sangh 6, Hindu Mahasabha 6, Forward
Bloc (Marxist) 6, Revolutionary Socialist Party 3, Ram Rajya Parishad 2, Forward Bloc
(Subhasist) 2, Bolshevik Party 1, Revolutionary Communist Party 1, other parties 14.
Amrita Bazar Patrika of 31 December 1951 gives slightly different numbers.
26 The Statesman, 20, 23 November 1951; Jugantar, 20 November 1951; Amrita Bazar
Patrika, 20, 22, 30 November 1951.
27 Jugantar, 23 November 1951; see also the other Kafi Khan cartoon, ‘Gandhe tahaar
jaygo chena’ [You can know it by the smell], in Jugantar, 29 December 1951.
28 ‘KHOORO’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 15 November 1951.
29 B.K. Bhadra, Birupaksher Nidarun Abhignata [Birupaksha’s unbearable experience],
Calcutta: The Bihar Sahitya Bhavan Ltd., 1359 BS, p. 225.
30 For some profiles of such independent candidates, see Amrita Bazar Patrika, 4, 7
November 1951.
31 Jugantar, 16, 20, 28, 31 December 1951.
32 Jugantar, 8, 31 December 1951.
34 Jugantar, 26 December 1951.
36 Jugantar, 22 January 1952.
40 Anandabazar Patrika, 12 October 1951; Jugantar,13 October 1951.
41 The Statesman, 4, 6, 12, 21 November, 6 December 1951, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 20, 21
October, 21 November 1951; Jugantar, 21 November 1951.
46 Jugantar, 13 October 1951; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 16, 28, 29 October 1951.
47 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 3, 9, 14 November 1951; The Statesman, 7 November 1951;
Jugantar, 14 November 1951.
49 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 16, 18 November 1951.
50 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 21 October 1951; Jugantar, 5, 19 November 1951; The
Statesman, 25, 29 December 1951.
226 Notes
56 The Statesman,15, 17, 21 December 1951.
57 ‘Extract from Summary Reports of the Bankura District Hindu Mahasabha Conference
held at Kenjekura on 16.6.51 and 17.6.51 under the presidency of N.C.Chatterjee’ in
60 For details, see ‘Copy of an I.B.Officer’s Meeting Report dated 12-12-51 organised by
the “Peoples United Socialist Front” at Desapriya Park’; ‘Extract from Memo No.
3411/1(2)/79–50, dated 21.6.51, from the Suptd. Of Police, Burdwan to the D.I.G.,
Western Range, Chinsurah’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 84/26, F.No. 518/26, WBSA;
‘Report of a meeting organised by the Socialist Party at Krishnagar Town Hall on the
occasion of the Netaji Birth Day Anniversary on 24.1.51’; ‘Copy of a meeting report
dated 24.11.51’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 200/26, F.No. 166/26, WBSA.
61 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 22 November 1951. A Kafi Khan cartoon in Jugantar also
alluded to the single agenda election campaign of all opposition parties. See Jugantar,
16 November 1951.
63 Krishnalal Sridharani, ‘Post-election Portents: Shape of Things to Come’, Amrita
Bazar Patrika, 20 April 1952.
64 WBPA, dated 7.4.51 to 21.4.51, GB, IB Records, S.No. 307/26 (Hooghly), F.No.
35/26, WBSA.
65 Extract from WBPA, dated 2.6.51, GB, IB Records, S.No. 285/26, F.No. 35/26
(Midnapore), WBSA.
66 Extract from WBPA, dated 7.7.51 to 27.10.51, GB, IB Records, S.No. 285/26, F.No.
35/26 (Midnapore), WBSA.
35/26 (Hooghly), WBSA.
35/26 (24-Parganas), Part I and II, WBSA.
35/26 (Bankura), Part III, WBSA.
70 A boxed advertisement in Amrita Bazar Patrika of 27 December 1951 stated: ‘Please
Remember Bad Politicians Are Elected By Good Citizens Who Do Not Vote. So Cast
Your Vote.’ See also Jugantar, 29, 31 October, 24, 29 November 1951, 3 January 1952;
Anandabazar Patrika, 15 October 1951.
71 In one cartoon, for example, the voter appears to be the would-be bride, while the polit-
ical parties are the contesting suitors; in another, the voters become judges in a beauty
pageant, and the party leaders are contestants. Anandabazar Patrika, 25, 31 October
1952.
72 R. Guha, India after Gandhi, p. 139.
73 However, it will be fair to mention that this sort of coverage of Nehru’s election tour
was common in the press across the country and not just the Calcutta newspapers. See
S. Karkhanis, Indian Politics and the Role of the Press, New Delhi: Vikas, 1981, p. 89.
74 Indeed, one letter to the editor mentioned that: ‘Most Indians now regard yours as the
only impartial journal in the country.’ The Statesman, 29 January 1949.
75 For more discussion on this, see R. Jeffrey, India’s Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism,
Politics and the Indian language Press 1977–99, New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2000, pp. 11–13.
76 According to the 1951 census West Bengal had a literacy rate of 24 per cent. Kerala
with 40.7 per cent and Delhi with 38.4 per cent were ahead of West Bengal. But the
overall literacy rate in India was 18.33 per cent. See A. Bagchi, ‘Studies on the
Economy of West Bengal since Independence’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.
XXXIII, Nos. 47–48, November 21–27/28–December 4, 1998, p. 2973. Also
Notes 227
http://infochangeindia.org/200210025866/Education/Statistics/Literacy-rates-in-
India-1951-2001.html, accessed on 10/10/2008.
77 Jugantar, 7, 8 October 1951.
78 Jugantar, 16 December 1951; 1, 21 January 1952.
79 The Statesman, 13, 24 December 1951.
80 Jugantar, 26 January 1951; 1, 21 January 1952.
81 See the Kafi Khan cartoon on election posters, ‘Gandhe tahar jaygo chena’ [You can
know it by the smell] in Jugantar, 29 December 1951; and also the collage of posters on
the Calcutta streets in Jugantar, 22 January 1952.
82 Jugantar, 26 November 1951, 7 January 1952; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 15 January 1952.
83 The details of the election campaign are from: The Statesman, 13, 29, 30, 31 December
1951.
85 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 5, 27 November 1951.
87 For a discussion on this aspect of the Indian electoral laws, see D. Gilmartin, ‘Election
Law and the “People” in Colonial and Postcolonial India’, in D. Chakrabarty, R.
Majumdar and A. Sartori (eds) From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and
Pakistan in Transition, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 55–82.
88 Nehru told the meeting: ‘I am not interested in what caste a particular candidate belongs
to. I am interested in brave young men and women irrespective of their caste and reli-
gion. Those who thought on caste lines should be thrown out of the Congress.’ The
Statesman, 29 December 1952.
89 M. Sen, Sediner Katha [Tales of those days], Calcutta: Nabapatra, 1982, p. 225. Baidya
is one of the higher castes in Bengal.
90 In West Bengal 39 seats were reserved for the Scheduled Castes and 12 for the
Scheduled Tribes in the State Assembly and there were six reserved seats for Scheduled
Castes and two for the Scheduled Tribes in the central parliament. See, Amrita Bazar
Patrika, 4, 14 November 1951; Jugantar, 3, 13 February 1952.
91 The Statesman, 20, 21, 22 November 1951.
93 Jugantar, 8, 21 January 1952.
94 Anandabazar Patrika, 24 October 1951; Jugantar, 7 January 1952.
95 See reports on such meetings in Jugantar, 24 December 1951; Amrita Bazar Patrika,
17 January 1952.
98 J. Chatterji, ‘Of Graveyards and Ghettos: Muslims in Partitioned West Bengal
1947–67’, in M. Hasan and A. Roy (eds) Living Together Separately: Cultural India in
History and Politics, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 233.
99 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 December 1951, 1 January 1952.
101 Jugantar, 27 September 1951; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 16 October, 23, 17 December
1951.
102 Amrita Bazar Patrika,, 29 December 1951; Jugantar, 29 December 1951.
103 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 31 December 1951, 15 January 1952.
106 See, for example, Jugantar, 9, 23, 30 December 1951.
107 Jugantar, 8, 20 October 1951.
109 The Statesman, 30 December 1951; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 26 January 1952.
228 Notes
113 Jugantar, 8, 27, 30 December 1951, 11, 19 January 1952.
114 See reports in Jugantar, 14, 15, 24, 28, 30 December 1951, 1 January 1952.
117 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 31 January 1952. In UP there were 12 women candidates; see
Jugantar, 21 December 1951.
118 J. Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007, p.112, Table 3.1.
120 See the following correspondence: S.P. Mukherji to Vallabhbhai Patel, 4 September
1950; Vallabhbhai Patel to S.P. Mukherji, 12 September 1950; Jawaharlal Nehru to S.P.
Mukherji, 1 December 1950, S.P. Mukherji Papers, 1st Instalment, File No. 33, NMML.
121 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 7, 8 January 1952; Jugantar, 7, 8 January 1952.
122 J. Chatterji, ‘Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West
Bengal, 1947–50’, in S. Kaul (ed.) The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the
Division of India, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001, p. 110.
123 Revolutionary Socialist Party, Bengal Provincial Committee, Circular dated 17 April
1950, GB, IB Records, S.No. 65/30, F.No. 103/30, WBSA.
124 ‘Extract from an IB Officer’s Report dated 18.8.50’, GB, IB Records, S.No. 65/30,
F.No. 103/30, WBSA.
125 The Nation, 14 August 1950, in A. Bera (ed.) Interpreting A Nation: Selections from
Sarat Chandra Bose’s The Nation, Kolkata: Netaji Institute for Asian Studies, 2001,
pp. 153–55.
126 In Dhubulia camp trouble arose when a number of refugee families refused to leave the
camp for rehabilitation elsewhere unless they were told where they were going and
were given sufficient money to survive for at least six months. This was followed by the
stopping of the dole for those families and protests organized by Central Bastuhara
Jubak Sangha, sponsored by the Forward Bloc. See ‘Extract from an IB Officer’s report
dated 14.12.50 re. the situation at Dhubulia Refugee camp’, GB, IB Records, S.No.
84/26, F.No. 518/26, WBSA.
127 See various reports of IB Officers in GB, IB Records, S.No. 84/26, F.No. 518/26 and
S.No. 200/26, F.No. 166/26, WBSA. A protest meeting was organized at Deshapriya
Park in Calcutta under the auspices of the West Bengal Relief and Rehabilitation
Committee, presided over by Hemanta Basu, who had by now left the Congress. For a
report on the meeting, see The Statesman, 27 September 1950.
128 N. Chatterjee, ‘The East Bengal Refugees: A Lesson in Survival’, in S. Chaudhuri (ed.)
Calcutta: The Living City, vol. II, Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 75.
129 Here on 4 February 1950, according to some reports, the police accompanied by 300
‘ruffians’ hired by the zamindars fell upon the refugees, demolished 122 huts and
burned 11 of them. In order to accomplish this, the police allegedly resorted to indis-
criminate lathi-charge and fired tear gas on 10,000 refugees who had started living on
the property for the last ten days. The atrocities were renewed on the next day, when 451
more ‘rooms’ were demolished. See report in GB, IB Records, S.No. 200/26, F.No.
166/26, WBSA.
130 ‘Extract from B.P.A. [Bengal Police Abstract] for the w/e 6.1.51’, GB, IB Records,
S.No. 200/26, F.No. 166/26, WBSA. More details in G. Chakravartty, Coming out of
Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal, Delhi, Calcutta: Bluejay Books, 2005, p. 55.
131 The bill made a distinction between low-priced and high-priced properties, while the
latter had to be vacated, the refugees could retain low-priced properties by paying a
negotiated price. And where they would be evicted, they were to be provided reason-
able alternative accommodation by the state. So the bill tried to strike a balance between
the interests of the landlords and the needs of the refugees.
132 See for details, P. K. Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the
Left Political Syndrome in West Bengal, Calcutta: Naya Udyog, 1999, pp. 64–66,
79–83.
Notes 229
133 ‘Extract from Report dated 18.2.51 regarding a meeting in the Maidan near the foot of
the Ochterlony Monument organised by “United Central Refugee Council” in protest
of the proposed “Eviction Bill”’, GB, IB Records, S.No.200/26, F.No.166/26, WBSA.
134 ‘Extract from an I.B. Officer’s Confidential Report dated 28.3.51’, GB, IB Records,
S.No. 200/26, F.No. 166/26, WBSA; West Bengal Legislative Assembly Proceedings,
vol. III, no. 3, 29 March 1951, 23–29.
135 See various reports in GB, IB Records, S.No. 200/26, F.No. 166/26 and S.No. 37/17,
F.No. 50/17, WBSA. See also Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men, pp. 84–155.
137 The Statesman, 7, 9, 11, 14 November 1951.
138 Jugantar, 14, 18 November 1951.

140 Jugantar, 21, 24, 25 November 1951; The Statesman, 23, 25 November 1951.
141 On this point also see Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, pp. 296–97.
142 See for details, Chakravartty, Coming out of Partition, chapter 2, especially pp. 71–72.
Also see J. Bagchi, ‘Women in Calcutta: After Independence’, in S. Chaudhuri (ed.)
Calcutta: The Living City, pp. 42–49, especially, pp. 42–43.
143 The Statesman, 13 January 1952; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 17 January, 14 February 1952.
146 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 20 February 1952. A crore is ten million – 10,000,000.
150 Jugantar, 14 February 1952.
153 This description of the polling pattern is based on reports in The Statesman, 4, 12, 13,
14, 16, 17 January 1952; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 5, 7, 8, 13 January 1952.
154 See B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, Second Edition, London: Verso, 2006, p. 26. For more on this argument,
see P. Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most
of the World, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, pp. 6ff.
155 The Statesman, 11, 23, 26, 29 January 1952; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 11, 23 January
1952; Jugantar, 23 January 1952.
156 The Statesman, 16, 18 January 1952; Jugantar, 11 January 1952; Amrita Bazar
Patrika, 4, 8, 11, 13, 18 January 1952.
157 The Statesman, 13, 16 January 1952; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 13 January 1952.
159 Jugantar, 16 January 1952; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 16 January 1952.
160 The Statesman, 10, 14, 17 January 1952.
161 See, for example, The Statesman, 10, 13, 16, 18 January 1952; Amrita Bazar Patrika,
4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 17, 18 January 1952; Jugantar, 4, 6,11 January 1952.
162 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 13 January 1952. A mela is fair.
165 See Guha, India after Gandhi, p.134.
168 Ava Maity (Cong), Mira Dutta Gupta (Cong), Ashrumati Debi (Cong-Sch), Purabi
Mukherjee (Cong), and Manikuntala Sen (CPI) went to the Assembly and one more –
Renu Chakravarty (CPI) – to the House of the People. Later in March, Mayadebi
Chetrinee, a Congress female candidate, was elected to the Council of States or the
upper house of the central parliament. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 31 January, 28 March
1952; The Statesman, 14 February 1952.
230 Notes
169 Quoted in Bagchi, ‘Women in Calcutta’, in Chaudhuri, Calcutta: The Living City, p. 42.
170 P. Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, p. 18.
171 They were Harendranath Chaudhury, Prafulla Chandra Sen, Bimal Chandra Sinha,
Bhupati Majumdar, Nikunja Behari Maity, Niharendu Dutta Majumdar and Kalipada
Mukherjee. The other minister in the Roy cabinet, N.R. Sarkar did not contest the elec-
tion. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 16 February 1952.
172 It will be pertinent to point out here that in the next election in 1957 Roy won by a
humiliatingly slim margin of 450 votes in this constituency. See Chatterji, The Spoils of
Partition, p. 301.
174 The full result for the parliamentary election in West Bengal was: Congress-24, CPI-5,
Jan Sangh-2, Hindu Mahasabha-1, RSP-1, USOI-1. Amrita Bazar Patrika, 14 February
1952.
178 Guha, India after Gandhi, p. 146.
179 A. C. Banerjee, ‘Congress and the Problems of West Bengal’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 22
March 1952.
181 ‘Kalopechar dukalam – Bhotranga 1’, Jugantar, 21 January 1952.
183 The Statesman, 15 January, 4 February 1952.
184 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 3 February, 3 April 1952; The Statesman, 12, 13, 19 February
1952.
185 Jugantar, 28, 29 January, 3, 13 February 1952.
186 Jugantar, 3 February 1952; The Statesman, 6 February 1952.
187 The Statesman 19 February 1952.
188 See Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, pp. 195–96. For example, in Garden Reach con-
stituency where the Congress candidate S.M. Abdulla won, he was opposed by eight
other candidates. The Statesman, 26 January 1952.
191 The Statesman 6 February 1952; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 20 February 1952.
193 Ashutosh Lahiry to V.D. Savarkar, 10 April 1952, Ashutosh Lahiry Papers, NMML.
194 B. R. Majumdar, ‘Whither Bengal’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 13 February 1952.
195 The Statesman, 25 February, 30 March 1952.
196 See The Statesman, 1, 19, 25, 26 January, 11, 21, 25 February, 5, 6, 8, 9, 19, 27, 29
March 1952; also see Jugantar, 6, 14, 15, 16 February 1952.
201 Quoted in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 24 February 1952.
204 Quoted in K. Sridharani, ‘Post-election Portents: Shape of things to come’, Amrita
Bazar Patrika, 20 April 1952. Also see The Statesman, 22 March 1952.
205 For a discussion on this issue, see K. Baynes, ‘A Critical Theory Perspective on Civil
Society and the State’, in N. L. Rosenblum and Robert C. Post (eds) Civil Society and
Government, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 123–145.
207 The Statesman, 1, 7 March 1952.
Notes 231
212 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 19, 20 March 1952.
213 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 27 March 1952; The Statesman, 27 March 1952.
214 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1, 10, 17 24 April, 4 May 1952; The Statesman, 28 March 1952.
215 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 28, 30 March, 1 April 1952.
216 Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, p. 225.

222 The Statesman, 18 March, 19 April 1952.
223 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 27 April 1952.
224 For a critical analysis of B.C. Roy’s grand development projects in the 1950s, see
Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, pp. 254–57.
225 First of all, much to the dislike of Nehru he had his two discredited and defeated minis-
ters Prafulla Sen and Kalipada Mukherjee returned through the upper house of legisla-
tive council and inducted them into his cabinet in the name of experience. Then to cast
his patronage network far and wide he constituted a rather large cabinet consisting of 14
Cabinet Ministers and 16 Deputy Ministers. And then he appointed another defeated
candidate Renuka Ray as the Rehabilitation Minister, despite the fact that she happened
to be the wife of the Chief Secretary S.N. Ray. Nehru did not like this. See S.
Chakrabarty, With Dr.B.C. Roy and Other Chief Ministers, Calcutta: Benson’s, 1974,
pp. 200–1.
226 According to his close associates, Roy ruled the province like a ‘benevolent dictator’.
See, S. Chakrabarty, With Dr. B.C. Roy, p. 71.
227 For three different versions of the history of this period, see N. Sengupta, Bengal
Divided: The Unmaking of a Nation (1905–1971), New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2007,
pp. 233–35; P. Chatterjee, ‘The Political Culture of Calcutta’, in S. Choadhuri (ed.)
Calcutta: The Living City, pp. 30–32; and Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, chapter 5.
228 For the emergence of a regional identity in UP after 1947, see G. Kudaisya, Region,
Nation, “Heartland”: Uttar Pradesh in India’s Body Politic, New Delhi, Thousand
Oaks, London: Sage Publications, 2006, chapter 7.
229 See for details, L. A. Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement, 1876–1940, New
York and London: Columbia University Press, 1974; R.K. Ray, Social Conflict and
Political Unrest in Bengal, 1875–1927, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984; G.
Bandyopadhyay, Constraints in Bengal Politics, 1921–41: Gandhian Leadership,
Calcutta: Sarat Book House, 1984.
230 I have discussed this in detail in Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social Dominance in
Colonial Bengal, New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage Publications, 2004, chap-
ter 5.
231 Dy HC to HC for UK in India, Calcutta, 11 February 1948, IOR London: L/P&J/5/320.
232 See Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, p. 304.
235 Jugantar, 25, 28 December 1951; Samayik Prasanga’ [Current affairs], Masik
Basumati, 27th year, vol. 1, no. 4, Sraban 1355 BS, pp. 531–36; ‘Desher Katha’ [News
of the Country], Masik Basumati, 28th year, vol. 2, no. 2, Agrahayan 1356 BS,
pp. 267–70; vol. 2, no. 4, Magh 1356 BS, p. 406. The Nation, 19 April 1949, in Bera,
Interpreting A Nation, pp. 90–91.
236 Samayik Prasanga’ [Current affairs], Masik Basumati, 27th year, vol. 1, no. 5, Bhadra
1355 BS, p. 683.
232 Notes
239 For discussion on these developments, see Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition,
pp. 304–6; Sengupta, Bengal Divided, p. 234.
240 I have discussed this in ‘Introduction’, in S. Bandyopadhyay (ed.) Bengal: Rethinking
History. Essays in Historiography, New Delhi: Manohar 2001, pp. 33–34.
Conclusion
1 P. Chatterjee, ‘Introduction – The Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-
State’, in P. Chatterjee (ed.) Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State,
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 4–5.
2 I have recently discussed this pluralist aspect of Indian nationalism in From Plassey to
Partition: A History of Modern India, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004, chapters 5
and 7.
3 See R. Poole, Nation and Identity, London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
4 See D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
5 Gandhi argued in an interview on 29 October 1944 with N.G. Ranga that: ‘Every
Congressman must make up his mind to make the Congress an honest organization, and
therefore a kisan organization. As for rights they should follow as a natural corollary
from the performance of service. Otherwise there is only usurpation.’ The Collected
Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. LXXVIII, New Delhi: Publications Division,
Government of India, 1979, pp. 248–49.
6 G. Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 212.
7 See R.K. Ray, Exploring Emotional History: Gender, Mentality and Literature in the
Indian Awakening, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.
8 T. Banerjee, Ganadevata: The Temple Pavilion, tr. Leela Roy, Bombay: Kutub-
Popular, 1969, p. 253.
9 See A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London and New York: Routledge,
1998, p. 207.
10 Jugantar, 14 February 1952.
11 N.R. Sarkar, ‘The General Election and the Congress: Before & After’ (1952), N.R.
Sarkar Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.
12 See analysis of election results in, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 20 April 1952.
13 However, this programme of modernity also incorporated some of the Gandhian ideals,
like the Panchayati Raj or village self-government. See for details, P. Chatterjee,
Wages of Freedom.
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Index
24-Parganas 19, 21–22, 50, 115–16, 127, Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam 52, 69,
162, 168, 170–72, 174, 176–77 133–34
‘A. Zhadanov thesis’ 107, 121
Abdulla, Janab 55
Acharya, Sudhanshu 109 Badruddoja, Syed 50, 51, 55, 59, 98
Acheson, Dean 178 Bahar, Habibullah 34
Ahmad, Muzaffar 155, 162 Baksh, Khuda 55
Ali, Aruna Asaf 161 Bandyopadhyay, Pramatha Nath 90
All-India Hindu Mahasabha (AIHM) 11, Banerjee, Anil Chandra 175
15, 23, 34, 49, 57–58, 60–61, 72, 80, Banerjee, Manik 102
106, 129, 143–49, 150–53, 158, 175; Banerjee, Mrityunjoy 25
election campaign 166, 177–78, 182; Banerjee, Nripen 125
riot of 1950, the role in 53–55 Banerjee, Satyapriya 137–38, 161, 168,
All-India Kisan Sabha 137 169, 172, 174
All India Progressive Writers’ Association Banerjee, Sibdas 138
98 Banerjee, Sibnath 21, 25, 88, 97, 98, 100,
Ambedkar, Dr B.R. 60, 156, 165, 176 139, 140, 154
Amin, Nurul 51 Banerjee, Dr Srikumar 63, 95, 104, 175
Amrita Bazar Patrika 27, 30, 32, 37, 38, Banerjee, Tarasankar 17
53, 62, 63, 67, 68, 71, 83, 84, 93, 94, Banerji, Dr Suresh Chandra 14, 18, 21, 25,
95, 100, 104, 110, 123, 124, 129, 130, 43, 76, 79, 87–88, 92, 97, 101, 111–12,
157, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 171, 173, 123, 132, 134–35, 141–42, 159, 169, 176
175 Bankura 34, 47, 115, 118–19, 127, 131,
Anandabazar Patrika 75, 82, 94, 95, 123, 147, 162
124, 162 Bargadar Bill 122
Andaman Islands 35 Barisal 51, 55, 202
Anderson, Benedict 3, 172 Basu, Hemanta Kumar 90, 159
Andhra 126, 134 Basu, Jyoti 18, 21, 30, 43, 74–75, 87, 96,
Ansars 50 100–1, 120, 141–42, 169, 180
Anushilan Samiti 34 Bengal Chamber of Commerce 89
Assam 35, 48, 57, 151, 182, 199 Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha 106
Assembly, West Bengal Legislative 21, Bengal Provincial National Trade Union
24–27, 30, 38, 41, 43, 46–48, 55, 58, 62, Congress (BPNTUC) 46, 112
63, 72–75, 79, 80, 87–88, 91–92, Bengal Provincial Student Federation
96–100, 102, 106, 115, 123–24, 132, (BPSF) 111–13; also see Student
134, 136, 140, 142, 144, 154–55, 157, Federation of India
167, 169, 174, 176–77, 179–80, 185 Bengal Provincial Trade Union Congress
Associated Chamber of Commerce of (BPTUC) 43, 76, 110, 112–14, 200
India 44 Bengal Volunteer Group 34, 137, 182
Index 241
Benthall, Sir Paul 44, 89 Calcutta 39, 44, 45, 47, 48, 62, 66, 89, 94,
Berhampore 171 106, 122, 124, 129, 130, 135, 138, 139,
Bhabha, Homi 7 142, 143, 148, 149, 150, 152, 154, 158,
Bhadra, Birendra Krishna 13; also see 172, 177, 180–81; anti-Security Bill
Birupaksha meetings in 75–76; black marketeering
bhadralok 5, 16, 32, 33, 34; leaders 119; in 26–27; by-election in 79–84, 137,
migration 34 162; celebration of independence in
Bhandari, Charu Chandra 19, 26, 83, 90, 9–11, 14–15; communal riots in 48–59;
135 communist insurgency in 108, 110–14;
Bharat Mata 16–17; also see mother epidemics in 31–32; food prices in
goddess 18–20; industrial unrest in 40–42;
Bharatiya Jan Sangh 150–51 public life in 42, 120; refugees in

Bhattacharya, Nirmal 141 35–37, 167–70
Bhopatkar, L.N. 146 Calcutta Corporation 26–29, 40, 112, 180
Bhowmik, Bina (formerly Das) 88, 90, 92 Calcutta High Court 100, 127
Bihar 21, 35, 158, 164, 182, 183 Calcutta Municipal Act of 1951 180
Birbhum 47, 80, 171, 172 Calcutta Tramway Company 40, 111–12
Birla, M.P. 24 caste 164–65; also see Scheduled Castes
Birupaksha 13–14, 22, 27–29, 30, 48, 104, Chakrabarti, Prafulla 32
157, 176 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 3, 5
Bishnupur 171 Chakrabarty, Renuka 162
black marketeering 26–29; marketeers 27, Chakrabarty, Satish Chandra 90
62 Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan 114, 115
Bohurupee 67 Chandernagore 52
Bolshevik Party of India 137, 142, 159 Chandra, Bipan 5, 71, 105
Bombay 10, 23, 68, 138–39, 181 Chatterjee, N.C. 144, 146, 152, 153, 166, 178
Bombay Plan 90 Chatterjee, Partha 3, 72, 174
Bongaon 49, 51, 55 Chatterji, Haripada 90, 96
Bora-Kamalapur 115–16 Chatterji, Joya 4, 56, 153, 168
Bose, Amiya Nath 138, 141 Chattopadhyay, Bankim Chandra 15
Bose, Aurobinda 141 Chaudhuri, Tridib 75, 140
Bose, Bivabati 141 China 123, 124, 142; Chinese 178;
Bose, Mrinal Kanti 43, 137, 168 Chinese way 126
Bose, Sarat Chandra 10–11, 18, 53, 61, 64, Chintaman Deshmukh Award 92
94–95, 144, 149, 182, 185; and left unity cholera 30–31
124–25, 137–41; and Security Bill Chowdhuri, Harendra Nath 78
75–76; death of 140; in South Calcutta Chunder, Nirmal Chandra 180
by-election 79–82 Christians 149
Bose, Netaji Subhas Chandra 11, 64, 81, citizens 5, 75, 156, 162, 164, 171, 176,
82, 142, 159 179; citizenship 5, 12, 13, 123, 151, 167,
Bose, Sir S.M. 96 168, 173, 185
Boundary Commission 11, 16, 72 civil liberties 82, 94–95, 100, 103, 114,
Brahman, Ratan Lal 97, 98, 101 121, 123–25, 127–8, 138, 155, 162, 179
British Acting Deputy High Commissioner civil society 157, 197
98 cloth shortages 19–20, 26, 63, 89, 101, 162
British Deputy High Commissioner 89 Cominform 107, 121, 127
Brown, Judith 86 Commonwealth 18, 137–38, 141–42
Burdwan 21, 47, 52, 55, 78, 115, 118, 127, communal relations 10–11, 34–35, 49;
170, 172–73 riots 7, 11, 38, 48–59, 65, 97, 149, 166;
Burman, Mohini Mohan 78 communalists 181
Burrabazar 19 communism 91, 103, 177; communists 7,
Burrows, F.J. 72 41, 47–50, 56, 61–63, 68, 76, 80, 82, 84,
By-election 125, 129; also see South 94–98, 101, 106–7 115, 120, 122–25,
Calcutta by-election 140, 153, 163, 165, 168, 178, 180–81
242 Index
Communist Party of India (CPI) 15, 18, Dacca 34, 49, 50–52, 143
61–62, 75, 105–28, 137–39, 141–43, Dalit 60–61, 67, 165, 176, 187; also see
152, 155, 159, 169, 182; and rural Scheduled Castes
insurgency 115–20, 186; and urban Dange, S.A. 126, 128, 143
insurgncy 110–15; banning of 61–62, Darjeeling 172, 176
110; election campaign 161–64; Das, Radhanath 176
election results 175, 177–78; Second Das, Suresh Chandra 80, 82, 84
Congress 61, 108 Das Gupta, Dr Satish Chandra 33, 52
Communist Party of the Soviet Union Dasgupta, Khagendranath 92, 93
(CPSU) 105, 121 Dasgupta, Purnananda 139
Congress, Indian National 7, 9, 11–14, 17, Dasgupta, Purnendu 168
18–22, 25–6, 29–30, 43–45, 48, 54, Dasgupta, Ranajit 107

58–70, 71–104, 106, 107, 109, 113, De, Kanailal 90, 92, 98
121–22, 124–25, 128, 129–36, 137–38, Debi, Anila 75
139, 141, 143, 144, 145, 151, 155, 157, decolonization 1, 2, 4, 6; definition of 1;
158, 165, 166, 167, 179–83, 187; All- process of 5
India Committee (AICC) 14, 19, 83, 86, Defence of India Act 74
133, 158–9, 180–1; Assembly Party 78, Delhi Agreement (Pact) 56–58, 97, 15
84, 85, 123, 174; backbenchers 88–90, democracy 6, 7, 124, 129
92–93, 185; Burdwan group of 73; Democratic Front 132, 134
defection from 131–34; dissident groups Deo, Shankarrao 71, 86, 90, 94
within 133; election campaign 159–61, Duberbheri 100, 115–16
167; election results 174–76, 186; Dutta-Majumdar, Niharendu 96
factionalism 73, 77–80, 83–87, 158,
166, 174, 180–82, 209, 212; flag 14, 160 East Bengal 56, 60, 109, 151, 170;
; Gandhian Congressmen 73, 88–93, Congress leaders from 73, 77, 209; East
100, 104, 131; government 61, 73, 75, Bengalis 83, 87, 151; Hindu minorities
79, 84, 95, 99, 107, 109, 127, 128, 142; in 33–35, 37–38, 51–55; refugees from
Hooghly faction of 73, 77, 79, 87, 174, 36–38, 57–58, 149–51
212; Hooghly-Midnapur faction of 132, East Bengal Minorities Welfare Committee
174; ideological heterogeneity within 36
87, 91–92; ideals 93, 132, 134–35; East Pakistan 11, 19, 24, 32, 33–34, 37, 41,
Jaipur resolution of 132, 134; Jaipur 48, 50, 54–56, 60, 125, 144, 149, 150,
session of 90, 92, 213; Jugantar group of 166; East Pakistani 56
73, 87, 212; Khadi group of 73, 77, 79, election 7, 80, 86, 126–28, 132–33, 141,
87, 131, 212; landlord lobby within 169; 154–83
leaders 76, 83, 185; leaders from East Election Commission 154, 157
Bengal 73, 77, 83, 87 209; Midnapur Election Commissioner, Chief 154–55,
group of 73; ministers 73, 75, 81; 171, 173
organization 86–87, 97, 131; split in employment 23–25
133; West Bengal Provincial Committee epidemics 30–32, 38; also see cholera and
(WBPCC) 78–79, 81, 83–87, 131–32, plague
158, 166, 167, 209; workers 36, 136,
115; Working Committee 85–86, 92, famine 150; of 1943 29, 30, 37, 105
131 First Five Year Plan 19, 182, 194
Congress Democratic Front 131 flag 9, 10, 14, 15–16, 62, 65, 82, 106–7,
Constituent Assembly 14, 15, 18 118, 123, 127, 152, 162; black 127, 183;
Constitution of India 18, 58, 60, 86, 97, 98, burning of 95
100, 114, 127, 139, 152, 156, 165, 169, food 23, 89, 162; prices of 18–20, 63,
174 182; shortage of 18–19, 21, 25, 38,
Cooch Behar 22, 23, 67, 153, 161, 174, 101
199 Forward Bloc 61, 80, 124, 137–40, 182
corruption 26–30, 77, 84, 180, 182 Forward Bloc (Subhasist) 159, 168–69,
crime 39 175–76
Index 243
Forward Bloc (Marxist) 18, 138, 140, 142, Howrah 10, 20, 39, 47, 51–52, 56, 58, 87,
159, 161, 168, 172, 175–76 99, 115, 118–19, 133, 152, 168, 172–73
freedom 3, 4, 6; experiences of 5; idea of hunger marches 22–23
14; representations of 5, 7 Huq, Fazlul 51
Hyderabad 177
Gandhi, M.K. 10–11, 12, 14, 16, 33, 48,
49, 64, 65, 73, 76, 86, 88, 90–92, 138; Independents 175–76
assassination of 49, 145–46, 152; ideal Indian Civil Service (ICS) 72
of 43, 86, 89–93, 131, 133, 136, Indian Jute Mill Association (IJMA) 24,
185–87 43
Gandhians 71, 73–74, 79, 88, 100, 104, Indian National Army (INA) 81, 106
131, 157 Indian National Trade Union Congress

Ganguly, Bepin Behary 92 (INTUC) 44, 91, 112, 120, 134, 200
Ghatak, Ritwik 67, 207 India Peoples’ Theatre Association 98
Ghate, S.V. 126 Indo-Pakistani Trade Pact 24
Ghose, Bimal 97 Industrial Disputes Act 43
Ghosh, Ajoy 126–27, 143 Industrial relations 40–44
Ghosh, Amar Krishna 78, 134 Industrial tribunals 43–44, 88, 112
Ghosh, Atulya 79, 81, 83, 87, 131–32, 158, Inflation 18–21, 25, 38, 89
166, 167, 212 Inter-Dominion Agreement 35–36
Ghosh, Dr Prafulla Chandra 9, 13, 15, 20, Inter-Dominion talks 35
34, 47, 62, 72–80, 85, 87, 90, 93, 97–98,
101, 109, 131–35, 153, 169, 176, 212 Jalpaiguri 25, 173, 174
Ghosh, Surendra Mohan 77–79, 83, Jan Sangh, Bharatiya 150–51, 153, 158,
86–87, 212 168, 175–76
Godse, Nathuram 146 Jessop 41
Goenka, Sir Badridas 45 Jinnah, M.A. 33, 60, 67
Golwalkar, M.S. 152 Joardar, Jyotish 168, 169
Gorkha League 175–76 Joshi, P.C. 109, 125–26
Government of India Act of 1935 154 Jugantar 98, 157, 162, 163, 164, 171, 173,
Griffiths, Sir Percival 171 175
Guha, Ramachandra 105, 175 jute, cultivation of 25; industry 24–25, 40,
Gupta, Atul Chandra 183 44, 55, 76; tribunals 43
Gupta, Bhupesh 143, 155
Gupta, J.C. 84, 88 Kakdwip 115–18
Gupta, Partha Sarathi 1, 6 Kamalpur 116
Gupta, Sadhan 168 Katju, Dr Kailash Nath 38, 46, 58, 179
Khan, Kafi 157, 163
Haldar, Gopal 12 Khan, Liaquat Ali 33, 52, 55–56, 60
Hashem, Abul 48, 63, 74, 91 Kharagpur 164, 171
Himatsingka, Prabhudayal 78 Khare, N.B. 55, 148, 153
Hind Mazdoor Sabha 200 Kher, B.G. 181
Hindu 2, 3, 10–11, 15, 33–34, 37–38, 72, Khulna 2, 49, 51, 53, 60, 149, 167, 199,
143–44 146–49, 151–52, 166; and the 202
riots of 1950 48, 51, 53–54, 56–59; Kidwai, Rafi Ahmed 131
leaders 151; minorities 50, 53, 60, 200; Kisan Sabha 47, 117, 139
rashtra 148–49, 186 Kothari, Rajni 129
Hindu Code Bill 60, 148 Kripalani, Acharya J.B. 12, 130–36, 142,
Hindustan Standard 162 153, 155
history 67, 69 Kripalani, Sucheta 82
Hooghly 47, 51–52, 54, 64, 79, 115–16, Krishak Mazdoor Praja Party 134–36,
127, 162, 168–69, 174, 176 141–42, 159, 166, 169, 174–76, 181
House of the People 154, 175, 177; also Krishak Praja Mazdoor Party 87, 100, 131,
see parliament 134, 153
244 Index
Krishak-praja-mazdoor raj 6, 12, 66, 79, 72, 80, 146–47, 153, 182, 205; and
81, 88, 90–92, 97, 104, 108, 131, 135, election campaign 158, 166, 176; Jan
137, 185 Sangh 150–51; refugees 58, 149–50, 168
Krishak Samitis 116, 118, 162 Mukhopadhyay, Subhas 17
Munje, B.S. 144, 146
Lahiri, Abani 107, 121, 186 Murshidabad 2, 11, 19, 22, 25, 30, 34, 49,
Lahiri, Somnath 125 50, 76, 150, 164, 171, 174
Lahiry, Ashutosh 49, 54–56, 59, 146–48, Muslims 3, 10–11, 15, 22, 33, 34 67 72,
152, 153, 177 148–49, 151, 187; and the riots of 1950
Left Consolidation Front 142 48–59; candidates in election 166, 177;
Loomba, Ania 186 exodus of 55–56, 204; minorities 38,
Low, D.A. 119 48–49, 57, 59; slums 50–51; voters

166, 172, 174
Madras 177, 179 Muslim League 11, 29, 48, 50, 60–61, 63,
Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti 100, 102, 114, 72, 74, 98, 101, 106, 125, 129, 143–44,
118 165–66
Maitra, Pundit Lakshikanta 49 Mymensingh 125
Majumdar, Bhupati 77, 78
malaria 30 Nabadwip 32–33, 149
Malda 21, 25, 118, 152 Nadia 2, 19, 21, 25, 30, 32, 49, 53, 127,
Mandal, Jogendra Nath 60–61, 165, 176 150, 164, 166, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174
Mao Zedong 107 Nagas 171
map 16–17 Nahar, Bijoy Singh 87
Marwari 19, 77 Namasudras 49–50, 53, 60
Masik Basumati 11, 12, 18, 53, 56, 65, 67, Narayan, Jayaprakash 45, 58, 124–25, 130,
101 136, 139
Mazumdar, Niharendu Dutta 124 Naskar, Hem Chandra 78, 176
media 34, 49–50, 82, 122, 161–63, 182; nation 5, 6, 9, 13–15, 69
also see press national anthem 15; flag 14–15, 94–95;
Mehta, Asoke 130, 136, 139 history 16, 67–69
middle classes 14, 54, 61, 81, 102, 104, National Planning Committee 90
135, 142, 157, 174; and price rise 20, nation-state 3, 6, 11, 14–17, 39, 49, 53, 59,
22; the communists 120–21, 123–24, 63, 69, 77, 123, 156, 160, 177, 185
126; discontent 62–68, 70, 184, 187; Nazimuddin, Khwaja 34
frustration of 39; life 22; morality 29; Nehru, Jawaharlal 1, 14–15, 19, 20, 23, 26,
refugees 37–38; unemployment 23 33, 37, 44–46, 58, 60, 61, 63, 66, 69, 74,
Midnapur 12, 47, 52, 64, 68, 73, 115, 118, 75–76, 88, 92, 94, 95, 108, 109, 110,
150, 161–62, 164, 171, 174, 177 113–14, 126, 133, 134, 140, 180, 181,
minorities 7, 35, 48, 51–60, 98, 107 182, 205, 232; and Calcutta riots 49–53,
Mitter, J.P. 33 55–56; Congress factionalism 83–86;
modernity 2–7, 14, 16, 71, 104, 145, 148, election campaign 154, 156, 158–61,
149, 151, 162, 164, 169, 171, 178, 181, 163–64, 166, 168, 170; press freedom
184–87 97–98; ideas of 4, 6, 71, 185, 187
Moscow 107, 123, 177 Neogy, K.C. 35, 36, 58
mother goddess 143; also see Bharat Mata Nikhil Banga Bastuhara Karma Parishad
Mukherjee, Ajoy 12, 18 35, 110, 168
Mukherjee, Biswanath 162 Noakhali riot 33, 34
Mukherjee, Debendranath 146, 147, 161
Mukherjee, Dr H.C. 179 Orissa 35, 48, 182, 199
Mukherjee, Kalipada 45, 47, 77, 87, 111, Osman, S.M. 48
124, 232
Mukherjee, Dr Radhakamal 150 Pakistan 24, 33, 49, 52, 54–59, 144, 172,
Mukherjee, Radha Kumud 150 202, 204
Mukherji, Dr Shyama Prasad 37, 44, 49, Pal, Dr Radha Binod 129, 137, 158
Index 245
Pandey, Gyanendra 2 Ray, Renuka 167
parliament 49, 50, 52, 56, 58 refugees 3, 11, 31–38, 66–67, 92, 157,
Partition 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, 17, 23, 31, 33, 34, 164, 167–70, 199, 202, 204, 229; and
52, 56, 58–60, 64, 67, 72, 89, 92, 105–6, Calcutta riots 50–52, 54–55, 57–58;
144, 147–49, 151–53, 182; economics of communists 110–11, 128; food situation
23–25 22–23; Hindu mobilization of 149–51
Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai 37, 45, 51, 72, Refugee Eviction Bill 150, 169, 229–30
75, 76, 82, 94, 101, 122, 124, 138, 168; refugee policy 33, 36–38, 167–70
death of 132 Republic Day 122, 127
peasant 20–21, 61–62, 124, 194; Revolutionary Communist Party of India
movements 115–20, 186; voters (RCPI) 41, 121, 137–38, 140, 159,
171–72 168–69, 175–76

Peasants and Workers Party 139 Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) 18,
People’s United Socialist Front (PUSF) 75, 137–38, 140, 142, 159, 168, 175
140–41, 158–59, 165, 176 Roy, Anil 140
plague 31–32 Roy, Annada Sankar 10, 12, 34, 48
Planning Commission 19 Roy, Dr Bidhan Chandra 15, 21, 23, 30,
Police 47, 49, 50, 72, 75–76, 79, 80, 155, 36, 37, 41, 94, 138, 140, 183, 232; and
162, 168, 169, 180; budget 98–99, civil liberties 96–99, 101–2, 155;
100–1; handling of communist communal riots 50–51, 53, 58;
insurgency 110–14, 116, 118, 119, 186; corruption 27, 29; dealing with the
intelligence 8, 54, 55, 100–1, 125, 146, communists 61–63, 109, 113, 120;
163; role in communal riots 51, 53–54 election 155, 166, 169–72, 174, 177,
Politburo 126, 127 179–81, 183; factional rivalries 73,
political prisoners 120–21, 142, 155, 76–79, 83–86; labour problem 44–46;
179–81 political prisoners 155, 179–80; South
Praja Socialist Party 136 Calcutta by-election 76–81, 83; ideas of
Prasad, Rajendra 36 economic development of 91–92;
Prakasam, T. 131 leadership of 187
Presidency Jail 82 Roy, Kiran Shankar 48, 62, 78–80, 87, 96,
press 50, 63, 76, 97–98, 100; also see 99, 110, 115, 123
media Roy, Leela 80, 138, 140, 161, 168, 169
Preventive Detention Act 1950 55, 121, Roy, M.N. 100, 177
97, 179 Ruikar, R.S. 140
Progressive Workers’ Bloc 159 Russia 121, 125, 141, 142, 177
Progressive Writers’ & Artists’ Association Russians 123, 124, 126
102
Punjab 2, 144, 158 Saha, Meghnad 150, 179–80
Purulia 183 Saksena, Mohanlal 36, 199
Sanibarer Chithi 28, 66, 93, 124, 156
Radcliffe, Sir Cyril 2; also see Boundary Santhal 118, 119, 125, 162; voters 172
Commission Saraswati, Swami Sahajanand 137, 140
railway strike 45, 120 Sarkar, Jadunath 12, 200
Rajagopalachari, Chakravarti 9, 48 Sarkar, Nalini Ranjan 21, 23, 25, 29, 73,
Rajbhoj, P.N. 176 78, 83–84, 88–93, 99, 102, 187
Rajshahi 51, 125 Savarkar, Veer 15, 53, 147–48, 177
Ram, Jagjivan 133 Scheduled Caste Federation 60, 165,
Ram Rajya Parishad 158, 175 176–77
Ramaswamy, Sumathi 17 Scheduled Castes 60–61, 78, 154, 165,
Ranadive, B.T. 61, 107–8, 125–26 172–74, 176–77
Ray Chaudhuri, S.C. 29 Scheduled Tribes 154, 165
Rao, Rajeswar 126 Sealdah station 36, 37, 51, 52, 110, 170
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 15, Second World War 25, 29
143, 145, 147, 150–53 Sen, Bhowani 125
246 Index
Sen, Debendranath 78, 90, 92, 104 Travancore-Cochin 177
Sen, Kshiti Mohan 183 Tribunal, industrial 43–44, 88, 112
Sen, Manikuntala 104, 164, 186 Truman, President Harry S. 178
Sen, Prafulla Chandra 19, 20, 22–23, 77,
78, 87, 174, 232 Unemployment 23–25
Sen, Sukumar 154; also see Election United Central Refugee Conference 168
Commissioner United Central Refugee Council 128,
Shankar 29, 161 169
Singh, Mohan 140 United Progressive Bloc 175
Singh, Triloki 130 United Socialist Organization of India
Sishu Sathi 65–67 (USOI) 125, 139–43, 158–59, 161,
Sitaramayya, Dr Pattabhi 25, 29, 72, 85 175

small pox 30–31 United States of America 178
Socialist Republican Party 11, 61, 80, 137, Uttar Pradesh (UP) 4, 21, 133, 134, 158,
140, 142, 159 179
Socialist Party 100, 130, 136, 138–41, 153,
155, 157–59, 165, 168–69, 175–77, 181 Venkatarao, Kala 84, 133
South Calcutta by-election 79–83, 125,
129, 137, 138, 141, 162 West Bengal 3–8, 22, 62, 95; abolition of
sovereignty 3–5, 12, 18, 47, 69, 75, 77, zamindari system in 20–21; celebrations
123, 156, 163, 167, 179, 181, 185 of independence in 9–15; communal
state 5, 15, 65, 77; also see nation-state relations in 48–59; communist
The Statesmen 40, 62, 64, 77, 79, 87, 95, movement in 105–28; Congress in
96, 100, 102–4, 124, 132, 133, 135, 141, 72–73, 80–104, 181–83; corruption in
142, 143, 154, 163, 164, 171, 173, 177 26–30; dalit politics in 60–61; election
students 11, 61, 106, 114; protests 75; of 1952 in 154–78; epidemics in 30–32;
strikes 111 food shortages in 21–23; Hindu
Student Federation of India 152; also see Mahasabha in 143–50, 153; industrial
Bengal Provincial Student Federation relations in 40–44, 46; Jan Sangh in
Suhrawardy, H.S. 11, 33–34, 48 150–51; prices in 19–20; opposition
Sundarban 21 parties in 129–30, 132, 134–43, ; public
Sundarrao, V.L. 137 life in 68–69; refugee problem in
Swadeshi 134 31–38, 167–70; Rashtriya Swayamsevak
swaraj 3, 12, 13, 66, 131 Sangh in 151–53; rural life in 17,
Sylhet 125 47–48, 115–20
West Bengal Security Act 62, 74, 82,
Tagore, Abanindranath 16 95–98, 100–2, 109–10, 117, 123; Bill
Tagore, Rabindranath 15, 16 74, 76, 97, 124
Tagore, Soumyendranath 81, 137–38 West Dinajpur 25, 127, 174
140–41, 143, 158, 161, 168–69 women 120, 166–67, 170, 172–74, 202,
Tamluk 118 204
Tandon, Purushottamdas 59, 92, 130, 132, working classes 20, 40–47, 52, 106,
205 109–15, 120, 124, 135, 142
Tapsili Jati Sangh 159 Writers’ Building 46, 116
Tebhaga 13, 106–7, 115–16, 119–20, 122,
162, 186; abolition of 118 Yajee, Shilbhadra 124
Telengana 61, 105, 107, 109, 117, 119, 128
The Nation 83, 95 zamindari system 108; abolition of
trade unions 40, 44, 54, 61–62, 110, 114, 20–21, 88, 107, 109, 115, 118, 122, 130,
200 132, 138, 141, 142, 151, 162

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Decolonization in South Asia

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is Professor of Asian History at Victoria University of

1. The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India

2. Decolonization in South Asia

First published 2009

ISBN 0-203-88628-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 10: 0–415–48106–6 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978–0–415–48106–9 (hbk)

1 The arrival of freedom: celebrations, anxieties and realities 9

2 The discontents of freedom 39

3 Congress Raj in a ‘problem province’ 71

4 The communists: from insurgency to electoral politics 105

5 The fractured Opposition 129

6 The ‘great adventure’: the election of 1952 154

AICC All India Congress Committee

However in these memories of Partition experience, another historical amnesia

on how this future was to be built.

(1947–52) and focuses on various literary and visual representations of freedom, as

Arrival, celebrations and anxieties

The other side of freedom

suburban newspapers and periodicals like Bardhamaner Katha or Birbhum Bani.71

In the British period it used to be emphasized by our leaders, rightly or

The frustration became widespread as the black marketeers continued to have a

the arguments that he believes exist in favour of and against stealing.

Corruption, in other words, was in the process of becoming a normalized social

controlled fair-price shops ended up straight on the black market.164 When a

Refugees and the bitter taste of freedom

liberation, frequently infringed the prevailing boundaries of reverent behaviour. This

Working class and peasant militancy

omy, as we shall see later.

November 1951, a speaker referred to the ‘tyranny’ of one European supervisor

against arbitrary retrenchment and to mediate in wage disputes.44 Indeed, in

What is important to note here is that a peaceful political demonstration by unarmed

Communal riots and the minorities

assassination, Ashutosh Lahiry, the General Secretary of the All-India Hindu

principle a Government of India order on 14 September 1950 announced the reser-

The middle class and its dilemmas

that brutal efforts for suppression of communism adopted by this Ministry

On 2 August 1950 another correspondent confirmed this sense of disappointment:

the whole screen, a background voice tells the audience:

to form a government in Bengal, which was a Muslim-majority province. It was

Suddenly called upon to shoulder responsibilities which practically bore no

conference on 15 December.36 Five days later at a public meeting at Deshbandhu

Living in Bengal many of us know of Dr Ghosh and Dr Roy. Dr Ghosh belongs

Referring to the change of government, in a private conversation with the British

demanding a reconstitution of the ministry. 57 Its signatories included three minis-

As the present Ministry, which includes outsiders, is not essentially Congress

South Calcutta by-election

votes, convincingly defeating his Hindu Mahasabha rival, Sibkinkar Mukherjee.71

The very existence of West Bengal is at stake; her economy is in perilous

the reversal of the earlier decision of the Congress Working Committee.125

described as ‘irresponsible and reckless criticisms’, which he warned would only

Today in the name of democracy freedom of the individual is suppressed – the

I am perhaps one of the heretics of the Congress Party. I do not understand

The custodians of freedom

In the mirror of public opinion

but economically unemancipated middle class to whom ultimately the

We have previously seen middle-class dilemmas reflected in creative writing and

that appeared in January 1950 in response to an anti-communist editorial in The

the charkha and God.232

This yearning for a non-Western or indigenous model of development was meshed

Communists and decolonization