Armstrong
RETIRED TTA
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Hmm... no..Direct Action Day ? He wasnt the greatest ambassador for any unity.
That was indeed a miscalculation on part of Mr.Jinnah where he thought that mob hysteria would not overtake common sense and his command to the Muslims. Having said that it wasn't a deliberate plan by the League to cause bloodshed for they - the League - knew that they couldn't stand their own in any numerical confrontation especially in Bengal and it would have been a political suicide for Suharwardy's government which relied on the support of Hindus and Muslims alike to stay in power. Even Maulana Azad refers to 'how a constitutional politician like Jinnah resorted to mass politics and concluded that Jinnah was driven along a course that he was reluctant to and, at any rate, understood little of.'.
The customary Indian accusation that the Muslim League planned and executed the massacre of innocents in Calcutta does not stand the test of facts. Lord Wavell wrote on August 21 that “the estimate of casualties is 3,000 dead and 17,000 injured. The Bengal Congress is convinced that all the trouble was deliberately engineered by the Muslim League ministry but no satisfactory evidence to that effect has reached me yet. It is said that the decision to have a public holiday on August 16 was the cause of trouble, but I think this is very farfetched. There was a public holiday in Sindh and there was no trouble there. At any rate, whatever the causes of the outbreak, when it started, the Hindus and Sikhs were every bit as fierce as the Muslims. The present estimate is that appreciably more Muslims were killed than the Hindus” (page 274, Volume VIII, Transfer of Power Papers).
This was confirmed by Sardar Patel’s letter, where he gloated about more, many times more, Muslim casualties than Hindus. This letter is quoted by renowned Indian historian Sumit Sarkar on page 432 of his book Modern India: 1885-1947. One of the big gaping holes in the Indian nationalist version of history is that while all accounts seem to indicate that Muslims were armed with sticks, according to Sir Francis Tuker, “buses and taxis were charging about loaded with Sikhs and Hindus armed with swords, iron bars and firearms” (‘While Memory Serves’, quoted on this website: Sir Francis Tuker: "The Great Calcutta Killing" in While Memory Serves). Who then was arming the Hindus and Sikhs?
Had Lord Wavell and by extension the British had been in bed with the league they wouldn't have dismissed the ML government in Bengal and installed a Congress only ministry at such a critical juncture.
As for the 'Hindu Muslim Unity' bit ! He was given that title by Gokhale himself, his work alongside Tilak, Annie Bessant and others in the Home Rule League speak for themselves and his ardent desire to bring the League and the Congress together culminated into the Lucknow Pact of 1916 which was later used as a toilet paper by the Congress. Even as late as '46 he was ready to concede a United India when he accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan only for the Congress to accept it at first and then reject it !