Nehru, however, was far from content with a plan that set out the
pattern of a post-independence India in this awkward way. Given that he
was committed to strong central government, and to centralised economic
planning, a centre with limited powers or even jurisdiction over some
areas of the country was not particularly to his liking. In a number of
speeches, once again as Congress president (to which post he returned in
July), he criticised the provincial grouping aspect of the Cabinet Mission
Plan and declared that the Congress would be free to modify it in the
future. ‘We are not bound by a single thing,’ he declared, ‘except that we
have decided to go into the Constituent Assembly.’^26 This gave Jinnah an
opportunity to repudiate the Cabinet Mission Plan. Jinnah now raised the
stakes substantially by calling for a day of direct action to show Muslims’
support for Pakistan. The date was set for August 16, 1946: the date now
remembered as that of the ‘Great Calcutta Killings’.
Nehru’s fellow negotiator, Maulana Azad, later blamed Nehru’s
speeches for this turn of events. Had he not made them, Jinnah would not
have rejected the Plan, would not have called for a Direct Action Day, and
the events of Calcutta and subsequent violence might have been avoided:
‘The turn that events had taken made it almost impossible to expect a
peaceful solution by agreement between the Congress and the Muslim
League.’^27 Calcutta inaugurated a chain of violence that spread across
India, which lasted well past the actual transfer of power, a bewildering
series of events, and an enormous degree of carnage. Azad’s retrospective
account, however, never questioned, nor found worthy of mention,
Jinnah’s opportunism in calling for something that he might well have
anticipated, especially in the context of the uneasy and tense environment
of 1946, would lead to violence; it would seem that Jinnah’s lack of
principles could be taken for granted.
But if Jinnah was cynical enough to risk or even incite violence, neither
he nor anyone else had much control over subsequent events. The intensity
of the ‘communal’ violence in Calcutta took everyone by surprise. The
communal solidarity of the INA trials and the post-war industrial unrest
in Calcutta had not prepared anyone for what happened. The Bengal prime
minister, H.S. Suhrawardy, made some incautious and provocative
remarks in his speech on August 16 in Calcutta, a day on which many
Muslims had come in to Calcutta from the countryside. Sporadic violence
began, with the occasional looting of shops by Muslims in a state of
agitation. It then transpired that neighbourhoods had organised local130 THE END OF THE RAJ