THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT AND THE PARTITION OF INDIAdesigned so that it became a mere agency centre with executive and not
legislative powers, and dealt only with matters specifically delegated to it
by the federal units. The Congress also accepted the scheme, but for the
opposite reason: it took it to be a rejection of the Pakistan demand. It also
held that the provinces were free to opt out of a group to which they did
not wish to belong. This was particularly important in view of the fact that
the Northwest Frontier Province in the proposed Group A had a Congress
government, as had Assam in the proposed Group C (Group B contained
the Hindu majority provinces). Jinnah, however, interpreted the scheme in
terms of compulsory grouping, i.e. the respective provinces would have to
join their group first, whether they liked it or not, and if they wished to opt
out of it they could do so only at a much later stage when constitution
making was completed. There was still a further point of disagreement: the
Congress held that once a constituent assembly was convened, it was a
sovereign body not bound by the cabinet mission scheme; Jinnah, of
course, insisted that this scheme, once accepted, must be binding on
everybody concerned.
The cabinet mission scheme was not an Act on the statute book: it was
only a suggestion, and the only sanction which the British had so as to
make it a success was that they would not quit India before the Congress
and the League had made this scheme work. But this sanction was wearing
thin as it became more and more obvious that British staying power—in
the most literal sense of the term—was diminishing very rapidly. For this
reason Wavell was most concerned to get a national interim government
going. This time the viceroy did not let Jinnah’s veto deter him and he
appointed a cabinet with Nehru as interim prime minister.
Jinnah was furious. He resorted to agitation by declaring 16 August
1946 to be the League’s ‘Direct Action Day’, though he did not actually
say what was to be done on that day. In most provinces nothing happened.
However, in Bengal the Muslim League chief minister, H.Suhrawardy,
engineered a communal holocaust in Calcutta. He probably hoped to tilt
the city’s demographic balance in this way in favour of the Muslims.
Calcutta had a large population of Hindu workers from Bihar, and many
of them actually did flee to their home province due to the ‘Great Calcutta
Killing’ as this fateful event came to be known. The cabinet mission
scheme had conceived of a united Bengal, but there had been indications
that if this scheme failed then Bengal would have to be divided and
Calcutta might become part of west Bengal. Jinnah stated that depriving
Bengal of Calcutta would be like asking a man to live without his heart.
Suhrawardy obviously hoped to cleanse this heart by driving out Hindu
blood. When this did not work he turned to seek Hindu support for a
united Bengal, which would have become an autonomous dominion along
the lines laid down for India and Pakistan. Jinnah would have supported
this plan: he stated that such a Bengal would certainly have friendly