Daily Times

August 14 and 15 are celebrated with great pomp, ceremony and fervour by Pakistan and India as independence days from direct British imperialist rule. The official historians of the ruling elites in India, Pakistan and Britain have their baked versions reflecting the class interests of their ruling elites and interpretations of the magnificent struggle waged by the Indian subcontinent masses. However, independence was born amid a bloodbath of communal genocide. It was plagued from the beginning with caste and religious atrocities, and domination over the subcontinent’s patchwork of national minority cultures and languages resulting in the slaughtering of nearly a million people, hundreds and thousands maimed and over 12 million fleeing their homes — primarily in caravans of bullock-carts and blood littered trains — to seek refuge across the new border: it was the largest exodus in history. Tens of thousands of girls and women were seized from crowded trains, refugee caravans and isolated villages, and subjected to rape and sexual assaults; not even the passage of time has cleansed these scars.
In their renowned book, Freedom at Midnight, Lapierre and Collins narrate the communal frenzy in this bestiality, “If they were Sikh or Hindu women, abduction was usually followed by a religious ceremony, a forced conversion to make a girl worthy of her Muslim captor’s possession in his home or harem. The Sikhs’ 10th Guru (Gobind Singh, 1666-1675) had specifically enjoined his followers against sexual intercourse with Muslim women to prevent what happened in Punjab. The inevitable result was a legend among the Sikhs that Muslim women were capable of particular sexual prowess. Under the impact of events in Punjab, the Sikhs forgot the Guru’s admonishment and gave free reign to their fantasies. With morbid frenzy, they fell on Muslims everywhere, until a trade in kidnapped Muslim girls flourished in their parts of Punjab.”
What bourgeois historians forget to mention is that this communal frenzy was preceded by a mass uprising starting in August 1945, culminating in the revolutionary insurrection of ‘sailors’ revolt’ in February 1946 that led to a proletarian uprising, creating a revolutionary situation throughout the subcontinent. The failure of the Communist Party of India’s (CPI’s) leadership to grasp the moment changed the course of history to such a traumatic fate. Already in 1942, the situation was getting out of control for the British Raj. On August 31, Indian Viceroy Lord Linlithgow in a secret telegram informed Winston Churchill: “I am engaged here in meeting by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857, the gravity and extent of which we have to conceal form the world.”
The message of this rebellion started to spread by word of mouth and when the rebels had taken over the radio station messages, including revolutionary songs and poetry that were being played around-the-clock over the wireless to military garrisons and barracks across India. The revolt spread to 74 ships, 20 fleets and 22 units of the navy along the coast, including the naval stations of Bombay, Calcutta, Karachi, Madras, Cochin and Vishakhpatnam. On February 20, only 10 ships and two naval stations were not in complete revolt.
In the beginning, this revolt was considered to be spontaneous but that is not completely true. On the eve of February 19, a strike committee was formally set up with signalman M S Khan and petty officer telegraph operator Madan Singh unanimously elected as president and vice president. Both were under the age of 25 years; one was a Muslim and the other a Sikh, which was a conscious act to reject the religious divide being fed into the liberation movement by the native bourgeois leaders and their British masters. The strike committee immediately embarked upon involving political parties, including the CPI. Unfortunately, the CPI failed to link the movement with the revolt that was brewing up within the police, army, navy, striking Bombay textile workers and other workers across the breadth of the country.
It was not only the British who were fearful but the Hindu and Muslim leaders of the local elite were also feeling the ground disappearing under their feet. General Claude Auchenlick, the commander in chief of the British armed forces in India, sent a telegram to Whitehall in London warning them that “India is like a ship on fire in the middle of the ocean”. Both Gandhi and Jinnah denounced the sailors’ revolt. They were afraid that revolutionary and class struggle ideas would penetrate into the movement they had done so much to tear apart along religious lines, leading to the utmost betrayal to defeat this massive revolt. In spite of this betrayal and the contemptuous attitude of national bourgeois leaders, the revolutionary momentum of the uprising continued unabated and the whole country was filled with the echoes of the slogan “long live the revolution!”
On February 21, British shock troops opened fire on the sailors as they came out of their barracks in Bombay. This provocation changed a peaceful uprising into an armed rebellion and, according to some eyewitness accounts, clearly showed how the oppressed masses of the whole subcontinent rose up in a revolutionary movement against British rule. On February 22 and 23, the imperialist forces martyred 250 sailors and workers. Navy Admiral Godfrey ordered the rebellious sailors to “surrender or perish”. In the early hours of February 24 it was evident that with the betrayal of the native political leadership the only option was to surrender and lay down arms. At 0600 hours on February 24, 1946, black flags were raised to announce surrender. In its last session, the strike committee passed a resolution that stated: “Our uprising was an important historical event in the lives of our people. For the first time the blood of uniformed and non-uniformed workers flowed in one current for the same collective cause. We, the workers in uniform, shall never forget this. We also know that you, our proletarian brothers and sisters, shall also never forget this. The coming generations, learning its lessons shall accomplish what we have not been able to achieve. Long live the working masses. Long live the revolution.”
The 1946 uprising was one of the greatest chapters in the struggle against British rule and played a critical role alongside the rapid radicalisation of the British soldiers after the end of the Second World War, whose boots could no longer be relied upon to hold the subcontinent’s masses at bay in forcing British Prime Minister Clement Atlee to announce that British would leave India before June 1948. The British, in collusion with the subcontinent’s bourgeois leaders, hastened the process of partition along ethnic and religious lines. British imperialists led by Churchill were determined not to leave the subcontinent united. Churchill described Hindu-Muslim antagonism as, “a bulwark of British rule in India…were it to be resolved their concord would result in the united communities joining in showing us the door.”

(To be continued)

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at lalkhan1956@gmail.com