Syama Prasad Mookerjee by Tathagata Roy

Author:Tathagata Roy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353050047
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2018-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

While discussing Noakhali it might be of profit to compare Gandhi and Dr Mookerjee’s response to the carnage. Gandhi stayed away from Calcutta after Direct Action, but visited Noakhali shortly afterwards, in November 1946, and stayed there till February 1947. He did not make public statements condemning either holocaust, as Dr Mookerjee did. Gandhi’s trip to Noakhali brought the obscure area to the front page of every newspaper of the country, and indeed to the attention of the world. Gandhi’s mission apparently was to restore confidence in the Hindus so that they could come back to their villages and his method was abiding, endless love for one’s fellow men. He chalked up a very punishing schedule for himself in visiting remote villages to hold prayer meetings there and kept it, moving over the very difficult terrain on foot at an incredible speed from strangely named hamlets like Toomchar and Qazirkhil to Atakhora and Lamchar. He had told Ashoka Gupta, one of the people who had come forward to assist him, and others at the very beginning of their project: ‘Bear no ill will towards anyone. Work without fear, mix intimately with the villagers. Success will come your way only if you remain completely fearless, stay on the path of truth, inspire confidence in the weak. The rioters will respect you only when they see true fearlessness in you, not any fake bravado.’

According to Louis Fischer, the American journalist who accompanied Gandhi in Noakhali, his journey was a pilgrimage of penance, in which the pilgrim wears no shoes. Hostile elements, obviously Muslim Leaguers, strewed broken glass, brambles and filth in his path. He was once sitting on the floor of a hut in the midst of Muslims and discoursing on the beauties of non-violence.17

Gandhi, it must be acknowledged, had totally failed to achieve his central purpose of getting the Hindus back to their villages where they would live happily ever after in perfect harmony with the majority community, the Muslims. This just did not happen, the good intentions and deeds of a number, not very large, of sensible Muslims notwithstanding. The historian Mushirul Hasan has remarked, ‘Never before did so earnest an effort achieve so little.’ Today, in 2010, sixty-three years after Partition, and thirty-nine years after the formation of independent Bangladesh, there are very few Hindus (around 3 per cent, down from 18 per cent in 1946) in what used to be the district of Noakhali in British India. The proportion of Hindus in the whole of Bangladesh is currently around 9 per cent, down from 29 per cent in 1947.

An interesting sidelight of Noakhali was something Nehru said to Ram Manohar Lohia by way of a private conversation while visiting the place during Gandhi’s stay there. To quote Lohia,18 ‘Mr Nehru spoke of the water, slime, bush and tree that he found everywhere in East Bengal. He said that that was not the India he or I knew and wanted with some vehemence to cut East Bengal away from the mainland of India.

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