Sardar Patel on Direct Action

Volume III, Chapter IV, item 145 of Sardar Patel's Correspondence, issued in ten volumes edited by Durga Das:  Sardar Patel's letter to R.K. Sidhwa in Sind.

145

New Delhi

27 August 1946

My dear Sidhwa,

I have received your letters of the 22nd and 24th instant along with their enclosures.  

The Muslim League tried its programme of direct action in Calcutta and to their great bewilderment they have found out that two can play at the game although it may be started by one.  The poor Muslims in Calcutta have suffered terribly and the League had discredited itself by their doings in Calcutta.  If they follow the same method of arson, loot, murder and anarchy, they may be able to inflict hardship on the non-Muslims but eventually that way will without doubt lead the League organisation to ruin and destruction.  

I am not sure that your Governor will allow any violence or disturbance to take place, because he is much too clever not to understand his own responsibility and his own reputation would be at stake.  He will no doubt try his best to keep the Ministry in office but he will not allow his own reputation to suffer.  I hope things will ultimately straighten themselves.

Yours sincerely,

Vallabhbhai Patel

Shri R.K. Sidhwa

Karachi

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Munir Report 1954

One should read the 1954 report of the judicial inquiry into the anti-Ahmedi riots of 1953. A key lesson for administrators in any of the nations of South Asia is that the public purveyance of hatred directed at any group of people needs to be firmly nipped in the bud. In this case, the police on the scene kept recommending action against rabble-rousing mullahs, but kept getting overruled by higher-ups.

As a grim aside, the precipitating event for the riots was the arrest of the leaders of the anti-Ahmedi movement. Why were they arrested? Because they had threatened a Direct Action Day. (the previous one being the August 16, 1946 Direct Action Day called by the All-India Muslim League). Who but the leaders of Pakistan to know better what Direct Action entails?