India 1946

[Pinkie Pappalardo]

TheIndian Claims Commission Decisions is a 43 volume set documenting the claims of American Indian groups against the United States from 1946 to 1978. All 43 volumes of this collection were digitized by the OSU Library in cooperation with the University of Tulsa Law Library and the National Indian Law Library.The set is at the University of Tulsa College of Law and was published by the Native American Rights Fund in 1973.

In the years leading up to the 1946 act, many bills were introduced in Congress with the hopes of creating a better way for American Indian claims to be heard. Some of these bills were spearheaded by Oklahoma legislators. In March 1935, Oklahoma representative William Rogers (not to be confused with Will Rogers, the famed Oklahoma humorist) introduced the first bill calling for the formation of a special commission for hearing these cases, rather than instituting a judicial process in the existing Court. By this point, both the Secretary of the Interior and Congress believed a commission would help cut through the red tape of the complicated process previously in place. In the same year, Senator Elmer Thomas from Oklahoma introduced a similar bill in the Senate, with the purpose of creating a fact-finding body to investigate all American Indian claims and make recommendations to Congress. While these bills were not passed, they were very similar to the final bill that passed 11 years later.

Three bills were introduced in the House of Representatives in 1945; one of which was introduced on Jan. 8 by William Stigler of Oklahoma. This bill added a provision that at least one commissioner be an American Indian. While his bill was not passed, Stigler later testified before the Senate in support of the third 1945 bill, which was passed unanimously by the House and would pass into law a few months later. The main difference between the 1935 bills and the 1945 bill that became law was that the final law allowed the Court of Claims to review findings of the Indian Claims Commission and appeal to the Supreme Court.

This material was added to the Library's digital collections by the Electronic Publishing Center. The EPC, which was in operation from 2000 to 2008, was an early digitization program at the OSU Library.

Jinnah had called for peaceful demonstrations all over India on Direct Action Day, and most of India, including the Muslim-majority provinces of the Punjab and Sind (in the latter the Muslim League was part of a coalition government) remained calm. In Bengal, however, and specifically in Calcutta, the events took a violent turn, and quickly spun completely out of control.

-Suhrawardy positioned himself with his cronies in the Police Control Room, and thus prevented the Police Commissioner, a British national who was technically in charge of law and order, from attending to the trouble with a free mind;

-# that he took too long to realize the extent of the trouble, and called the troops in when things had already gotten out of hand; an earlier intervention by the military might have been able to save the day.

Their exact number is not and will never be known. Authorities have compiled various official estimates on the basis of a rough body count, but none appear too reliable. The most widely accepted figure of dead is situated between a minimum of 5,000 and a maximum of 10,000 (Chatterjee, 1991), and the number of wounded is generally put at around 15,000, but it is not clear on what this figure is based, apart from guess work. In any case, such uncertainty is a common feature of most massacres in India. The reasons for this uncertainty are complex, ranging from the low degree of penetration of State institutions in society, to the absence of reliable registration of deaths. To these structural reasons, we must add a more temporary factor, the disorganization of public administration in a period of rapid political change and turmoil.

Many people witnessed the massacre, but there are few reliable testimonies on which to draw. In August 1946, the Government of Bengal appointed an enquiry commission presided by the Supreme Justice of India, Sir Patrick Spens. Although the commission interrogated many witnesses, its conclusions were never published. These findings have nonetheless been widely used by a Bengali historian (Das,1991). The memoirs of Lieutenant General Sir Francis Tuker, then in command of British and Indian forces in the Eastern sector of India, provide a fairly detailed, although heavily biased, first-hand account (Tuker, 1950). These memoirs embody a British view of the events which tends to distribute blame more or less equally between the two communities, but nevertheless displays a slight pro-Muslim and a strong anti-Congress bias. A few other British witnesses have left written accounts. There is a wide array of personal reminiscences by inhabitants of Calcutta who witnessed the events, published in Bengali, but they have not been the object of a systematic study.

In a paradoxical way, one could say that on the one hand, the Great Calcutta Killing is very much an object of living memory; narratives are handed down from one generation to another within practically all the families who lived through it. On the other hand, it is conspicuously absent from the official memory of Bengal, particularly on the West Bengal side, but also, in a more surprising way, on the Bangladeshi side. The disjunction between private memory and public and official memory is not unique to this particular event. This disjunction occurs with most traumatic events. For example, the Holocaust in the immediate post-war period, before the outset of the era of commemoration in the 1960s, is a case in point.

In the scholarly literature about the event, which is scarce (there is no book or article specifically devoted to the Great Calcutta Killing), two main strands of interpretation can be discerned. One tends to emphasize continuity, showing that the 1946 riots were mostly a culmination of trends towards growing inter-communal violence in Bengal, but did not represent a radically novel development. The other places the violence more specifically within the context of the Partition and stresses its instrumentality to the goals pursued by certain actors, in particular Hindu politicians.

The Indian Claims Commission, an independent agency, was established by the Congress in 1946 to hear and determine the claims of tribes and other identifiable groups of American Indians living in the United States. These claims represent attempts by Indian tribes to obtain redress for any failure of the Government to complete payments for lands ceded under treaty, for the acquisition of land at an unconscionably low price or for other failure to comply with a treaty or legislative action regarding Indian lands that grew out of the westward expansion of the United States.

Typical projects include scholarships for the education of Indian youth, social services for reservation dwellers, construction of community centers, funding of community development, industrial parks, and other projects designed to bring new sources of income and employment to the Indians.

Along with the Repeal of Chinese exclusion in 1943, the Luce-Celler Act further undermined Asian exclusion and emphasized foreign relations over racial discrimination by extending naturalization rights and immigration quotas to other key U.S. allies in Asia, the Philippines and India. The Philippines gained independence from the United States in 1946 as did India from Great Britain.

AN ACT To authorize the admission into the United States of persons of races indigenous to India, and persons of races indigenous to the Philippine Islands, to make them racially eligible for naturalization, and for other purposes.

(1) white persons, persons of African nativity or descent, and persons who are descendants of races indigenous to the continents of North or South America or adjacent islands and Filipino persons or persons of Filipino descent;

(4) persons who possess, either singly or in combination, a preponderance of blood of one or more of the classes specified in clause (3) or, either singly or in combination, as much as one-half blood of those classes and some additional blood of one of the classes specified in clause (1) . . . .

By 1945, however, the territory of the British Empire was at its apogee through the reconquering of colonies and the acquiring of new territories as a result of the Axis defeat. Unexpectedly, the incoming Labour government of July 1945 turned out to be quite traditional in its foreign and imperial policy. The new Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, was determined Britain would remain a great power and maintain its colonial empire despite the economic constraints of post-war Britain.

At the Potsdam conference in July 1945, the Allied powers decided that South East Asia Command, under the command of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, would be responsible for occupation duties across the region. Indian Army formations also helped restore colonial empires in Saigon in French Indo-China (Vietnam) and on the islands of Java and Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), as well as contributing to the occupation forces in Japan and the British colonies such as Burma (Myanmar) and Malaya.

Gracey was much criticised at the time for imposing martial law, but it was seen as an impossible situation that the division had been sent to sort out, with the French viewing them as peace enforcers and the Viet Minh seeing them as aiding the French colonial oppressors. There was serious fighting between the division and the Viet Minh. The division established control in Saigon as well as providing support for the French. By November, the soldiers were able to return to their original objective of disarming the Japanese as the French army largely took over internal security roles. Indeed the French officers and men were criticised by Gracey for their colonial and racist attitude towards Indian soldiers. Between October 1945 and January 1946, the division suffered more than a hundred casualties, forty soldiers had died in the period, and 54,000 Japanese troops had been disarmed with an estimated 2,000 Viet Minh deaths. The division began to leave Saigon in early February, with effectively the last remaining units gone by the end of March 1946.

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