Direct Action Day

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Direct Action Day (16 August 1946) was the day the All-India Muslim League decided to take a "direct action" using general strikes and economic shut down to demand a separate Muslim homeland after the British exit from India. Also known as the 1946 Calcutta Riots and Great Calcutta Killings, it soon became a day of communal violence in Calcutta. It led to large-scale violence between Muslims and Hindus in the city of Calcutta (now known as Kolkata) in the Bengal province of British India. The day also marked the start of what is known as The Week of the Long Knives. While there is a certain degree of consensus on the magnitude of the killings (although no precise casualty figures are available), including their short-term consequences, controversy remains regarding the exact sequence of events, the various actors' responsibility and the long-term political consequences. There is still extensive controversy regarding the respective responsibilities of the two main communities, the Hindus and the Muslims, in addition to individual leaders' roles in the carnage. The dominant British view tends to blame both communities equally and to single out the calculations of the leaders and the savagery of the followers, among whom there were criminal elements. In the Indian National Congress' version of the events, the blame tends to be laid squarely on the Muslim League and in particular on the Chief Minister of Bengal, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. Thus, the riots opened the way to a partition of Bengal between a Hindu-dominated Western Bengal including Calcutta and a Muslim-dominated Eastern Bengal (now Bangladesh). The All-India Muslim League and the Indian National Congress were the two largest political parties in the Constituent Assembly of India in the 1940s. The Muslim League had demanded since its 1940 Lahore Resolution for the Muslim-majority areas of India in...