Force Against Reds

Giant, sprawling Calcutta, where a hundred thousand homeless refugees sleep on the streets every night, is the most explosive city in India. Murderous riots can be touched off by anything from a trifling rise in streetcar fares to the throat-cutting religious strife that killed thousands in 1946. Calcutta rioters have even perfected their own secret weapon: electric-light bulbs filled with nitric acid.

Last week India's Communists chose inflammable Calcutta to show their defiance of Nehru's government for its act in ousting the Reds from power in the state of Kerala (TIME, Aug. 10). They had plenty of tinder at hand: the soaring food costs and the rice shortage, which are spreading misery in Calcutta and all West Bengal. Starving mobs have halted freight trains and looted the cars of food. Confidently using the tactics employed against them in Kerala, the Reds fired off a 53-page "charge sheet" against the West Bengal administration of Chief Minister Dr. B. C. Roy, the 77-year-old leader of the local Congress Party, accusing his regime of corruption, misrule, nepotism and graft --much of it true. A "Famine Resistance Committee" drew up plans for mass defiance of the law and set August 20 as the trysting day.

Dr. Roy asked angrily how defiance of law "could increase the supply of food grains to the state?" More to the point, he reinforced West Bengal's 35,000 police with troops from the National Volunteer

Forces. Two nights before the scheduled demonstration, police squads fanned out through the sleeping city and hauled from their rope beds some 100 Communist and left-wing leaders.

Hamstrung by the arrest of their chiefs and also by the defection of the Praja-Socialists, who used to join them but have been wary since Tibet, the Reds were unable to fill the streets with raging thousands, could muster on successive days only a few hundred, who were carted off to jail still waving red flags and shouting slogans. Communist agitators pleaded with the onlooking crowds to lie in the streets in passive resistance, but won no volunteers.

The efficient use of force plus the growing unpopularity of the Communists had this time saved West Bengal's flabby administration. Undeterred, the Reds set August 31 as the new date when "fire will rage through Calcutta."

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