If you enter any Indian college or university classroom and ask students about Direct Action Day, you are likely to encounter blank faces, even in West Bengal, where one of history’s worst pogroms happened. Indian media and academia have painstakingly managed to keep the information hidden from generations of Bharatiyas.

Which is why the trope that ‘those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it’ has come to visit us today.

What has been unfolding in the name of protests against the Waqf amendment follows the same sinister pattern of the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946 when Muslim League chief Mohammed Ali Jinnah gave the call for ‘direct action’ to massacre, terrify, and displace enough Hindus in Kolkata to claim the metropolis and its adjoining districts as part of East Pakistan.

What has started now in West Bengal’s Murshidabad and spread to other districts like Malda, Uttar Dinajpur, and South 24 Parganas has an eerily similar pattern with Direct Action Day, which started on August 16, 1946. One can see the same calls for ‘constitutional protest’ — 79 years ago for the formation of Pakistan, now against the amendments to the Waqf Act.

Then the mobilisation of mobs, as agency inputs suggest, with money or provocative misinformation (Islamists now have the internet and social media).

And then the unleashing of........

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