On Paschimbanga Dibas (20 June), or ‘West Bengal Day’, we revisit the historic campaign of the Bengali Hindus of erstwhile undivided Bengal, under the leadership of Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, to grab a slice of their homeland from the notorious designs of Mohammed Ali Jinnah by effectively putting up resistance to the communally-biased provincial government of the Muslim League. On this day in 1947, the state of West Bengal, located in present-day Bharat, was established through a fierce struggle.
West Bengal is not just the name of a province, not just the western part of the former Province of Bengal. West Bengal is the name of a thought, West Bengal is the name of the existence of Bengalis, West Bengal is the name of Bengali asmita, the name of an indescribable history. When people ask, when ‘West’ Bengal exists, east must have existed, where did it go?
West Bengal is the name of the legacy of the Bengali who has sacrificed so much in the freedom movement, the Bengali who has shown the way to the renaissance. Bengal, which played a crucial role in the growth of literature, philosophy, science, there was a conspiracy to expel the Bengali country from Bharat and make it Pakistan. West Bengal was born out of a history of opposing this nefarious goal.
The movement was led by Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, son of Sir Ashutosh Mookerjee; an educationist, former vice-chancellor of Calcutta University, a servant, a selfless man. He has played a unique role beyond politics.
If the question arises, ‘What is the significance of West Bengal Day’? The significance is the story of the oppressed Bengali Hindus securing their own land. And who is its founder? Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee. Why did Bengal have to be divided? We will get the answer by analyzing the historical analysis of sharing. And only then will we find out the significance of West Bengal Day.
When the partition of Bharat became inevitable due to supremacist Islamist demands and accompanied violence, all tacitly backed by the British, Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee snatched West Bengal from Pakistan. But Bengalis are still in the dark about this contribution of Dr. Syama Prasad.
The year was 1946. The Cabinet Mission, headed by Lord Pethick-Lawrence came to Bharat and made a public resolution. The resolution said it recognised the Muslim League’s demand for the creation of Pakistan. It was immediately proposed to form an interim government and write a constitution. When there was a difference of opinion between the Congress and the Muslim League on this issue, the Muslim League withdrew themself from this process. The League’s meeting rejected the Cabinet Mission’s offer to join the interim government and proposed a ‘Direct Action Day’, an open call for Islamist violence.
An estimated 10,000 Bengali Hindus lost their lives and thousands of Hindu women were raped and molested in the two conspiratorial pogroms combined, fueled by the Ansars and Azrails of the Muslim League. The conscience of the Bengali Hindu was shaken in the immediate aftermath of these two horrible genocides, which were engineered by none other than the Premier of Bengal, H S Suhrawardy himself, and by the Islamic fundamentalist forces unleashed by the Pakistan movement, which was gaining ground throughout Bharat.
Being a Muslim-majority province, Bengal was not an exception to that rule. The streets and villages of Bengal echoed with the cries of ‘ladke lenge Pakistan’. Dr. Syama Prasad Mukherjee, whose position and legitimacy as the undisputed leader of the Bengali Hindus rose after the two gruesome massacres, had proclaimed in Assam’s Sylhet on 7 April, 1940: “Jinnah is out to destroy the very soul of India”.
The persistent and terrible persecution of Bengali Hindus at the behest of the Suhrawardy government convinced them that co-existence with the Muslims was an impossible affair. Even after that, Mukherjee batted for a separate Hindu-majority province within a United Bharat.
However, the immediate turn of events had destined something else for the Hindus of Bengal.
At this time, Bengali intellectuals came forward to support Dr. Syama Prasad’s partition of Bengal. Who wasn’t there? Linguist Dr. Suniti Kumar Chattopadhyay, historian Ramesh Chandra Majumder, Dr. Meghnad Saha, Dr. Jadunath Sarkar, Dr. Makhanlal Roy Chowdhury, etc. Among the Hindu SC (‘Dalit’) leaders, Premhari Barman and Matua Mahasangha chief Pramath Ranjan Thakur called for the partition of Bengal. At that time, supporting the partition of Bengal, it was written in the ‘Prabasi’ newspaper, “The hope of the union of the two communities was far-fetched. The proposal for partition of Bengal needs to be decided. ”
Realizing that it was impossible to include the whole of Bengal in Pakistan, the Muslim League leader Suhrawardy suddenly took a different position. He said that a united Bengal with two Bengals should be an independent state – which will join neither Bharat nor Pakistan. But even in undivided Bengal, Bengali Hindus were a minority. Jinnah also agreed to this proposal. From this, it can be inferred that this undivided Bengal would have joined Pakistan later. In any case, two senior Congress leaders Sarat Chandra Bose and Kiran Shankar Roy fell into the trap of Suhrawardy.
They forgot about Suhrawardy’s role in the Kolkata riots and the Noakhali massacre that took place just a few months ago. At this moment Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee realised that the only way to sustain the existence of Bengali Hindus was to divide Bengal. So without delay, he devoted all his energies to creating public opinion by explaining the issue to Bengali Hindus. On June 20, 1947, the Assembly of Bengal (Legislature) approved a proposal to create West Bengal with Hindu-dominated areas. Dr. Mukherjee had asked, “If 25 percent Muslims could not agree to live in India, how could 44 percent Hindu live in Bengal under 54 percent Muslims.”
Hindu opinion was firmly against a sovereign and united Bengal. The Amrita Bazar Patrika, a nationalist English daily published from Calcutta, ran a plebiscitary opinion poll among the Hindus of Bengal, where a staggering 98.3 per cent of them opined in favour of partitioning the province. Had there been a sovereign United Bengal, then the plight of the Bengali Hindus would have been similar to the Sindhi Hindus who were left without a country to call as their own.
At that time, Dr. Syama Prasad had played a crucial role in dividing Bengal. On April 23, 1947, in a meeting with Lord Mountbatten, Dr. Syama Prasad explained to him why Bengal needed to be divided. On May 2, 1947, he wrote a long letter to Mountbatten. In this informative paper, he spread the argument in favor of the partition of Bengal. In this letter, demanding the partition of Bengal, he wrote that, “Sovereign undivided Bengal will be a virtual Pakistan.”
A month after Dr. Syama Prasad’s appeal, on June 20, 1947, the province was divided and the partition of Bharat was decided. Today’s West Bengal was built in exchange for the long and tireless work of Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee .
What would have happened if West Bengal had not been created? This land would have been annexed to Pakistan or to another united state. And later, it would have likely come under Pakistan’s control. We know what happened to independent Bangladesh – within a few years of independence, it became a Islamic state. If Bengal was an independent country with a Muslim majority, Bengal would also be another Pakistan at the will of leaders like Jinnah and Suhrawardy. Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee called it ‘Virtual Pakistan’. He did not allow this territory to be annexed to Pakistan.
Phanibhusan Chakravarty, former Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court and former provisional governor of West Bengal, wrote that Dr. Syama Prasad was able to resist the proposal of an independent sovereign Bengal with all his powers and made another partition within the partitioned nation. Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee won the political, diplomatic and public movement to retain the present part of West Bengal in Bharat. So in Parliament, he was able to say on Nehru’s face “You divided India, I divided Pakistan.”
-By Diganta Chakraborty (Jagran Josh Awardee 2023, A Young writer and columnist)
