The creation of West Bengal as a state and its inclusion in India is an amazing case study in the political history of India. No other Indian state experienced more pain and pangs at the time of its birth than West Bengal did. The western part of undivided Bengal, which is now known as West Bengal, was not destined to be created in 1940 when, at the Muslim League’s national meet at Lahore, the resolution on Pakistan was passed. It clearly stated the demand for a separate homeland for Indian Muslims who, as per Mohammad Ali Jinnah, were part of a different nation.
The dream of a future Pakistan in 1940 was to include all Muslim-major provinces of India, including Bengal, which had nearly 55% Muslim population. However, in 1933 in England, when a young student of Cambridge named Choudhary Rahmat Ali first spoke about a separate Islamic nation for Indian Muslims and coined the word Pakistan with alphabets picked from Punjab, Balochistan, N.E. Frontier, etc., Bengal was not included in that. It is good to recall that a man present in that meeting silently laughed at this idea, thinking it an “impossible dream”. He was Mohammad Ali Jinnah. In 1940, the same man, and then fueled by money and political power had a bigger and more determined dream of Pakistan, which was much bigger than the idea propounded by Choudhary Rahmat Ali.
Though most of the national leaders of Congress ignored the Lahore resolution of the Muslim League, there was a man in Bengal who had a hunch that the demand would gain prominence sooner or later. His profound academic experience and practical political wisdom convinced him that a time had come to act to save Bengali Hindus from annihilation. He was Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the legendary educationist who joined the Hindu Mahasabha (HMS) in 1939. Ever since, his active participation in regional and national politics had made him a household name in Bengal. Since 1937, as soon as Bengal came under the rule of two Muslim political parties named KPP (Krishak Praja Party) and the Muslim League, a series of anti-Hindu activities and wanton communal riots in the eastern part of Bengal made it clear that the lives and properties of Hindus in Bengal were seriously under threat, and Congress, the so-called Hindu party, was unable to tackle it.
Thus, a dream of a Hindu homeland for Bengali Hindus crossed the mind of Dr. Mookerjee in 1939 itself. He was inspired by the resolution taken in the HMS 1927 Patna conference, where the demand was raised to create separate provinces for the Hindus of Punjab and Bengal “to eliminate Muslim majorities from these two provinces”. Experience convinced him that the dignity and security of life of a Hindu could never b e pro te c te d in a Muslim-majority province. In 1941 itself, when the census was on, he tried his best to encourage the Hindu masses to register their existence in their respective places to ensure their numbers. It was a masterstroke of his political outlook, knowing the future danger coming to Bengal in the next few years. From 1939, Dr. Mookerjee started demanding a new reformation of Bengal with all these Hindu-majority districts along with Bengali-speaking zones of Bihar and Assam.
This shows his power of statesmanship when the partition of India and Bengal was not much in sight. In the next few years, Bengal passed through a political tumult. Its most popular leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, lost his position in national politics from April 1939 and, in early 1941, left the country for a bigger project. Dr. Mookerjee, who never had a mass-leader image like Bose, emerged as the most active and vocal voice of Bengal politics, though his own party, HMS, was never strong in Bengal. Still, thanks to his extraordinary organizational power, Mookerjee was able to mobilize both Bengali intellectuals and common people behind him in many movements against the KPP and Muslim League government. His movement against the imposition of Urdu in Bengal was boldly supported by titans like Rabindranath Tagore, Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray, Ramananda Chattopadhyay, etc.
His matchless oratory skills with sharp logic soon made him a leader of high credentials, even to his rivals in the Congress and Communist Party of India. While constantly making his demand for a separate Hindu-majority state out of Bengal, Mookerjee was also trying to unite Hindu political leaders in Bengal across parties. In the 1946 election, his party, HMS, was fully rejected by the people of Bengal. Except for him, none could win the election, as Bengali Hindus kept faith in Congress. Meanwhile, the horrific communal riot of Calcutta in August 1946, followed by a bigger slaughter of Hindus in Noakhali of East Bengal in October 1946, exposed the nightmarish agenda of the Muslim League government of Bengal. Bengali Hindus, who had rejected HMS in the election of the same year, now started looking to Mookerjee for their survival.
It was the time when Mookerjee’s dream of creating a separate Hindu homeland for Bengalis steamed up, and he did a near-impossible political negotiation and generated mass support for it. Mookerjee was adamant about saving the Bengali Hindus and vehemently opposed the idea that they would be a part of Pakistan. He averred that it was an impractical idea that a so-called sovereign Bengal would exist where minority Hindus had to live under a Muslim ruler with 55% Muslims as co-citizens. This idea was conceived by H. S. Suhrawardy, also known as the “Butcher of Calcutta”. Suhrawardy was too unpopular among Hindus by this time for his various political positions.
In the 1941 census, a notional partition of Bengal was visible, clearly marking out the districts and indicating which was populated by which religion. Though 16 districts were found to be populated by a Muslim majority, surprisingly, except for the Chittagong Hill Tracts, all fell on the eastern side of Bengal, while most of the Hindu-majority districts, except Murshidabad, fell on the western side of Bengal. It was the first time that the common people had an idea about the future West Bengal where Hindus could create a homeland separate from the Muslims. Dr. Mookerjee, knowing his own political limitations as an HMS leader, first created a solid foundation of support from Bengali intellectuals.
On 15th March 1947, he held a public meeting in Calcutta where he presented on stage stalwarts of the Bengali intellectual class like Dr. R. C. Majumdar, Dr. Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Lord Sinha, Makhanlal Sen, Nirmal Kumar Bose, Upendranath Mukherjee, etc., who openly supported Mookerjee’s demand for a new Hindu Bengali homeland out of Pakistan, which would be a part of India. Later on, Sir Jadunath Sarkar and Meghnad Saha joined his movement. He himself toured the entire Bengal region to create mass support in favor of it, and his party, HMS, involved nearly 2,000 of its branches to mobilize opinion. Next, he formed a team with Major A. C. Chatterjee (a former soldier of Netaji’s INA), Hemanta Kumar Sarkar, etc., to arrive at the political map of the new Hindu homeland.
He took the help of the 1941 census report plus his own idea of including some parts of eastern Bihar. HMS organized a massive conference of Hindus from 4th to 6th April at Tarakeshwar in Hooghly, where its objective of the creation of West Bengal was officially adopted. On 5th April, Bengal Congress also had a similar meeting in Calcutta and decided to support the creation of a new state named West Bengal as a part of India. Dr. Mookerjee was invited as a special consultant speaker in that meeting of Congress. He traveled all the way to Calcutta to join that meeting. This is a rare example in the history of world politics where a leader of an opposition party was invited to deliver his opinion to another party before a crucial decision was made.
This shows the influence of Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee when Bengal was standing at its nadir. On 26th April, Dr. Mookerjee and Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy of Congress jointly visited Delhi and met all the top Congress leaders. While Nehru gave perplexing answers to Dr. Mookerjee on the partition of Bengal and its inclusion in India, Sardar Patel clearly gave him the confidence that Congress would support the idea. Dr. Mookerjee met Mountbatten and wrote him several letters to cement the logic of partitioning Bengal. His profound knowledge and sharp reasoning made it clear to the nation that if 24% Muslims had the right to claim a homeland for themselves, then 45% of Hindus living in a province could also claim their share. Surprisingly, by using the same logic, Mountbatten later tamed Jinnah and prevented him from claiming the entirety of Punjab, Bengal, and Assam.
The Muslim League was determined to grab the city of Calcutta;then India’s richest and biggest city with a thriving port and a massive industrial hinterland. Muslims in Bengal were sure that Calcutta was going to Pakistan. Dr. Mookerjee did his best to save Calcutta from going to Pakistan. He reasoned that the city was only 23.59% Muslim, and only 8.45% of tax came from Muslim taxpayers. The city was surrounded by a zone with 67.53% Hindus. He made it clear to both common people and political parties that Calcutta, the capital of Bengal, could not go to Pakistan the way Lahore had gone in the case of the partition of Punjab.
In February of that year, Mookerjee wrote a letter to Patel to block a �90 crore subvention sanction to the Muslim League government of Bengal, arguing that this would prevent the Islamization of Bengal. Mookerjee also reasoned that the complete inclusion of undivided Bengal into Pakistan would force the transfer of 26 million Hindus from there, whereas creating a Hindu Bengal and a Muslim Bengal would make the job comparatively easier, requiring only 9 million and 6 million people, respectively, to relocate. Se eing the mo o d of Bengal, Mohammad Ali Jinnah understood that he was going to get Bengal without Calcutta, which made him extremely frustrated.
“What is Bengal without Calcutta?” he murmured. He tried to influence the press to mobilize the issue. The Amrita Bazar Patrika, the leading English newspaper of the time, organized a readers’ opinion poll. On 23rd April, the result of the poll showed that 98.3% supported the partition of Bengal for the sake of saving Hindu lives and dignity. Tushar Kanti Ghosh, editor of the paper, addressed a mammoth rally of Bengali Hindus in Delhi on 12th April and avowed, “Salvation of Hindus lies in the partition of Bengal.” By the end of May, HMS and Congress organized 12 and 69 public meetings, respectively, in support of creating West Bengal for Hindus. They also organized many joint public meetings. Such was the wave created by Dr. Mookerjee in a few months that even H. S. Suhrawardy, on 15th May, admitted that HMS had captured the imagination of Hindus in the context of partitioning Bengal.
In its editorial on 24th April, The Statesman wrote that in the past 10 weeks, the effort to repartition Bengal by HMS had grown from a small cloud into a storm covering the entire province and beyond Bengal. Meanwhile, a large section of Bengal traders, especially the Marwaris and Bengali Hindus across various chambers of commerce, sided with Mookerjee. G. D. Birla was one of the frontrunners in this. On 2nd June, Congress accepted partition, and soon Lord Mountbatten chalked out the partition plan of India along with three states: Punjab, Bengal, and Assam. He mentioned that respective members of the Legislative Assemblies of Punjab and Bengal would decide the future of their states, while Sylhet of Assam would go to a referendum.
On 10th June, Ananda Bazar Patrika claimed that as nearly 80% of the land of Bengal was owned by Hindus and their population was almost equal to half, the land allocation to the new Hindu state must not be less than half of Bengal. Finally, on 20th June 1947, votes were taken from the elected members at the Bengal Assembly. In a joint voting, the proposal of including undivided Bengal in Pakistan won by 126 to 90 votes. Then, non-Muslim members voted on the proposal to divide Bengal and join India. This was won by 58 to 21. Finally, the proposal of including West Bengal in India, if partition was done, won by a massive margin. With excellent support from Congress, Dr. Mookerjee was able to snatch a huge landmass of Bengal from the jaws of Pakistan.
Even members of the CPI, once supporters of the Muslim League’s Pakistan plan, voted for partitioning Bengal. Jyoti Basu and Ratanlal Brahman, two elected members of the CPI, voted in favor of partition. Sarat Bose opposed it, but Satish Chandra Bose, the eldest brother of both Netaji Bose and Sarat, sided with Dr. Mookerjee. A. K. Fazlul Huq did not vote. On 20th February 1947, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced in the British Parliament that Britain would grant freedom to India by a date no later than June 1948. On 15th July, the bill to grant India her independence was passed in the House of Commons, and the next day it was passed in the House of Lords.
It got final approval from the King of England on 18th July 1947. Based on that, India gained her independence on 15th August 1947, and a homeland of Hindus named West Bengal, with Calcutta as its capital, came into existence as a province of free India. The final shape of West Bengal was known on 17th August when the boundary commission announced its final decision. West Bengal lost the large district of Khulna to Pakistan but gained Murshidabad, a much smaller district, in exchange.
Calcutta was given to West Bengal. As Dr. Mookerjee influenced the commission to consider a police station as a unit to check population, five big districts were partitioned and their Hindu-populated areas were given to West Bengal. With that, it ended up with 36.2% of the landmass of undivided Bengal, with only a 16% Muslim population. Dr. Prafulla Chandra Ghosh became the first Chief Minister of West Bengal, while Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee moved to Delhi to become a minister in Nehru’s cabinet.
(THE WRITER IS A RESEARCHER AND FREELANCE CONTRIBUTOR.)