It is likely that there will be bewilderment in some circles of Bengali society over the importance being attached to the commemoration of West Bengal Day on June 20. Only the buffs will perhaps be aware of the significance of a political convention organised by the Hindu Mahasabha in 1946 at Tarakeshwar, an event that will be commemorated in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday. Why, it will be asked — not least by the battalion of sceptics who have momentarily fallen silent after the Bharatiya Janata Party’s emphatic victory in last month’s polls — does West Bengal need a foundation day? After all, Bengalis have always regarded themselves as a cultural and civilisational entity rather than as a community forged through administrative fiat. To pin this identity to any single event may seem needless.
The tremors caused by this West Bengal Day are fascinating. However, to equate the debate with a political contest involving the BJP and its ‘secular’ opponents would amount to narrowing its scope. The issue is not merely the commemoration of the second Partition of Bengal — the first being Lord Curzon’s controversial measure of 1905, undone in 1911 — on the day it was decided to establish West Bengal as an integral part of the Indian Union but the larger question of Bengali identity.
The irony of Bengali society celebrating the resistance to Lord Curzon’s division of the mammoth Bengal Presidency in 1905 and endorsing the imposition of the Radcliffe Line in 1947 will, hopefully, not be lost. In 1905, Curzon was demonised by the Bengali-speaking intelligentsia — whose members were almost entirely Hindu by faith — for attempting to divide a linguistic and cultural community along religious lines. To the stalwarts of that age — legendary figures such as Surendranath Banerjee, Bipin Chandra Pal, Aurobindo Ghose and Rabindranath Tagore — this was an outrage so monumental that it broke their faith in the loftiness of British rule. That the small community of educated, Bengali-speaking Muslims did not necessarily feel similar pangs of separation was something that neither Hindu Bengalis of that age nor subsequent historians either appreciated or admitted. The myth of a composite cultural community spanning religious fault lines was allowed to persist well into the 21st century.
The denial involved a great deal of intellectual acrobatics. Since the ignominious collapse of the Khilafat Movement in 1922, Bengal was engulfed in communal strife. Nearly every town and city of united Bengal experienced sectarian strife of varying intensity. Chittaranjan Das tried bravely to reverse the growing Hindu-Muslim gulf through his Bengal Pact. However, this lawyer’s settlement was never really accepted by either the Congress or by Hindu society. The Pact didn’t outlive Deshbandhu’s untimely death in 1925. Politically and emotionally, Hindu and Muslim Bengal got more and more disengaged in the first half of the 20th century.
Bhadralok society’s denial of a schism that determined the contours of politics until Independence and even after was in hindsight quite incomprehensible. Even before the Pakistan resolution of 1940 formalised the divide in Bengal, Hindu and Muslim societies were moving in very different directions. Recent research has clearly indicated that Muslim separatism had intellectual roots in society and wasn’t merely something spawned either by the miscalculations of the Congress in 1937 or by the machinations of the Urdu-speaking elite in the Muslim League. Fazlul Huq may have been a reluctant participant in the aggressive separatism promoted by the likes of Khwaja Nazimuddin, H.S. Suhrawardy and the Ispahani business group, but the debates over the Calcutta University logo, the singing of "Vande Mataram", and the sharing of spoils in the Calcutta Corporation — to name a few emotive issues — indicated that the composite Bengali identity was a nice, self-serving myth. A common language separated two distinct communities that were not in any meaningful conversation.
The unwillingness to recognise what had become patently obvious was a factor in the management of Bengal’s post-Partition trauma. Till Operation Searchlight in March 1971 signalled the end of East Pakistan, a clutch of influential Calcutta politicians and
policymakers in Delhi clung to the belief that the Radcliffe Line was transitory. The Nehru-Liaquat Pact of 1950 perpetuated the myth of Bengalis transcending religion and the East Bengali Hindus returning to their ancestral lands.
Even as late as the mid-1970s, it was quite common to find articles in the Calcutta press on Independence Day questioning the inevitability of Partition. During
the Bangladesh conflict of 1971, many elderly ‘Bangals’ actually dreamt of recovering their Supari trees and village ponds.
The Left was principally responsible for perpetuating this 'false consciousness'. The Left parties built their organisations on the strength of support from the dispossessed refugees from East Pakistan. But while they craftily spread disaffection at the pitiable condition of the 'colonies' and camps, the Left ideologues were silent over what had led to the exodus of Hindus in the first place. This denial became the foundation of the secular consensus that prevailed until the BJP became a force in the state.
Bengali secularism first began showing cracks when the Left Front government looked the other way as the border districts experienced a marked demographic transformation. Whether the rise in Muslim population was a consequence of Hindus moving elsewhere or of Muslim migration from Bangladesh remains an inconclusive debate, but clearly the growing Hindu fear of losing control over entire districts was disregarded by the mainstream 'secular' parties. After the BJP began the process of Hindu counter-mobilisation, the Trinamool Congress became over-dependent on Muslim support. This meant encouraging Muslim bellicosity and even supporting illegal Muslim migration from Bangladesh.
The rediscovery of the fight put up by Syama Prasad Mookerjee and, indeed, the entire Hindu leadership of Bengal to save Calcutta for India and a slice of united Bengal for Hindus owes entirely to the changed environment of West Bengal. The movement to have June 20 declared West Bengal Day became relevant in the context of the Mamata Banerjee government’s conscious disavowal of Hindu political interests and the corresponding bid by the BJP to secure the maximum consolidation of Hindu votes. It may have got a further fillip with the rise in Islamist impulses and the persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh after August 2024. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 that, in effect, established the 'right of return' of all Hindus in South Asia has provided the constitutional foundation for the reforging of the Bengali identity.
The importance of June 20 lies in the formal acknowledgment of two identities: the Bengali identity of India and the Bangladeshi identity of our neighbour. The two have commonalities but they are distinct.
Swapan Dasgupta is the finance minister of West Bengal. The views expressed in this article are personal
