The Partition of Bengal in 1947, also known as the Second Partition of Bengal, part of the Partition of India, divided the British Indian Bengal Province along the Radcliffe Line between the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. The Bengali Hindu-majority West Bengal became a state of India, and the Bengali Muslim-majority East Bengal (now Bangladesh) became a province of Pakistan.
On 20 June 1947, the Bengal Legislative Assembly met to decide the future of the Bengal Province, as between being a United Bengal within India or Pakistan or divided into West Bengal and East Bengal as the homelands for the Bengali Hindus and the Bengali Muslims, respectively. At the preliminary joint session, the assembly decided by 126–90 that if it remained united, it should join the new Constituent Assembly of Pakistan. Later, a separate meeting of legislators from West Bengal decided by 58–21 that the province should be partitioned and that West Bengal should join the existing Constituent Assembly of India. In another separate meeting of legislators from East Bengal, it was decided by 106–35 that the province should not be partitioned and by 107–34 that East Bengal should join Pakistan in the event of Partition.
On 6 July 1947, the Sylhet referendum decided to sever Sylhet from Assam and merge it into East Bengal in order to join Pakistan.
The partition, with power transferred to Pakistan and India on 14–15 August 1947, was done according to what has come to be known as the 3 June Plan, or the Mountbatten Plan. Indian independence, on 15 August 1947, ended over 150 years of British rule and influence in the Indian subcontinent. East Pakistan became the independent country of Bangladesh after the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.
Background
Since 1866, there had been discussions about splitting up the Bengal Presidency, which had grown too large to be administered effectively from Calcutta. This was the official reason given in 1905 for the first partition of Bengal. However, the geography of that partition had another, political, purpose, to weaken Bengali resistance to British rule. The partition divided the province between West Bengal, whose majority was Hindu, and East Bengal, whose majority was Muslim, but left considerable minorities of Hindus in East Bengal and Muslims in West Bengal. While the Muslims were in favour of the partition, as they would have their own province, Hindus opposed it. The controversy led to increased violence and protest, and in 1911, the provinces were again united.
However, the disagreements between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal that had sparked the Partition of Bengal in 1905 remained, and laws, including the Second Partition of Bengal in 1947, were implemented to fulfil the political needs of the parties involved.
Assembly resolution about partition
According to plan, on 20 June 1947, the members of the Bengal Legislative Assembly cast three separate votes on the proposal to partition Bengal:
- In the joint session of the house, composed of all the members of the Assembly, the division of the joint session of the House stood at 126 votes against and 90 votes for partitioning of Bengal and joining the existing Constituent Assembly (India).
- The members of the Muslim-majority areas of Bengal in a separate session then passed a motion by 106–35 against partitioning Bengal and instead joining a new Constituent Assembly (Pakistan) as a whole.
- A separate meeting of the members of the non-Muslim-majority areas of Bengal then decided 58–21 to partition the province.
Under the Mountbatten Plan, a single majority vote in favour of partition by either of the notionally divided halves of the Assembly would have decided the division of the province, and hence the proceedings on 20 June resulted in the decision to partition Bengal. That set the stage for the creation of West Bengal as a province of India and East Bengal as a province of the Dominion of Pakistan.
Also in accordance with the Mountbatten Plan, a referendum held on 6 July saw the electorate of Sylhet vote to join East Bengal. Further, the Boundary Commission, headed by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, decided on the territorial demarcation between the two newly created provinces. Power was transferred to Pakistan and India on 14 and 15 August, respectively, under the Indian Independence Act 1947.
Opposition to the partition
In Bengal, the Krishak Praja Party's Syed Habib-ul-Rahman said that partitioning India was "absurd" and "chimerical".
Rezaul Karim, a Bengali Muslim leader in the Indian National Congress, was a champion of Hindu-Muslim unity and a united India. He "argued that the idea that Hindus and Muslims are two distinct nations was ahistorical" and held that outside of the subcontinent, Indian Muslims faced discrimination. With respect to Indian civilization, Rezaul Karim declared that "Its Vedas, its Upanishads, its Rama, Sita, its Ramayana, and Mahabharat, its Krishna and Gita, its Asoka and Akbar, its Kalidas and Amir Khusru, its Aurangzeb and Dara, its Rana Pratap and Sitaram—all are our own inheritance." In 1941, Rezaul Karim published a book Pakisthan Examined with the Partition Schemes that firmly rejected the two-nation theory and opposed the division of India. Karim advocated for composite nationalism, with historian Neilesh Bose of the University of Victoria stating that "Rezaul Karim developed a Bengali Muslim composite nationalism that aimed to connect religion, region and nation in the context of a subjunctive, possible future India."
United Bengal plan
After it became apparent that the division of India on the basis of the two-nation theory would almost certainly result in the partition of Bengal along religious lines, the Bengal provincial Muslim League leader Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy came up with a new plan to create an independent Bengal state, which would join neither Pakistan nor India and remain unpartitioned. Suhrawardy realised that if Bengal was partitioned, it would be economically disastrous for East Bengal, as all coal mines, all but two jute mills, and other industrial plants would certainly go to the western part since they were in overwhelmingly Hindu areas. Most importantly, Calcutta, the largest city in India and an industrial and commercial hub and the largest port, would also go to the western part. Suhrawardy floated his idea on 27 April 1947 at a press conference in Delhi.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, wanted an undivided Bengal outside the Dominion of India. He had told Mountbatten only the day before, "What is the use of Bengal without Calcutta; they had better remain united and independent; I am sure that they would be on friendly terms with us". Opinion among the Bengal provincial Muslim League leadership was divided on the question of a United Bengal. The leader Abul Hashim supported it, but Khawaja Nazimuddin, Nurul Amin and Mohammad Akram Khan opposed it. Suhrawardy lobbied Jinnah on 15 May for his support. Shortly thereafter, opponents of the proposal also met with Jinnah. In letters, he privately entertained the idea, but did not publicly endorse either side. Notwithstanding his earlier comment to Mountbatten, historians are divided as to whether he supported a United Bengal outside of Pakistan, and, if so, to what degree. Bidyut Chakrabarty and Sirajul Islam wrote that Jinnah consented to or defended the scheme, perhaps believing that an independent Bengal could be a first step towards an undivided Bengal within a greater Pakistan. Others say he either didn't support or opposed the plan.
For the Congress, only a handful of leaders agreed to the plan, such as the influential Bengal provincial Congress leader Sarat Chandra Bose, the elder brother of Netaji and Kiran Shankar Roy. However, most other leaders and Congress leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, rejected the plan. The nationalist Hindu Mahasabha, under the leadership of Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, vehemently opposed it and considered it nothing but a ploy by Suhrawardy to stop the partition of the state so that its industrial west, including the city of Kolkata, would remain under League control. It also claimed that even if the plan was for a sovereign Bengal state, it would be a virtual Pakistan, and the Hindu minority would always be at the mercy of the Muslim majority.
Although the chance of the proposal seeing light without the Congress central committee's approval was slim, Bose and Suhrawardy continued talks to reach an agreement on the political structure of the proposed state. Like Suhrawardy, Bose also felt that partition would severely hamper Bengal's economy, and almost half of the Hindus would be left stranded in East Bengal. The agreement was published on 24 May 1947, but was largely political. The proposal had little support at the grassroots level, particularly among Hindus. The Muslim League's continuous propaganda for the two-nation theory during the past six years, as well as the marginalisation of Hindus in the Suhrawardy ministry and the vicious 1946 riots, which many Hindus believed to have been sponsored by the state, left little room for trust by the Bengali Hindus. Soon, Bose and Suhrawardy were divided on the nature of the electorate: separate or joint. Suhrawardy insisted upon maintaining the separate electorates for Muslims and non-Muslims. Bose opposed the idea and withdrew. The lack of any other significant support by the Congress caused the United Bengal plan to be discarded. Still, the relatively unknown episode marked the last attempt among Bengali Muslim and Hindu leadership to avoid Partition and to live together.
Displacement
1946–1951
Following the partition of Bengal between the Hindu-majority West Bengal and the Muslim-majority East Bengal, there was an influx of Bengali Hindu/Bengali Muslim refugees from both sides. An estimation suggests that before the Partition, West Bengal had a population of 21.2 million, of whom 5.3 million, or roughly 25 percent, were Muslim minorities. Most of the Muslim population were native Bengali Muslims, whereas East Bengal had 39.1 million people, of whom 10.94 million or roughly 28 percent were Hindu minorities, i.e. predominantly native Bengali Hindus. Nearly 2.04 million Bengali Hindus left Pakistan's East Bengal for India's West Bengal region, and 1.72 million Bengali Muslims left India's West Bengal for Pakistan's East Bengal region immediately after the Partition because of violence and rioting resulting from mobs supporting West Bengal and East Bengal. However, most Muslims who left in 1947 returned soon after to India's West Bengal before the Liaquat–Nehru Pact, which was signed in 1950.
Unlike Punjab, where a full population exchange between Punjabi Muslims and Punjabi Sikhs/Punjabi Hindus during the partition happened, the same complete population exchange did not happen in Bengal (the population transfer between Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims was lower due to the occurrence of less violence); overall it was one-sided, i.e. most of the Bengali Hindus, mainly from upper caste left East Bengal, but most of the Bengali Muslims didn't leave West Bengal. During Partition, Hindu Mahasabha leader Shyama Prasad Mukherjee demanded a full exchange of population—an exchange of the Bengali Muslim population of West Bengal with that of Bengali Hindus of East Bengal—but it didn't happen due to the lack of interest of Central Government leaders of that time. Presently, only 8 percent of Bangladesh (then East Bengal) is Hindu, whereas West Bengal is still 27 percent Muslim, compared to 25 percent at the time of Partition.
1960
An estimated one million Hindu refugees had entered West Bengal by 1960, and close to 700,000 Muslims left for East Pakistan. The refugee influx in Bengal was also accompanied by the fact that the government was less prepared to rehabilitate them, which resulted in huge housing and sanitation problems for the millions, most of whom were owners of large property back in East Bengal.
1964
During the East Pakistan riot of 1964, it is estimated, according to Indian authorities, 135,000 Hindu refugees arrived in West Bengal from East Pakistan, and the Muslims started to migrate to East Pakistan from West Bengal. According to Pakistani figures, by early April, 83,000 Muslim refugees had arrived from West Bengal.
1971
In 1971, during the Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan, a large group of refugees numbering an estimated 7,235,916 arrived from Bangladesh to India's West Bengal. Nearly 95% of them were Bengali Hindus, and, after the independence of Bangladesh, nearly 1,521,912 Bengali Hindu refugees decided to stay in West Bengal. The Bangladeshi Hindus were mainly settled in the Nadia, North 24 Parganas, and South 24 Parganas districts of West Bengal after 1971.
Aftermath
Before the official Radcliffe Line was drawn in 1947, these were the religious demographics in Bengal:
- Muslim-majority districts: Dinajpur, Rangpur, Malda, Murshidabad, Rajshahi, Bogra, Pabna, Mymensingh, Jessore, Nadia, Faridpur, Dhaka, Tippera, Bakerganj, Noakhali and Chittagong.
- Hindu-majority districts: Calcutta, Howrah, Hooghly, Birbhum, Burdwan, Bankura, Midnapore, Jalpaiguri, Darjeeling, 24 Pargan and Khulna
- Buddhist-majority district: Chittagong Hill Tract
- Assam Province: Sylhet (muslim majority)
Final division: