A new day of commemoration is sought to be marked in the rather sparse calendar of milestones in the history of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Bengal. Paschim Banga Divas, the foundation day of West Bengal. The date chosen is June 20, 1947, when the legislators from the non-Muslim majority districts voted in favour of the partition of Bengal by 58 votes to 21, to ensure it remains within India.‘Paschim Banga Divas’ is not the brainchild of the newly elected BJP ministry in Bengal, though it is projecting it as such. It was proposed in 2023 but rejected by the state government as an appropriate date, due to its deeply painful association with communal trauma and mass displacement. Throwing protocol to the winds, the Union government went ahead with observing June 20 as ‘Paschim Banga Divas’ in the Raj Bhavans in BJP-ruled states. No time was lost in consecrating this date when the present ministry was sworn in. A few days ago, the prime minister, no less, visited the state to celebrate West Bengal Foundation Day. Addressing a rally at Tarakeshwar, he portrayed Syama Prasad Mookerjee as the leader who saved Calcutta for West Bengal while accusing the Congress leaders of betraying the Hindus by falling for the conspiracy to create a united independent Bengal, which would inevitably merge with Pakistan.Today, Mookerjee’s birth anniversary, has been announced as a holiday across Bengal.Swapan Das Gupta’s column ‘Myth Punctured’ on The Telegraph is as close to a manifesto of Hindu Bengal as one can get. Dasgupta is the finance minister in the newly elected BJP ministry in Bengal – a ministry formed after almost stealing an election by massively deleting voters from the electoral rolls. Dasgupta presents us with a political manifesto that seeks to lend legitimacy to the idea of a ‘Hindu’ Bengal. The ‘fault lines’ he traces go back to Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay on the ‘Hindu’ side and the ‘Muslim’ literati in the 19th century. Indeed, it is a long line drawn from Bankim to Syama Prasad Mookerjee to Bangladesh in 1971 to the Citizenship Amendment Act, which allows Hindus from neighbouring countries to become citizens. The purpose of constructing this political genealogy is, in part, to justify controversial policies such as the CAA. The manifesto ends with the homily that the BJP accepts the reality of Bangladesh, unlike the Bangal (read leftists), who believe in composite culture and yearn for their ‘remembered villages.’ Making of a heroAlong with the selected date is a hero and a consecrated site. Syama Prasad Mookerjee and Tarakeshwar. Tarakeshwar, a popular Shaivite pilgrimage site, was the venue of the Bengal Hindu Mahasabha conference on April 4, 1947, at which a resolution was passed demanding the partition of Bengal. Why Syama Prasad Mookerjee? Three days associated with him are to be celebrated within two weeks this June and July now. June 20, to which he is yoked; June 23, Balidan Divas marking his death anniversary; and his birth anniversary today. The question is whether his contribution to the freedom struggle deserves the honour bestowed on him.Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s political role during World War II began with his resignation from the Congress in 1939, the premier nationalist organisation. He worked actively with the Hindu Mahasabha, which, under Savarkar’s influence, cooperated with the British government during the War years and opposed the nationalist forces, including during the Quit India movement. Despite the party’s dismal showing of two seats in the 1937 provincial legislative assembly elections, the exigencies of the wartime political situation allowed Mookerjee to form a coalition with Fazlul Huq. He headed the Civil Supplies Ministry in the run-up to the devastating famine of 1943. His subsequent resignation from the ministry and exposure of the government’s policies are mentioned by his admirers, not his loyalist politics, especially shameful when the people of India were in resistance mode and the Congress leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi, were in jail for long spells.Legendary Bengali artist Chittaprosad’s depiction of Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s house.In 1945, when elections were announced, he proposed, on behalf of the Hindu Mahasabha, a pre-poll alliance with the Congress. Patel firmly ruled out an alliance on two grounds. In his letters to Nehru on October 8 and 12, 1945, he wrote that the Mahasabha’s politics were dubious and, second, that the party was unlikely to win any seats. Maulana Azad, who was then the Congress President, agreed with Patel. Nehru also analysed why “it would be wrong policy and harmful for us to enter into pacts and arrangements with the Hindu Mahasabha….[They will] again emphasise, as they have done in the past, that the Congress is the Hindu Mahasabha in a different guise…. This will take away from the straight and semi-revolutionary appeal of the Congress functioning without compromises with other groups.” When Mookerjee pressed the matter again on December 20, 1945, he could hardly have expected the summary dismissal he got from Patel: “The Hindu Mahasabha should be dissolved and its members should join the Congress.” The Hindu Mahasabha won just one seat in both the Central Legislative Assembly elections in 1945 and in the Bengal Legislative Assembly elections in 1946. The Hindu Mahasabha was hardly a force in Bengal during this period. Its political influence, including among the Hindus, should not be overstated when looking for why Bengal was partitioned. In the Bengal Governor’s words, “Dr Mukherji was a clever and unscrupulous politician. The Hindu Mahasabha had failed completely to gain representation in the Legislative Assembly, except for Dr Mukherji’s own seat. They were, however, good propagandists.” Also read: ‘Painful Sights’: Chittaprosad on BJP Icon S.P. Mookerjee’s Bengal VillageLobbiesThe Governor, whose own sympathies were on the side of the Muslim League and independent Bengal, spelt out clearly who represented the Hindus and what the demand for partition stood for: “The Hindus at the General Election may be said to have voted for Congress ideals and against Pakistan. The present “Partition” agitation is in fact an anti-Pakistan movement, — those who support it would rather face the division of Bengal, in order to retain a connection with a Hindu-controlled Central Government, than remain in an independent Bengal (whether Muslim-controlled or under joint Hindu-Muslim control) or a Bengal linked with some form of Pakistan.” A powerful counter-lobby in favour of an undivided Bengal comprised the Muslim League and the Governor of Bengal. They explored alternatives such as an independent United Bengal or making Calcutta a shared/free city because they believed East Bengal would not be economically viable without it. The Governor of Bengal cautioned the Viceroy that the partition of the province would mean bloodshed and even a holocaust if Calcutta remained with West Bengal. The Bengal administration offered the bait of Bengal as a separate dominion coming into the Commonwealth, assisted by European commercial interests, with Calcutta a free city or condominium under joint control. Without Calcutta, East Bengal will be a rural slum, warned the Governor. So, it was a Muslim League-British conspiracy, but Congress was not part of it, contrary to what the Prime Minister claims. Let us quote Patel in the hope that the Prime Minister may listen to his self-declared mentor: “Talk of the idea of a sovereign republic of independent Bengal is a trap to induce the unwary and unwise to enter into the parlour of the Muslim League. Bengal has got to be partitioned, if the non-Muslim population is to survive.” In Bengal, a range of people and organisations backed the demand for partition. The Congress leaders were flooded with memoranda (often signed by hundreds of villagers or with their thumb impressions), declaring their unwillingness to live under League rule. We only learn of the telegrams sent en masse by the Mahasabha from those who project it as the driver of the ‘movement’. But there were countless others. The signatories included the Bangladeshiya Kayasth Sabha, the Assam Bengal Indian Tea Planters Association, the Calcutta Motor Dealers Association, the Bar Associations of Barisal, Khulna and Kushtia, Municipal Commissioners, and even the priest of the Kalighat Kali Temple. Bengalis outside Bengal, in Kanpur, Nagpur and Banaras, supported the demand. Eminent intellectuals such as Jadunath Sarkar, Meghnad Saha, Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Kalidas Nag, and R.C. Majumdar, among others, publicly supported the partition of Bengal. Seven members of the Indian Legislative Assembly and four members of the Council of State from Bengal posed the choice as “whether to live in freedom or in slavery”. They opted for a separate autonomous province in West and North Bengal. Myth-makingA scrutiny of over 2,000 pages of documents comprising the Transfer of Power volumes covering the period from March 23 to June 2 and then to July 1947, yielded just one interview with Syama Prasad Mookerjee on April 23 and one letter from him to the Viceroy on May 2, making a case for partition. It was the Congress, Patel, and Nehru, and not the Hindu Mahasabha and Syama Prasad Mookerjee, that were the main players in the move to partition Bengal. In the wake of the riots in Rawalpindi on March 8, the Congress Working Committee passed a resolution demanding the partition of Punjab in the event of the partition of the country. This resolution predated the Bengal Provincial Hindu Mahasabha’s March 16 resolution demanding the partition of Bengal. The partition of Bengal, implied in the Congress Working Committee resolution of March 8, 1947, was specifically demanded by the Bengal Congress on April 9, 1947. The Executive Committee of the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee urged the establishment of two regional Ministries and demanded that, in the event of power being transferred to the present League government, those areas wishing to remain in India be brought together into a separate province.But the role of the Bengal Congress is erased in the myth-making of a Hindu Mahasabha-led ‘Hindu Bengal’.On April 17, the President of the Congress met the new Viceroy. The official record of the interview ran thus: “The Congress must reluctantly accept the fact that the Muslim League will never voluntarily come into a Union of India’ and that being so, ‘rather than have a battle we shall let them have their Pakistan, provided you will allow the Punjab and Bengal to be partitioned in a fair manner.’On May 1, in an interview to Associated Press of America, Patel, Home Member in the Interim Government, said, “If the Muslim League insists it wants separation, then Congress will not compel them to remain by force. But it will result in dividing Bengal and the Punjab.”Nehru’s prescience on the issue was remarkable. In a speech in Lahore on August 26, 1945, he said:“If Pakistan is given, then parts of the Punjab and Bengal, where the Hindu population is in a majority, will join Hindustan and both the Punjab and Bengal will have to be divided.” On April 20, Nehru again pressed for the division of Punjab and Bengal. This is followed by the interlude at Simla from May 10, when Nehru rejected the draft of the Mountbatten Plan that the Viceroy had shared with him, which he considers raises the spectre of balkanisation. As reported in the minutes of the official meeting at Simla the next morning on May 11, Pandit Nehru said that it was obvious that the division of Bengal was harmful from many points of view, but the same argument applied to the cutting off of Bengal from India. Nehru would be willing to consider special arrangements with Bengal and the Punjab, but the feelings of the people in west Bengal were an important factor for him. “The situation in Bengal had become intolerable for them. There was not likely to be more than one per cent of non-Muslims who would agree to independence; Calcutta had been half ruined in the last six months,” he said.That Nehru’s views had been driven home was evident from the minutes of the staff meeting the following day:“After discussion, his excellency the viceroy decided that the plan should be redrafted on the basis of no option for independence being given to Bengal or any other Province.”The Viceroy reported this to the Governor of Bengal a week later, on May 18:“My talks with Nehru at Simla led me to believe that it is extremely unlikely that the Congress High Command will accept an independent Bengal or allow their followers to support such a proposal, as their view is that Bengal has no future except in Hindustan.”It took Nehru’s forthright statement, on May 25, to a foreign journalist, Norman Cliff of the News Chronicle, that the Congress would agree to united Bengal only if it remained in India, to wring a clear-cut stand from Mountbatten. Three days before the announcement of the June 3 Plan, the Viceroy reminded his staff of where Nehru stands:“However, Pandit Nehru had stated that he would not agree to Bengal being independent.” The Viceroy had already informed the Governor of Bengal on May 17 that:“His Majesty’s Government had decided that it would not be practicable to declare Calcutta a free city. They had also ruled that Dominion status would not be granted to Eastern Bengal independently. It looks as if the Congress were determined to oppose any move towards an independent but united Bengal.”In his periodic personal report of June 5, the Viceroy noted that:“[I]t was at Nehru’s own request that I had removed the choice of independence in the case of Bengal and other provinces to avoid ‘Balkanisation.”The Viceroy explained to the Nawab of Bhopal:“I told him that basically Congress would never have accepted the plan if there had been more than two Dominions: they had even refused to allow Bengal to vote for independence and separate Dominion status to avoid partition.” Sardar Patel, and not Syama Prasad Mookerjee, was the saviour of Calcutta. In a report of an interview with Patel and Nehru on May 17, the Viceroy stated that Sardar Patel was strongly opposed to treating Calcutta as a free port, and he did not press the point further. The Viceroy further reported on June 5:“I sent V. P. Menon to see Patel to obtain his agreement to six months joint control of Calcutta. Patel’s reply was very firm: “Not even for six hours!”Sucheta Mahajan retired as Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.The article is based on official correspondence, reports and minutes included in the Transfer of Power series, volumes 10 and 11 edited by Manserghm published by Her Majesty’s Government for the period of the Mountbatten Viceroyalty from March to July 1947. The author has also consulted the private papers of Rajendra Prasad, the correspondence of Vallabhbhai Patel and the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru.