Bengal’s volatility and India’s fading memory

Bengal has shaped the fate of the subcontinent more than once. Each time, the signs were visible long before the consequences became unavoidable. India does not lack experience. What it risks lacking now is attention, restraint, and memory.

- SHIV KUNAL VERMA

Bengal has never been a quiet corner of the subcontinent. When events turn there, they do not turn gently.

They gather force, acquire momentum, and leave marks that endure long after the moment has passed. India forgets this too easily.

What is unfolding in Bangladesh today is being read in New Delhi as political turbulence of a familiar kind. Governments fall. Protests rise. Tempers flare and are expected to cool. It is comforting to believe that this will pass, that the patterns we have known will reassert themselves. History suggests otherwise. Bengal has a way of influencing the subcontinent in ways that are neither temporary nor contained.

The creation of Pakistan itself offers an early warning. It is convenient to believe that Pakistan was forged primarily in Punjab, in the violence of the west. The record tells a more complicated story. Without Bengal, Pakistan might well have remained an argument rather than a state.

The Muslim League was born there in 1906 and the Bengal provincial elections gave Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s (who joined the IML in 1913) demand for a separate state mass legitimacy at a moment when it still lacked inevitability. Anglo Indian support proved decisive. When Calcutta erupted after the Direct Action call, a threshold was crossed. Partition ceased to be negotiable. It became irreversible.

That threshold was crossed in Bengal.

The pattern repeated itself after 1947. East Pakistan was the demographic heart of the new country and its economic mainstay. It earned the foreign exchange and sustained the state. Yet power remained concentrated in a Punjabi dominated West Pakistan that viewed Bengalis as useful but suspect. Even when prime ministers came from the east, authority rarely followed. Language was dismissed. Culture was patronised. Economic extraction was normalised. Sada Punjabi, Saala Bengali! Alienation set in long before it found political expression.