– By Anindita Dasgupta and Neeta Singh*
The independence of India in 1947 gave birth to the new South Asian nation of Pakistan – one country but incongruously situated on two sides of the Indian sub-continent and named East and West Pakistan—comprising territories carved out of Bengal in the east, and Punjab in the west. What Gandhi famously called the vivisection of India had, as a consequence, also led to the re-defining of the subcontinent’s borders, and the creation of the new Indian nation-state as well.
Barely six weeks before India’s independence when the political big-wigs of the Indian National Congress and Muslim League were engaged in conversations and compromises regarding the imminent partition of Punjab and Bengal, in a quiet north-eastern corner of India— Sylhet district in Assam— unknown to most people, Hindus and Muslims were braving the incessant rains and waterlogged fields, and streaming into make-shift poll booths to cast their life-changing votes to decide for themselves if their district would remain with India or join East Pakistan. A little over a month earlier, on 3 June, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, had proposed that a referendum be held in order that the people of Sylhet (a Muslim-majority district in Hindu-majority Assam) could decide whether to stay in India or join Pakistan after Independence. However, the Mountbatten Plan for Punjab and Bengal provinces had no such referendum. Instead Boundary Commissions were set up to demarcate the two parts of the Punjab and Bengal based on majority Muslim and non-Muslim areas.
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