Bengal Foundation Day? Mamata Banerjee's History Lesson For Governor

Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee today lashed out at the Governor' decision to mark the state's Foundation Day. Scoffing at the declaration of June 20 as the "Foundation Day" of Bengal, she pointed out that the state was really born as a painful fallout of partition -- an occasion that is seared into the memory of its people. "The State was not founded on any particular day, least of all on any 20th of June... the pain and trauma of partition was such that people in the state have never commemorated any day as foundation day since India's independence," she wrote in a letter to Governor CV Ananda Bose.

Declaring that she was "stunned and shocked" by the "unilateral decision", she wrote that the process of carving out Bengal out of the undivided State of Bengal in 1947 "involved uprooting of millions of people across the border and death and displacement of innumerable families" .

"The economy of Bengal was destroyed and devastated and the truncated State of West Bengal suffered a sudden disruption of communication and infrastructure, too. .. Since Independence, we in West Bengal have never rejoiced over, or commemorated, or celebrated, any day as the Foundation Day of West Bengal. Rather, we have seen the Partition as a result of unleashing of communal forces that could not be resisted at that point of time," she added.

The letter also mentioned that the Governor was going forward with celebrations at the Raj Bhavan despite their telephonic conversation where he "had admitted that unilateral and non-consultative decision to declare a particular day as the Foundation Day of the State of West Bengal is not warranted".

If an event is conducted at Raj Bhavan, it "may at best be a programme of a political party, driven by vendetta, but not of the people or its Government," the Chief Minister added.

June 20, 1947, was the date when two meetings of separate sets of legislators in the Bengal Assembly decided whether Bengal Presidency would be part of India or Pakistan.

The British Parliament passed the India Independence Act on July 15, 1947, without any clarity on the borders of the two states being torn apart - Bengal and Punjab. The Cyril Radcliffe Boundary Commission award demarcating the borders was made public on August 17, two days after the formal announcement of independence.