There are dates in history that shine not with fireworks but with the quiet glow of conscience. June 20, 1947 was one such day, a day when Bengal, bloodied and bewildered, stood at the edge of oblivion and made a fateful choice. It chose India, civilisation over surrender, memory over amnesia.

This day, now observed as Paschimbanga Diwas, marks the moment when Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee stood like a solitary flame in a storm, refusing to let the ambitions of the Muslim League devour Bengal. As the architects of Partition redrew borders in haste and indifference, Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee invoked not maps, but moral memory. His resistance was not loud, it was luminous.

In 1947, amidst the chaos of impending Partition, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, then Premier of Bengal, proposed the idea of a “United Bengal", an independent sovereign state that would remain undivided and separate from both India and Pakistan. This idea, echoed with Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Two-Nation Theory and was widely seen as a strategic attempt to create a Muslim-majority country under the guise of unity, with Kolkata as its capital. Syama Prasad Mookerjee emerged as the strongest voice against this plan. Recognising the danger it posed to Bengal’s Hindu population........

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