4 April 2026
•BIG PICTURESHARE
In conversation with Akeel Bilgrami, Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy and a faculty member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, and a renowned scholar of political philosophy. This is the second part of a two-part interview with the eminent scholar. The first part was published under the title ‘Does South Asia Need Secularism?’ on March 30, 2026.
THE FIRST PART FOLLOWS AFTER THE END OF THIS SECOND PART
Priyam Paul
The Daily Star (TDS): We have discussed secularism in the pre-independence period. How did it evolve in independent India?
Akeel Bilgrami (AB): In post-independence India, secularism surfaced initially, primarily in the legal sphere of the reform of religious law—in the formulation, for instance, of the Hindu Code Bill. It has become a commonplace to say (Radhakrishnan said it first, then Amartya Sen has also said it, and now troops of academics have started saying it, and indeed, in some of the case law, even confused judges have been saying it) that Indian secularism is different from the secularism of the West. I think this tendency is due to a confusion in some of the metaphors and slogans that have become commonplace in characterising secularism in the West—such as the ‘wall of separation’ between church (more generally, religion) and the state. There is no way for secularism to be implemented anywhere without the state perforating this so-called ‘wall’ that separates it from religion.
You cannot, in general, constrain religion in the political sphere unless the state breaches the wall. As it happened, in independent India, this occurred in the project of reforming religious law. So, the right way to characterise the notion of secularism (whether in Western nations or in India), where liberal constitutions have been adopted, is to say something like this:
Secularism is characterised by three commitments:
1. A commitment to freedom in the practice of religion,
2. A commitment to certain constitutional principles (just to give one example, freedom of speech), which neither mention religion nor opposition to religion,
3. A higher-order commitment which says that if there is a clash between 1) and 2), then 1) must get priority.
Once you eschew misleading slogans and metaphors to characterise it, this is the secularism that was, by and large, adopted by liberal democratic societies in the West (though, as I said earlier to you, countries like Turkey and France went further and adopted state-enforced secularisation, but these are exceptions). It is also the secularism that India adopted, and it is what was implemented in the reform of Hindu law. Practices sanctioned by particular religious laws clashed with 2), so 3) kicked in and permitted the reform of those laws.
So, when Radhakrishnan and Sen say secularism in India is different, that it is ‘the state’s principled neutrality and even-handedness between religions’ (this is sometimes captured in the phrase ‘sarva dharma, sama bhava’), I think they are getting it quite wrong. Certainly, this rhetoric of ‘principled neutrality and even-handedness between religions’ surfaced often in India, but it was never intended as an alternative definition of secularism. Rather, it was intended as a constraint on the implementation of the only definition of secularism that was adopted in India, i.e., the three-clause definition I have outlined. In other words, in the implementation of 3), when 2) and 1) clash, one must do it even-handedly; one must not apply it to one religion while failing to apply it to another, if the clash occurs with both religions.
Of course, as it turned out, as is well known, this constraint was not applied to the reform of religious law. Reform was not even-handedly implemented because Hindu personal law was reformed and Muslim personal law—despite extensively clashing with 2)—was not. But, as is also well known, there were reasons given for this asymmetry, reasons regarding a minority community having suffered great losses during Partition, so they should at least be allowed their personal laws until such time as they gained the psychological confidence, as a community, to accept the state’s reform of it.
Does South Asia need secularism?
Secularism, of course, surfaces in relevance outside the reform of law as well, but until the 1980s, it was mostly wielded in this sphere. Ever since the 1980s, secularism became a very urgent issue in many other spheres because India began to mimic the European form of nationalism that we discussed earlier, the damaging consequences of which, as I said, had prompted secularism as a damage-repair doctrine in the first place.
TDS: When secularism appears to fail or falter, many have said that multiculturalism or pluralism offers a better framework for the subcontinent. What is the difference between secularism and multiculturalism, and where do you stand on this matter?
AB: Multiculturalism, like secularism, also originated in Europe, but some centuries later, in the last quarter of the 20th century. As a result of the Second World War, there was a loss of manpower in Western European nations. They, therefore, allowed (indeed, initially even sought) migration from their erstwhile colonies to pick up the slack (in the case of Germany, it was not from a former colony, but, by various treaty-like arrangements, from Turkey). Over the next few decades, these migrants, displaced from their own cultures and religious settings, found themselves suffering under racist, xenophobic attitudes of the host populations, and therefore began to seek a sense of dignity and autonomy in the comfort zone of their own religions and cultures, and so began to demand that they be allowed to live more in accord with these than secularism—given its exercise of clause 3) in my definition—would allow. That is the origin of multiculturalism as a doctrine, which then spread with a lively intensity to such places as Canada and Australia, pushed not just by immigrants but also by advocates for indigenous communities long suffering from racism in those countries.
It is, in many ways, a more democratic doctrine than secularism, especially in countries with large and diverse religious populations, as in our part of the world and, as a result of migration, increasingly in the West too. But, alas, I think it is a fantasy to think that, in a country like India today, so completely dominated as it is by a Hindutva majoritarian party in power, Muslims could effectively make demands for a multiculturalist polity. That might have been possible from the 1980s to around 2014, when Hindutva was only laying down roots but was not in full-fledged power; but in the last decade or more, it has seemed very unlikely that multiculturalist demands can get anywhere.
The Partition emerged as an outcome of leaders and their negotiations (and failures of negotiation), not a mass movement of any kind. And in Bengal, the Muslim masses, as I said, were wielding Islamic ideas for solidarity in a class struggle, not for a struggle to establish a Muslim Zion. The idea of an Islamic nationalism as underlying the creation of Pakistan is not a plausible reading of the events of the late 1930s and mid-40s.
Even the remarkable Shaheen Bagh movement a few winters ago, which spread to many small towns in India, was not demanding multiculturalism. It was demanding, on behalf of Muslims, that the secularist commitment of the Constitution should curb the power of Hindu majoritarianism that was seeking to undermine the notions of citizenship that the Constitution had enshrined. (It is actually rather fascinating that the campaigns of that movement extensively and brilliantly used multicultural rhetoric and slogans—poetry, songs, art from diverse cultures—but what these were demanding was a proper implementation of a set of secular commitments already present in the Constitution.)
More recently, a constitutional path to multiculturalism is being indirectly proposed by political theorists in a demand for a much greater federalist de-centring of the polity (echoing the provincial autonomy themes we talked about earlier). Since different regions and states have different cultures, more autonomy for the states in a federated system would, in effect, be a kind of multiculturalism. This demand is not surprising because the only opposition to the Hindutva majoritarianism in power is to be found in the regions.
At the centre, there is virtually no serious opposition due to the abject failures of the Congress party. But the BJP-led alliance’s victories in Maharashtra, Haryana, and Bihar state elections are disheartening for this strategy. Bengal and some of the southern states are still holding out in opposition, but the BJP is now beginning to adjust its Hindi-culture Hinduism and seeking to find a path to accommodate southern Hinduism in its understanding of Hinduism. If it succeeds in that, and if Bengal too finds itself loosening its local culture to accommodate Hindi-oriented cultural elements, as it has begun to do in the last decade, then this entire federalist strategy will not amount to much.
Should that turn out to be so, secularism may remain the only plausible discourse to revive, since it is already there in various constitutional commitments. However, I say all this with the utmost tentativeness—it is not really possible to have any certain opinions in this matter. It remains an open question.
TDS: Finally, how do you understand these issues of nationalism, secularism, Muslim politics, and so on that we have been talking about in the context of the political and social transformations in East Bengal, East Pakistan, and Bangladesh over the last century or more?
AB: Muslim participation in Indian nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century took different forms as the freedom movement evolved. As I said in response to one of your earlier questions, the Gandhi–Nehru-led Congress party did try to mobilise Muslims, specifically under the name of ‘Muslim’, in two mass movements—the Khilafat movement and the Muslim Mass Contact Programme. And in the Khilafat period especially, Bengali Muslims were very much affected, and you can see this in the range of outcomes around the C.R. Das Pact that brought Hindus and Muslims together, and the Swarajist Party’s intervention in the legislative councils in the first half of the 1920s.
Just to give you one example, Muslim representatives in the provincial assembly voted for the women’s suffrage bill even though they had refused to do so just a few years earlier on the ground that, unlike Hindu women, Muslim women, due to the custom of purdah, would not come out and vote if they had the franchise. The only thing that intervened between the first vote and the second vote was the Khilafat movement’s impact on Bengal. This shift is a clear instance of the progressive effects of the movement. By the late 1920s, this kind of impact of ‘Hindu–Muslim’ unity in democratic politics had dissipated, thanks mostly to the strenuous efforts to undermine it by upper-caste Bengali Hindu politicians.
But you see, you cannot just see that as a shift from progressive nationalism to communal nationalism. I repeat what I said earlier—the shift is as much to do with the contrast between Muslim involvement in mass politics and their involvement in a quite different ‘representative’ politics forced on the freedom movement by the Crown’s constitutional concessions.
I have to say that this entire period is not very well understood. Many even see the Khilafat movement as a communalisation of Muslim nationalist politics. I think that is a serious misunderstanding. Even so interesting and thoughtful a scholar of that period as the Pakistani leftist Hamza Alavi (for that matter, even Eqbal Ahmad, another astute political analyst) gives a very distorted picture of the movement, calling it a forerunner of communal Muslim politics. It was not that. In fact, I do not believe the more class-based mobilisations of the 1930s—on which the Congress leadership did not always have control—would have been possible without the remarkable progressive impact of the earlier Khilafat movement and its follow-up in the non-cooperation movement immediately after.
Now, of course, Khilafat involved Muslims much more widely than just Bengali Muslims, though it had particularly dynamic effects on Bengali Muslims, and your question is just about the latter. If you focus just on Bengali Muslims in East Bengal, then what is conspicuous is that their class composition was predominantly of petty producers in a large agrarian economy, who were caught up in an economic struggle often made particularly acute due to the hardships forced on them by remote economic events elsewhere on the globe because of the regional economy’s reliance on jute, a cash crop in demand elsewhere and, therefore, subject to shifts in the global market.
This economic struggle surfaced with much intensity and with some passing successes, both of the KPP in the late 1930s and of the Muslim League’s radical wing under Abul Hashim’s leadership some five or six years later. The struggle is often presented by left historians as a purely class struggle (nothing to do with Bengali Muslims being Muslims), but it is not obvious that that is an entirely or exclusively right description of it. The cohesiveness that Islamic egalitarian ideals might have provided to bring together peasants in this struggle is worth studying and exploring as an overlay on the class dimension of the struggle.
Nothing like this sort of struggle existed in the Muslim-majority areas of the north. In Punjab, for instance, the Unionist Party represented the well-off landlord class. Sikandar Hayat, its leader, was deeply committed to provincial autonomy (even more so than Jinnah) and only allied his party with the Muslim League partly because he was, in some ways, outmanoeuvred by Jinnah, but also partly because he was anxious for the future of the class he represented in the wake of the threatening rhetoric of impending land reform that the Congress party had taken up under Nehru’s leadership.
As we know, in East Bengal, the class struggle was not, in the end, successful because the Dhaka Nawab, representing the Ashraf Muslim aristocratic class, lined up with Jinnah and the national-level Muslim political agenda of the Muslim League. And that level of Muslim politics was, as we discussed earlier, caught up with issues of regional autonomy around the Cabinet Mission, and the impasse around those issues is what led to Partition.
So, in answering the part of your question about Muslims and nationalism in the colonial period leading up to Partition, all of this shows that what recent historians like Dhulipala have been arguing, viz., that Pakistan was created by an evolving momentum for a modern Muslim state, and even Devji (who speaks of Muslims seeking a state as an exilic community like the Jews in Europe), are quite off-beam.
The Partition was primarily a result of the failure of ideas regarding provincial autonomy (that motivated Jinnah) to carry the day with the Congress leadership. The Partition emerged as an outcome of leaders and their negotiations (and failures of negotiation), not a mass movement of any kind. And in Bengal, the Muslim masses, as I said, were wielding Islamic ideas for solidarity in a class struggle, not for a struggle to establish a Muslim Zion. The idea of an Islamic nationalism as underlying the creation of Pakistan is not a plausible reading of the events of the late 1930s and mid-40s.
As is well known and oft told, after the creation of Pakistan, Bengali nationalism within the nation emerged in the Bengali language movements in the early 1950s against an increasingly dominant West Pakistan. That movement shattered the myth of religion as a binding force for the creation and sustenance of the new nation, and it simmered for almost two decades until the violence that led to the break-up of the nation; and one might say that that break-up echoed the proper understanding of what lay behind the events that led to Partition in the first place: the drive for regional autonomy as a way of protecting a people and its culture and language.
The Bangladesh that emerged, however, ended up—just as in India under the Congress—standing for a kind of hegemonic nationalist ideal, seeking to bring together, in a consensus, the various different communities in what might rightly be called—again echoing India after independence—a bourgeois democratic polity and political economy.
What followed Sheikh Mujib’s assassination in 1975 was a slow falling apart of this hegemonic consensual nationalism, first under military rule and then with the rise of the BNP and the Jamaat’s greater centrality in politics than it had ever possessed, culminating in the spectacular events that led to the fall of Sheikh Hasina.
The neoliberal cast of the political economy that Bangladesh has embraced in recent decades, consolidated in a number of decisions made by Dr Yunus’s interim government, may well have the effect of intensifying the Islamist presence both in the electoral field and on the streets, as it has in India since 1991. For all the BNP’s current claims to eschewing that presence in its own government, the fact is that, in the neoliberal period, political leaders in power do tend to work on two fronts: a free-market, open political economy, fully given to globalisation, offering the promise of growth and opportunity to the middle classes to gain their support, and, at the same time, a politics invoking more primordial sentiments—around religion—to extend that gain of support to other classes, who will certainly not reap any of the fruits of such growth.
Though I just mentioned India in passing, I am not at all suggesting that anything like the scenario that exists in India will emerge in Bangladesh. The contexts are very different. Hindu nationalists in India have effectively manipulated the apparatus of the modern state to undermine minorities, and that sort of exercise of power is not always replicable in other nations with rather different histories and different institutional structures in place. I am only suggesting that we should not leave out matters of political economy in seeking to understand the increasing presence of religion in the politics of countries like India and Bangladesh.
The interview was taken by Priyam Paul.
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Does South Asia need secularism?
30 March 2026
•IN FOCUSSHARE
Priyam Paul
In conversation with Akeel Bilgrami, Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy and a faculty member of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, and a renowned scholar of political philosophy.
The Daily Star (TDS): Could you elaborate on the origins of secularism in Europe? How did the idea evolve there?
Akeel Bilgrami (AB): ‘Secularism’, first of all, should be distinguished from ‘secularisation’. Both emerged initially in Europe. Secularisation is the name of a process of change—part intellectual, part societal. In the simplest terms, it can be described as a decrease in both religious belief and religious practice, that is, a decrease in belief in God and the myths of creation, as well as a decrease in various practices such as church-going, rituals, habits of religious dress, diet, etc. By contrast, secularism is the name of a political doctrine that sought to usher religion out from having the kind of direct bearing that it so often had on the polity and the state. Your question is about the origins of secularism, not secularisation. But I mention this distinction because there are subtle ways in which these two distinct notions get run together, which, for the sake of clarity, they should not be.
So, for instance, in my view, Kemalist Turkey (or indeed, the Soviet Union) adopted not just secularism but also a kind of state-enforced secularisation, and France, to a much less comprehensive degree, also did that when, for instance, it banned the hijab from being worn in some public places such as schools. In countries like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, in which there is not as much secularisation as there is in Europe—nor does one expect there to be in the foreseeable future—the point of focus is on secularism.
Rethinking secularism in South Asia today
So now let me answer your question about secularism. It has its origins in some of the developments around European nationalism, which itself originated as a result of large changes in the seventeenth century.
With the rise of modern science, certain longstanding theological forms of legitimation of state power—such as the divine right of the monarch who personified the state—began to lose their hold. New forms of justification for it were therefore sought, not in theology, but in political psychology. At just about the same time, after the Westphalian peace, there were two political developments on the ground: first, a new form of entity had emerged (the nation); and second, power, which hitherto had rather scattered locations, began to be increasingly centralised. These were not miscellaneously parallel developments; they were deeply integrated developments, so much so that the nation and the state became completely fused, a fusion expressed by a hyphen (the ‘nation-state’).
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Akeel Bilgrami
And the reason why I say the new justification of state power invoked political psychology is that it took the form of generating a feeling for what was named by the first half of the hyphenated conjunction (the nation), and this thereby—because of the fusion—legitimated what was named by the second half of the hyphenated conjunction (the state). The interesting and crucial question is: how was this feeling generated? Everywhere in Europe, it was done by a standard method: finding an ‘external enemy within’ the nation (the Jews, the Irish, Protestants in Catholic countries, Catholics in Protestant countries), despising it and subjugating it, and saying ‘the nation is ours, not theirs’. Much later, this came to be called ‘nationalism’.
And when numerical and statistical forms of discourse were introduced in the study of society, and notions of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ were coined, this method came to be called ‘majoritarianism’, and since the criteria for defining majorities and minorities were very often religious, it was often a ‘religious majoritarianism’. All of this, in turn, quite naturally caused religious minoritarian backlashes against it, thus generating, in general, a great deal of religion-based domestic strife. And secularism emerged as a doctrine because it was felt that the only way to stop such strife was to steer the polity to be free of all direct religious influence, whether majoritarian or minoritarian.
So, secularism, you might say, was first formulated as a way of repairing the damage caused by nation-building exercises in Europe some centuries ago.
Hurt sentiments and majoritarian politics: South Asia’s crisis of secularism
TDS: During the anti-colonial movement in undivided India, intense religious rivalry, tension, and violence—particularly between Hindus and Muslims—ultimately culminated in the Partition along religious lines. You have argued that Gandhi was not a proponent of secularism. What, then, was his actual understanding of religion and religious divisions within society and the nation?
AB: The anti-colonial movement was a very protracted affair over four decades, and it had many complex elements and developments. Gandhi’s position (indeed even Nehru’s position) on the question of secularism changed over this period in response to these developments. Gandhi’s only really systematic piece of writing was Hind Swaraj, published in 1909. In it, there is no mention of secularism. Nor did Nehru make much mention of it in the early decades of the freedom movement. It is really only in the very last decade at most of the freedom movement, and especially during the acrimonies around the Partition period, that secularism as a doctrine began to loom larger in their thinking and in their speeches and writings. Why? Why not earlier?
Gandhi’s position (as also Nehru’s in his book, Discovery of India) was that India’s history was a history of an unselfconscious pluralism in which Hindus and Muslims (as well as Sikhs, Christians, and others) lived side by side in a culture that had both shared elements and diversity. It had not suffered the damage induced by the kind of nationalism, the nation-building exercises I mentioned in my answer to your first question, which characterised European history. Our nationalism, they said, was not that kind of European nationalism; it was an anti-colonial nationalism embodied in a movement which they claimed would reflect that plurality, bringing together Muslims and others along with the Hindus. Regarding the Muslims in particular, they sought to implement this claim in such efforts as the Khilafat movement, which explicitly and specifically mobilised poor Muslims and Muslim kisaans (unlike the Muslim League, which by and large represented the urban, careerist, relatively educated Muslim), as well as the shorter-lived Muslim Mass Contact Campaign, whose leadership they actually put in the hands of a communist-leaning Muslim leader, K. M. Ashraf.
Now, one might say that we can infer from the very fact of Partition that that claim on Gandhi’s part was incorrect as a description of the national movement he led. I think, to some extent, that inference is right. But it is interesting to analyse exactly how those efforts on his and Nehru’s part went wrong. My own view is that while the freedom struggle Gandhi led involved Muslims in mass mobilisations, such as those I mentioned, Muslims tended to be driven primarily by anti-imperialism and not along religious or communal lines. Khilafat, in particular, had a tremendously dynamic and progressive effect on Muslim politics in many states like Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Assam, and these lasted until fairly late in the 1920s. It is only when the freedom movement involved Muslims, not in mass movements but in formal negotiations with the British, with Hindu and Muslim leaders representing the interests of each community, that Muslim leaders felt they were being treated as mere minorities, especially in the politics of key regions like Uttar Pradesh. And it is then that Congress began to lose some of its hold on Muslim support. In fact, Nehru and Gandhi realised this by the late 1930s, and that is why Nehru (with Gandhi’s assent) started another mass mobilisation that was focused on Muslim involvement, the Muslim Mass Contact Programme. But that mobilisation was much more short-lived than the Khilafat movement.
In any case, you asked what Gandhi’s thinking on the subject of secularism was. The short answer is that he thought secularism was not relevant in the Indian context, since the damage it is intended to repair had not occurred in India, and that adopting it would merely be slavish mimicry of Europe. Of course, if he were alive today, he would recognise that the very grounds on which he thought secularism was not relevant in India then would be the grounds for thinking that it is highly relevant and necessary today, since it is exactly European nationalism that Hindutva is mimicking today.
‘Islamisation in Bengal has no parallel in South Asia’
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TDS: How do you assess Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s political trajectory? He was once regarded as a champion of Hindu–Muslim unity and was not particularly interested in the Khilafat Movement, yet he later became the principal advocate of the Two-Nation Theory, which ultimately led to the creation of Pakistan. After independence, however, he did not emphasise Hindus and Muslims as two separate nations within Pakistan but rather spoke in terms of citizens. How would you describe the evolution of his views on religion, secularism, and political action?
AB: Jinnah, too, went through various stages of thinking in the long period of the freedom movement. His anti-imperialism was much stronger in the early phase. The Khilafat movement unnerved him, since his temperament as a leader was much more lawyerly and not attuned to or comfortable with mass movements. From the late 1920s onward, his focus was much more on protecting the future of Muslims than on opposing the British. I also think it is important to keep in mind that he and the Muslim League leadership, as I have said, basically represented urban, middle-class, relatively educated Muslims, not poor Muslims, not the Muslim kisaan. This was actually a trajectory that went from Sir Syed to Jinnah. Maulana Azad was clear-eyed in seeing Jinnah and the Muslim League as belonging to this trajectory and said so quite early on.
In your question, you say Jinnah was the principal advocate of the Two-Nation Theory—but you have to ask when this became a total commitment of his. I think historians like Ayesha Jalal (and even other less academic biographers of Jinnah, like H. M. Seervai and Stanley Wolpert) have argued convincingly that, until almost the very end, Jinnah’s talk of Pakistan (and there was much talk of that kind) was a bargaining weapon, and his sights were really set on a unified India with radical provincial autonomy (and, of course, his deepest concern was the regions of the north-west and the east, where there were concentrations of large Muslim populations). As everyone knows, there were complicated and intense negotiations on this issue towards the end, and things came to a head with the Cabinet Mission proposals. It was a complex matter with different considerations in play.
Gandhi’s entire political outlook, which was one of a highly decentralised polity (and economy), was of a piece with the idea of radical regional autonomy, but he had deep anxieties about the compulsory groupings clause in the proposals, fearing that they would be preludes to partition. The real opposition to the idea of provincial autonomy came from Nehru, who wanted a strong centre because that was needed to implement the ideas that he had been developing with Mahalanobis and others for central planning in an independent India, which they envisioned would adopt policies of Soviet-style industrialisation. (Subhas Chandra Bose was an ally of Nehru’s on this issue of a strong centre, something that became clear as early as 1938 when Bose set up the National Planning Committee and made Nehru its chair. Gandhi’s ideas, represented on the committee by Kumarappa, were pooh-poohed in the proceedings by the other members.)
I suspect Nehru also was seriously worried that it would be hard to get rid of the Princes if there was the kind of regional autonomy Jinnah was demanding. Moreover, the emerging interests of capital in India were also for a strong centre, since big capital, in general, does not like fragmented markets; so its interest in a strong centre coincided with Nehru for quite the opposite reasons. Nehru’s position carried the day, as you know, and then partition began to look inevitable once Jinnah’s demand for regional autonomy was rejected.
Now, if this understanding of Jinnah’s motives and role is right, then it is quite unsurprising that, after Pakistan was created, he would have articulated a secularist vision of governance for it, as he indeed famously did. That articulation would only be surprising if you accept the occasional Congress caricature of Jinnah as a man of outsize ambition or a sort of Muslim counterpart to Hindu Mahasabhite ideologues. But I think that the scholars I mentioned earlier (especially Jalal) have definitively shown, with documentation, that that understanding of his role and motives during the previous decade is quite wrong.
However, even when it was looking as if Partition was inevitable as a result of the considerations I have just mentioned, the question remained whether Bengal province should be partitioned or not. That question was not settled just by the deliberations of the Muslim League and northern Congress politicians and the British; it was something that was pushed by the Bengali Hindu upper castes, represented by the regional Hindu political leaders of Bengal, who were jittery about the prospect of being a minority in a united Bengal with a majority Muslim population.
And this, of course, raises the further question, a counterfactual one: could the Partition of India have been avoided in 1947 if the earlier partition of Bengal in 1905 had not been reversed? The what-ifs of history have no easy answers.
The interview was taken by Priyam Paul. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Ashoka University.
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