Was the second Partition of Bengal a good idea?

Which option would have been best?

  • Partition Bengal between Indian and Pakistan as OTL

    Votes: 2 3.0%
  • Keep Bengal as one nation independent of either

    Votes: 29 43.9%
  • Annex Bengal into India

    Votes: 32 48.5%
  • Other

    Votes: 3 4.5%

  • Total voters
    66
Holy crap that's a one-sided referendum. I wonder how trustworthy it was? Did the monarchy suck so bad? Did only unionists vote?

I think it may have been rigged.

Under pressure from Delhi, the Sikkimese King was forced to hold tripartite talks with SNC and India. The talks not only curtailed royal powers, it also turned Sikkim into Indian ‘Protectorate.’ In the elections held in 1974, Lhendup’s SNC got overwhelming majority in the parliament. The government and the king saw each other as enemies. Ultimately, the cabinet meeting, on 27th March 1975, decided to abolish monarchy. The Sikkimese parliament endorsed it and decided to hold a referendum on the future of monarchy. Four days later, the outcome of the poll in 57 stations across the country was: ‘Abolition of the monarchy.’

In an interview, then Agriculture Minister of Sikkim KC Pradhan recalled that the referendum was nothing but a charade. “Indian soldiers rigged the polls by pointing rifles at the hapless voters,” he said. Immediately after the referendum, Kazi Lhendup moved a motion in the parliament proposing that Sikkim be annexed to India. The 32 member parliament, which had 31 memberrs from Lhendup’s SNC- passed the motion without a blink. Needless to say that the entire episode was being orchestrated by India. The then Indian envoy to Sikkim (known as ‘political officer’) BS Das wrote in his book ‘The Sikkim Saga’, Sikkim’s merger was necessary for Indian national interest. And we worked to that end. Maybe if the Chogyal had been smarer, and played his cards better, it wouldn’t have turned out the way it did.”

But Chogyal didn’t play his cards welll. When Sikkim was undergoing turmoil, the Chogyal visited Kathmandu in 1974 to attend the coronation ceremony of King Birendra. According to insiders, King Birendra, Chinese deputy premier Chen Li Yan and Pakistan’s envoy advised Chogyal not to return to Sikkim. “They narrated a ‘master plan’ to save Sikkim from Indian hands but the King didn’t accept,” said Chogyal Yongda. “It was because the King couldn’t think even in dreams that India could use force to annex Sikkim.”

There's more to it too, it's fascinating.
 
Holy crap that's a one-sided referendum. I wonder how trustworthy it was? Did the monarchy suck so bad? Did only unionists vote?

The Monarch was basically really unpopular, I don't know why exactly though.

Sikkim had been before it joined an Indian Protectorate, so the status change was'nt as drastic as if it had been say Nepal or Bhutan.


I wonder how the precise boundaries of Nepal were determined, then. Are they based off of some historical state or feudal lines? Is it a linguistic thing like the states of India are supposed to be?

I'm not sure how all of them were, but given its geography the Northern border was probably based on valleys or mountain ranges.

The Southern border is partially the result of Treaties after Nepal went to war with Britain and its Protectorates a few times and ended up losing land.
 
So, I think the next question is what point of departure allows the separation of all of Bengal (likely with Assam) from India at/near independence as its own country?
 

GTAmario

Banned
No.

Bengali Muslims were not as fanatical A's the punjabi Muslims and could have probably been secularized. It also gets rid of the "Chickens neck"/siliguri corridor issue
 
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