Also in accordance with the Mountbatten Plan, a referendum held on 6 July saw the electorate of Sylhet vote to join East Bengal.

Further, the Boundary Commission, headed by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, decided on the territorial demarcation between the two newly created provinces.

[4] Rezaul Karim, a Bengali Muslim leader in the Indian National Congress, was a champion of Hindu-Muslim unity and a united India.

[5] With respect to Indian civilization, Rezaul Karim declared that "Its Vedas, its Upanishads, its Rama, Sita, its Ramayana, and Mahabharat, its Krishna and Gita, its Asoka and Akbar, its Kalidas and Amir Khusru, its Aurangzeb and Dara, its Rana Pratap and Sitaram—all are our own inheritance.

"[5] In 1941, Rezaul Karim published a book Pakisthan Examined with the Partition Schemes that firmly rejected the two-nation theory and opposed the division of India.

The nationalist Hindu Mahasabha, under the leadership of Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, vehemently opposed it[21] and considered it nothing but a ploy by Suhrawardy to stop the partition of the state so that its industrial west, including the city of Kolkata, would remain under League control.

Like Suhrawardy, Bose also felt that partition would severely hamper Bengal's economy, and almost half of the Hindus would be left stranded in East Pakistan.

[27] Still, the relatively unknown episode marked the last attempt among Bengali Muslim and Hindu leadership to avoid Partition and to live together.

[32] An estimated one million Hindu refugees had entered West Bengal by 1960, and close to 700,000 Muslims left for East Pakistan.

As Bashabi Fraser put it, "There is the reality of the continuous flow of 'economic migrants'/'refugees'/'infiltrators'/'illegal immigrants' who cross over the border and pan out across the subcontinent, looking for work and a new home, settling in metropolitan centres as far off as Delhi and Mumbai, keeping the question of Partition alive today".

Within a year, the population exchange had been largely complete between East and West Punjab, but in Bengal, violence was limited to Kolkata and Noakhali.

The educated urban upper and middle classes, the rural gentry, traders, businessmen and artisans left for India soon after partition.

The situation was vividly described by Jogendra Nath Mandal's resignation letter to Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan.

Mandal was a dalit leader and despite being of a depressed class, he supported the Muslim League as a protest to the subjugation of lower-castes by their higher-caste coreligionists.

For the next two decades, Hindus left East Bengal whenever communal tensions flared up or the relationship between India and Pakistan deteriorated, as in 1964.

The situation of the Hindu minority in East Bengal reached its worst in the months preceding and during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, when the Pakistani Army systematically targeted ethnic Bengalis, regardless of religious background, as part of Operation Searchlight.

However, like India, the two communities' relationship remains tense and occasional communal violence occurred, such as in the aftermath of Babri Mosque demolition.

Neither the central nor the West Bengal state governments anticipated any large-scale population exchange, and no co-ordinated policy was in place to rehabilitate millions of homeless people.

One of the most controversial schemes was the government's decision to settle the refugees by force in Dandakaranya, a barren plot of land in Central India.

Radcliffe's line split Bengal, which had always historically been a single economic, cultural and ethnic (Bengali-Hindu or Bengali-Muslim) zone, into two halves.

[57] The following table shows jute production details in both countries in 1961:[56] West Bengal's paper and leather industry faced similar problems.

[58] The pressure of millions of refugees, food shortages and industrial decline after independence put West Bengal in a severe crisis.

The government built irrigation schemes such as the Mayurakshi project and undertook construction of the Durgapur Steel Plant, but they failed to arrest West Bengal's decline.

[60] Poverty rose, and West Bengal lost its top place and lagged well behind other Indian states in industrial development.

By the 1990s, India upgraded the Assam rail link to 5 ft 6 in (1,676 mm) broad gauge up to Dibrugarh, thereby easing the traffic problem in the Brahmaputra Valley region, but the southern section of the area, which comprises Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur and Barak valley of Assam, still faces serious connectivity problems.

In 2023, a new cross-border rail line through Bangladesh connecting Tripura to Kolkata was established, with the aim of reducing travel time to 12 hours.

This was followed by Ritwik Ghatak's trilogy, Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-covered Stars) (1960), Komal Gandhar (1961), and Subarnarekha (1962), all dealing with the aftermath of the partition.

Tanvir Mokammel's (2017) documentary Seemantorekha (The Borderline) "documents the journey of four individuals to their erstwhile homes in Bangladesh and West Bengal".

Notably, Chandraprakash Dwivedi's (2003) period drama titled Pinjar, based on the Punjabi novel of the same name by Amrita Pritam, portrays the horrors of partition, communal violence, and the predicament of women during the years preceding and succeeding 1947.

The web series Jubliee (2023), created by Vikramaditya Motwane and Soumik Sen, featuring Prosenjit Chatterjee, Aparshakti Kurana, and Aditi Rao Hydari depicted the partition of India and its impact on cities like Lucknow and Bombay with communal riots and mass frenzy.