Though Southasia has a shared history and numerous cultural synergies, in the modern era ultra-nationalism, jingoism and religious radicalism have almost obliterated this legacy. The violence of Partition ensured that there was only limited space for moderate voices that believed in treating borders as mere national boundaries rather than zones of conflict. Political disputes and acrimony resulted in the creation of impermeable barriers, first between India and Pakistan and then between India and Bangladesh. The Punjab, which shared a common culture and heritage and was also a cohesive economic unit prior to Partition, was divided into two adversarial camps thereafter. Similar, though less extreme, was the fate of Bengal.
In the case of the Punjab, this began to change in the late 1990s when the two Punjabi prime ministers of India and Pakistan at the time, I K Gujral and Nawaz Sharif, attempted to forge a harmonious relationship between India and Pakistan. From 2003, cultural exchanges between the two Punjabs began to increase, visits by Sikh pilgrims to Punjab province became more frequent, and limited trade between the two also began. This process has continued since that time despite the continuing mutual mistrust maintained by incidents such as the 26/11 Mumbai attacks.
Relations between Dhaka and New Delhi have generally been smoother than those between Islamabad and New Delhi. As such, there is great potential to use the inherent cultural synergies and common history of the two Bengals, as well as parts of the Indian Northeast, as a bridge to improve relations between the two countries. To date, the India-Bangladesh thaw had been attributed to the personal chemistry between Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, himself a Bengali, and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The latter is also said to have phoned West Bengal's newly elected chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, to congratulate her on her victory in the recent West Bengal elections. There is great potential to move forward from this point, but India must work harder to dispel Bangladesh's fears of Indian hegemony and interference in Bangladesh. It is also time to encourage more people-to-people contact between West Bengal and Bangladesh.
While the Pakistani and Indian Punjabs are sub-state units (one a province, one a state), in the case of West Bengal and Bangladesh it would be one state unit dealing with a sovereign country. Interestingly, there are far fewer civil-society organisations in West Bengal and Bangladesh pushing for greater Bengal-Bengal interactions than one sees in the case of the two Punjabs. Yet in certain ways, especially at a cultural level, it would seem far easier for the two Bengals to cooperate, since they have not drifted as far apart culturally as have the two Punjabs since Partition. Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray are cultural icons admired on both sides of the border, as we have seen in the case of the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Tagore's birth.