The creation of Pakistan in the aftermath of the 1947 Partition of India is an event which is often oversimplified as the culmination of the Hindu-Muslim conflict. This dominant narrative often overshadows the nuances of the prevailing political landscape.
The birth of Pakistan was, in fact, a culmination of various layered struggles, one of the most significant yet forgotten being the assertion of Dalit political identity against the backdrop of caste oppression.
As Pakistan's first law minister and the temporary chairman of its Constituent Assembly, Jogendra Nath Mandal's initial words in that assembly seem a startling paradox today.
Mandal declared that the creation of Pakistan "augurs very well… because Pakistan today is the result of persistent and legitimate demand of the minority community, namely, the Muslims of India."
For a Dalit leader to endorse and join a nation carved out based on religious identity appears confounding. Yet, Mandal's journey reveals the profound desperation and strategic calculations of a community victimised by caste oppression.
Caste and politics in pre-Partition Bengal
Mandal's ascent was nothing short of extraordinary. Born in 1904 into a Namasudra family in Barisal district of Bengal, he rose from the bottom of the social and economic ladder.
The Namasudras, a traditionally "untouchable" community, were primarily engaged in fishing and boating. His family was so impoverished that they didn't own land "the size of a wooden stool". The men worked as carpenters, while the women toiled in the homes of upper-caste elites.
Despite these challenging circumstances, Mandal's academic brilliance enabled him to study law in Calcutta and establish himself as a respected lawyer, earning admiration far beyond his community.
For a Namasudra, his educational and professional achievements became a source of pride not just for his family, but for people across the region. He ran as an independent candidate from a general seat, defeating a powerful Congress-backed zamindar in 1936.
The early 20th century saw a growing political mobilisation among the Namasudras, who constituted the largest Hindu caste group in Eastern Bengal. The political landscape was further complicated by the British policy of "communal awards" in 1932, which proposed separate electorates for different religious and social groups, including the "Depressed Classes" (Dalits).
While BR Ambedkar championed this as a necessary tool for political representation, Gandhi vehemently opposed it, fearing a division within the Hindu society. For many Dalit leaders, including Ambedkar and later Mandal, this was a betrayal by the Congress, cementing their belief that the party was fundamentally a vehicle for upper-caste Hindu interests.
The politics of the Dalit-Muslim alliance
It was this deep-seated distrust of the upper-caste dominated Congress that pushed Mandal towards a strategic alliance with the Muslim League. He reasoned that the socio-economic conditions of Muslims and Dalits in Bengal were largely identical. Both were predominantly peasants, labourers, and fishers, and both suffered from educational and economic backwardness under the hegemony of the Hindu bhadralok. This shared experience of oppression formed the ideological basis for what came to be known as Sheikh-Shudra (Muslim-Dalit) solidarity.
Mandal believed this alliance could become the "regulator of the balance of power and the determiner of Bengal's fate." In 1943, when the Huq ministry fell, Mandal, now leading a significant bloc of Dalit legislators, conditioned his support for the Muslim League's Khwaja Nazimuddin.
Mandal helped establish the Bengal branch of Ambedkar's All India Scheduled Castes Federation (AISCF) and launched its Bengali weekly, Jagaran. The publication became the mouthpiece for the aspirations of the Scheduled Castes.
Of hope and betrayal: The Pakistan experiment
Given the relentless hostility from the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha, Mandal's decision to cast his lot with Pakistan was a calculated gamble. He, along with many in his community, believed that their interests would be better protected in a state free from upper-caste Hindu domination, a "secular Pakistan" as promised by Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
Mandal actively campaigned against the partition of Bengal, fearing it would leave the Dalits at the mercy of the caste-Hindu majority in West Bengal. When Partition became inevitable, he chose Pakistan.
His initial stature in the new nation was immense. Jinnah himself asked Mandal to preside over the inaugural session of the Constituent Assembly. As Pakistan's first minister for law and labour, he was the highest-ranking Hindu in the government, a powerful symbol of the new state's professed commitment to its minorities. The state machinery even celebrated his birthday as "Jogen Mandal Day" with great fanfare.
However, the facade of an inclusive Pakistan began to crack almost immediately after Jinnah died in 1948. In a letter to Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Mandal expressed with a "heavy heart" that the Muslim League government in East Pakistan had failed to include a single Dalit member in its cabinet.
The dream of a Dalit-Muslim alliance was colliding with the reality of a state increasingly defined by an exclusionary Islamic identity.
The final blow came with a series of orchestrated anti-Hindu riots. While Mandal had steadfastly stood with the Muslim League even after the horrific "Great Calcutta Killings" of 1946, arguing it was a political rather than communal conflict, the violence in post-Partition East Bengal (later to be renamed East Pakistan) was different.
The breaking point came during the Khulna riots of February 1950, where his own Namasudra community was brutally attacked by Muslim mobs, often with the complicity of the police. The state he had helped build was now actively persecuting his people.
His departure was made more bitter by betrayal from within his own community. To clip his wings, the Pakistani establishment propped up Dwarakanath Barori, a rival Dalit leader, who was made a minister. Upon Mandal's resignation, Barori issued a statement shamelessly branding Mandal's efforts to help his community as corruption and even labelled him a "spy for the Hindu Mahasabha".
Refugee in his homeland
Mandal returned to India in 1950, a broken man entering a hostile environment.
In Pakistan, he was a Hindu. In India, he was the man who had championed Pakistan. He was branded a traitor.
The West Bengal he returned to was grappling with a massive influx of refugees. And caste became a crucial variable when it came to the issue of the refugees.
The upper and middle-class refugees were largely settled around Calcutta, while the Dalit peasant refugees of the 1950s were considered a "burden". They were often forcibly sent to inhospitable refugee camps in other states like Orissa and the Dandakaranya region.
Mandal observed the caste-blindness of the leftist parties, who were more interested in harnessing the refugees as a political force against the Congress than addressing their suffering caused by caste-oppression.
Mandal even prepared a detailed report for Bidhan Roy, a Congress politician and then chief minister of West Bengal, arguing that by reducing land allocation per family, all refugees could be rehabilitated within Bengal itself. However, his proposals were ignored.
He employed all his strength to stop the uprooting of refugee Namasudras from Bengal, but his efforts were consistently thwarted.
He contested elections in 1952 and 1964 and lost.
His final years were spent in abject poverty in a Tollygunge slum, writing his autobiography in a carpenter's workshop.
Just when a glimmer of hope for his political comeback was visible, Jogendra Nath Mandal died suddenly in October 1968 while gearing up for a third electoral attempt with the Republican Party of India.
The erasure of minorities in the post-Partition political landscape
The culmination of Jogendra Nath Mandal's political career can be considered a tragedy, marked by the systematic dismantling of a political vision.
Every mainstream political force – including the Muslim League, Congress, the Hindu Mahasabha, and the Communists – contributed to the erasure of the caste question from Bengal's political discourse.
The Dalit alliance with the Muslim League, born of a shared sense of victimhood, could not withstand the pressures of religious majoritarianism.
Today, Mandal is a largely forgotten figure, a footnote in the grand narrative of Partition. As historian Joya Chatterji observes in The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967, "Partition's impact on the minorities it created on both sides of the border, those who remained where they were and did not emigrate as refugees to the new nation of their coreligionists, has not received the attention it deserves. Yet the histories of independent India and Pakistan are incomplete unless they seek to understand what happened to the minorities who stayed on."
The nation broke its promises to Jogendra Nath Mandal in 1947 and to Jagat Jyoti Das in 1971. In 2024, history offers us another chance to build the inclusive country that generations dreamed of.
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