South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

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Jogendranath Mandal and the Politics of Dalit

Recognition in Pakistan

Ghazal Asif

To cite this article: Ghazal Asif (2020): Jogendranath Mandal and the Politics of Dalit Recognition
in Pakistan, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1689472

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2020.1689472

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SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2020.1689472

ARTICLE

Jogendranath Mandal and the Politics of Dalit

Recognition in Pakistan
Ghazal Asif
Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay examines some turns in the Pakistani political career of Ambedkar; Dalit; East
the Dalit leader Jogendranath Mandal between 1947 and 1950 Bengal; Jogendranath
when he resigned as a government minister and left the country. Mandal; minority; Objectives
Resolution; Pakistan;
The imperatives of Dalit emancipation interacted with concerns Partition; Scheduled Caste
about the position of minorities, thereby revealing the conditions
by which difference became legible in the new state. In the cre-
ation of Pakistan, Mandal had seen a promise of furthering Dalit
emancipation, but this vision could not withstand the state’s view
of an undifferentiated Hindu minority population. By tracing
Mandal’s trajectory, this essay follows both the promises offered
by Pakistan and the slow closure of such alternative possibilities.

Introduction
This essay examines some turns in the career of Jogendranath Mandal, a Dalit leader
from Bengal, who was closely allied with B.R. Ambedkar.1 He had been nominated to
the Bengal government in 1937, and then to the interim government of 1946 by the
Muslim League. After Partition, he assumed a leading role in the Pakistan government
as the first chairman of the Constituent Assembly, and then as minister for law and
labour. However, in October 1950, he resigned from the Pakistani government and left
for Calcutta (now Kolkata). Today, Mandal is well known for the letter of resignation
he wrote at the time. He could not resuscitate his political career in Calcutta, and for a
while, he faded from history.
Recent scholarship on caste politics in Bengal has resituated Mandal as a Scheduled
Caste leader before 1947.2 However, his relationship to the Pakistani state has remained
overlooked, as have Dalit connections to the Pakistan project. This essay is concerned
with the terms of Mandal’s investment in the Pakistan project and the conditions

CONTACT Ghazal Asif gasif1@jhu.edu

1. ‘Dalit’ refers to the embodied history of caste oppression and incorporates the Scheduled Castes. This latter
term was used by Mandal, Ambedkar and contemporaries, referring to a colonial ‘schedule’ of lower castes and
former untouchables who were granted certain recognitions in the law after 1935. ‘Dalit’ incorporates those
lower castes and Adivasis who were not on this schedule. In keeping with the language of the period, however,
I have chosen to use ‘Scheduled Caste’ elsewhere in the article for clarity.
2. Dwaipayan Sen, The Decline of the Caste Question: Jogendranath Mandal and the Defeat of Dalit Politics in Bengal
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

ß 2019 South Asian Studies Association of Australia

2 G. ASIF

whereby it ended so abruptly in 1950. In his sensitive account of Mandal’s political life,
Dwaipayan Sen shows that while Mandal never abandoned his commitment to the
Scheduled Caste cause, he felt Dalits in Pakistan were caught between the Muslim
League and the Congress.3 I suggest that the trajectory of his disappointment was more
complex due to the nascent Pakistani state’s understanding of the minority question
and its relationship to caste politics. Interweaving Mandal’s trajectory with ongoing
debates on the politics of caste in the new state, this article follows both the promises
offered by the creation of Pakistan and the slow closure of such alternative possibilities.
Immediately after Partition, East Bengal retained a sizeable Hindu minority that had
chosen not to migrate to India, as well as several Hindu politicians who formally joined
the opposition, the Pakistan National Congress;4 however, Mandal’s longer association
with the Muslim League led to his appointment to a role in Pakistan’s Muslim League
government. But newly state-supported Muslim nationalism and growing dissatisfac-
tion about provincial autonomy in East Bengal had joined such that religious minor-
ities were increasingly imagined as a collective in binary opposition to the interests of
the Muslim majority.5
This directly contradicted the political calculations and assumptions Mandal had
made as the self-proclaimed leader of the Pakistani Scheduled Castes.6 The
Ambedkarite movement for Scheduled Caste and Dalit emancipation, which Mandal
was immersed in, was not readily commensurable with the interests of religious minor-
ities, especially caste Hindus. It had voiced specific needs and requirements for
Scheduled Castes via full citizenship and political emancipation. But Dalits could not
be seen as part of a larger religious minority without reinforcing historical forms of
oppression and injustice.7 Sections of the Ambedkarite movement had made some
common cause with the Pakistan Movement before Partition, albeit cautiously, based
on a shared anti-Brahmanism; even so, they now began to be seen as undifferentiated
from Hindus as a whole.
Constituent Assembly debates from 1947 to 1950, along with contemporary private
correspondence by Mandal and others reveals that in the early years of Independence,
any hopes for caste emancipation in Pakistan were slowly closed off and absorbed into
concerns about Hindus as a religious minority. The sheer impossibility of retaining a
distinction between Scheduled Castes and caste Hindus then demonstrates that minor-
ity remains an unstable analytical category in the context of modern South Asian his-
tory. Existing scholarship on Pakistan often puts contemporary minorities together
without considering how historical circumstances may have forged specific relation-
ships to one another, to the state, and to the category of minority itself.8

3. Ibid., p. 204.
4. For more on the role of Hindu Opposition members in the Constituent Assembly, see Sadia Toor, State of Islam:
Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan (New York: Pluto Press, 2011), pp. 20–45.
5. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Anasua B.R. Chaudhury, ‘In Search of Space: The Scheduled Caste Movement in
West Bengal after Partition’, in Policies and Practices, Vol. 59 (2014), pp. 1–22.
6. Mandal identified himself thus in the very first speech he made as chairman of the Constituent Assembly, on
10 Aug. 1947. He was also the leader of the East Bengal Scheduled Caste Federation while in Pakistan.
7. Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India
(London: Sage Publications, 1994); and Aishwary Kumar, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of
Democracy (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), pp. 219–75.
8. Sadia Saeed, Politics of Desecularization: Law and the Minority Question in Pakistan (London: Cambridge
University Press, 2017).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 3

Mandal’s resignation from the government in 1950 and his public repudiation of the
Pakistan project, analysed in the second half of this essay, came about when he realised
that his desire to secure protections for the emancipation of the Scheduled Castes was
no longer viable because Hindus were now seen as an increasingly undifferentiated and
suspect group. Mandal’s trajectory demonstrates the conditions by which certain forms
of difference, such as caste, were elided in order to produce legible categories of minor-
ities in post-colonial Pakistan.
The Constituent Assembly debates referred to ‘the minorities’ regularly, albeit only
occasionally concerning specific issues or details.9 Although the needs and expectations
of the Scheduled Castes were mentioned in the Assembly, their claims were received by
a tin-eared central government that could not respond adequately. Delving into the
archive demonstrates the way these relationships congealed in the first few years after
the creation of Pakistan and excavates the possibilities and failures of that moment.

Dalit politics and the promise of the Pakistan project

The insufficiency of hospitality
Concurrent with the rise of anti-colonial and religious nationalism, the Dalit move-
ment led by B.R. Ambedkar created a powerful, organised political voice for those who
had hitherto been categorised by the colonial ethnographic state as ‘depressed classes’,
known then as Scheduled Castes.10 Knitting disparate and scattered castes together, the
movement was instrumental in articulating Dalit subjecthood as a political identity that
moved from an acknowledgement of historical oppression to a coherent demand for
empowerment and recognition in an independent India. Questions of representation
and state-mandated safeguards for constitutional minorities were central for the move-
ment toward Dalit empowerment, all the more compelling at a time when, as the
promise of sovereignty and self-determination loomed ahead, burning questions about
the composition of national bodies politic had to be reckoned with.11
Ambedkar’s writings on separate electorates and Muslim nationalism are an indica-
tion of the ferment and upheaval around the forms of nationalism, community and
electoral politics in the period before Independence and Partition.12 Within this atmos-
phere, a central concern of Dalit leaders had been to create a separation between
Scheduled Castes and the Hindu–Muslim divide increasingly roiling the landscape.
Scheduled Caste leadership had worked to differentiate the Scheduled Castes from the
politics and concerns of upper-caste Hindus, while the overwhelmingly religious
nationalism of the day had often grouped them vis-a-vis Muslims. For example, in the
essay, ‘From Millions to Fractions’, in which Ambedkar describes the struggle to

9. The Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates, Official Report, Vols. 1–4, 1947–52 (Karachi: Government of
Pakistan, 1953).
10. Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001); and Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2009).
11. B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Pakistan or the Partition of India’, in Vasant Moon (ed.), Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and
Speeches, Vol. 8 (Delhi: Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, 2014 [1946]); and B.R. Ambedkar, Ranade, Gandhi, and Jinnah
(Jullundur: Bheem Patrika Publications, 1964 [1943]).
12. Valerian Rodrigues (ed.), The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 92–4.
4 G. ASIF

include a statutory definition of the Scheduled Castes (then termed ‘Untouchables’) in

the Government of India Act, 1935, he wrote: ‘ … in the struggle between Touchable
and Untouchables the latter did not get any support from the Mohammedans … . It is
rather strange that the Mohammedans should have kept mum. It was in their interest
that the Untouchables should be recognised as a separate political community’.13
The importance of civil recognition here highlights the status of (caste) Hindus and
Muslims as recognised communities, and the inclusion of Scheduled Castes as a third,
critical, consideration.14 In his pursuit of a democratic ideal built on radical equality
for all, Ambedkar had deployed the terms of citizenship to transform casteist society.15
As a commitment to social justice, political safeguards and constitutional recognition
of the historical oppression of Scheduled Castes formed the bedrock of any social con-
tract in this view. Pursuing the same political goal as Ambedkar, Mandal had moved
closer to the Muslim League by joining their government in Bengal just before
Independence: Dalit empowerment would occur through recognition of their historical
and specific difference from other communities, especially caste Hindus. Mandal
expected that this political calculus would help ensure the relevance of the Scheduled
Castes as a minority to be reckoned with.
While this goal did not come without serious shortfalls and risks, it is worth noting
that the empowerment of Dalits was understood here as that of a liberal, constitutional
minority.16 It aimed for state recognition of a specifically disenfranchised and disem-
powered, yet increasingly coherently articulated, population of citizen-subjects. The
section of the Dalit movement that had cautiously thrown its lot in with the Muslim
League against caste Hindus relied on this conceptual framework. Yet following
Partition, as the new state engaged in open debates about its future possibilities, about
who constituted its citizens, and about its responsibilities to non-Muslim minorities,
these concepts became very fraught.17
In a speech after he was elected chairman of the Constituent Assembly on 11
August 1947, Mandal stated that he intended to be a strident voice for the uplift
of the Scheduled Castes, whose sole representative in the Assembly he now con-
sidered himself to be: ‘It may be you will always find myself alone to raise a sin-
gle voice on behalf of the eight millions of Scheduled Castes of Pakistan … the
House will kindly forgive me as I will always appear to be very ambitious and as
I shall always be found asking more and more for the backward minorities’.18
These words echoed the legacy of pre-Partition debates in that they identified
Scheduled Castes as a particularly significant section of the minority community;
Mandal further promised that he would ‘try to raise the voice of other small

13. Ibid., pp. 332–50.

14. For a close reading of Ambedkar’s relationship with Jinnah and the Pakistan Movement as he sought to
negotiate a space for Dalit politics within a political climate wrapped up in the Hindu–Muslim divide during the
1940s, see Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013),
pp. 163–99.
15. Kumar, Radical Equality, pp. 1–58.
16. Rao, The Caste Question.
17. Sarah Ansari, ‘Everyday Expectations of the State during Pakistan’s Early Years: Letters to the Editor, Dawn
(Karachi), 1950–1953’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 45, no. 1 (2011), pp. 159–78.
18. Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates, Official Report, Vols. 1–4, 1947–52. It is not coincidental that this
statement was given on the same day as Jinnah’s well-known speech on the constitutional rights of minorities
in the new state. Defining the new polity as well as its new minorities was an urgent matter.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 5

minorities’ too. Mandal’s rhetoric was consistent with the idea that adequate
minority and caste rights were indispensable to full citizenship.19 His speech was
responded to by Abul Kasem Khan, who sought to assuage Mandal’s concerns by
promising a constitution for the ‘Backward Classes and Mussalmans, and all the
minorities’.20
Mandal’s statement raised the urgency of Scheduled Caste claims upon the new
state. It also worked to separate Mandal and his constituency of Scheduled Castes from
other Hindu politicians in the Constituent Assembly. The majority of Hindu members
in the Assembly were members of the Congress (now the Pakistan National Congress,
forming the opposition). Both Scheduled Caste and caste Hindu constituencies were
primarily based in East Bengal, a fact which would eventually blur the separations
between minority groups that Mandal at this time was striving to demarcate. Casting
himself as entirely alone against the Assembly vis-a-vis the interests of the Scheduled
Castes, Mandal made it clear that the dynamics of caste solidarity were not to be con-
fused with those of religious community. Yet, in a few years, the Dalit cause in
Pakistan lost itself somewhere between economic assurances for all the ‘backward
classes’ and promises of generosity for the minorities. Neither of these gestures could
accommodate the specificity of Dalit emancipation based on state recognition and con-
stitutional safeguards as well as redress for historical oppression.
Rather, as the new state took shape with optimism and good will, assurances were
repeatedly given that a hallmark of this new polity would be a relationship of tolerance
and generosity towards minority communities, understood as members of non-Muslim
religious nationalities resident in Pakistan. This meant that Dalit groups found them-
selves legible only as members of the Hindu religious community, the mirror opposite
of the new Muslim nation. This ended any early hopes that in Pakistan, Muslims and
Dalits alike would find political empowerment.21

Misrecognition in the Objectives Resolution?

The language of Scheduled Caste empowerment was heard alongside the rhetoric of
minority rights on various occasions in the Assembly, leading up to a defining debate
during the passage of the Objectives Resolution in 1949. However, the dominant lan-
guage throughout remained that of protection of minorities in general as a gesture fol-
lowing Islamic precepts of generosity towards others often at the expense of the
Scheduled Castes’ specificity. Although always uttered as assurance, the framing of pro-
tection as hospitality and generosity could only strike a note of insufficiency against a
political inheritance that demanded full citizenship as a condition of emancipation.
One telling comment in the Constituent Assembly came quite early, just before
Independence, amid a rushed debate on the design of the national flag. Trying to

19. Arjun Appadurai, The Fear of Small Numbers: Essays on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2006); and Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2015).
20. Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates, Official Report, Vols. 1–4, 1947–52.
21. Some Dalit leaders in areas that became West Pakistan, such as those of the Sindh Scheduled Caste Federation,
had asserted that the interests of the Scheduled Castes could only be secured in Pakistan because it would be
free of caste Hindu domination. See Sen, The Decline of the Caste Question.
6 G. ASIF

persuade a truculent opposition to accept his proposed design, Liaquat Ali Khan had
described its broad white stripe as a gesture to the minorities ‘that now exist and may
be come up afterwards’. ‘I hope you will not create them!’ came the swift interjection
from the opposition benches.22 In my reading of this exchange, I think of those whose
aspirations to minority status in Pakistan had been placed under question recently—
the Scheduled Castes, represented in the legislatures not by Congress members who
claimed to speak for all the minorities of Pakistan, but by Mandal. The question of
who was to count as a recognised legislative minority, and who was not, had been an
important one for Scheduled Caste leaders in undivided India; this exchange in
Karachi on the eve of Partition highlighted the continuing tensions that might feasibly
need resolution in the new state.23
In 1949, Liaquat Ali Khan introduced the Objectives Resolution to the Constituent
Assembly as the preamble to a future constitution, setting off an intense debate about
the future relationship of the Pakistani state to the religion(s) of its citizens. Liaquat
spent the bulk of his speech justifying the insertion of specific statements alluding to
divine sovereignty and the prescription of the ‘limits of Islam’ into his legal framework.
Much of the debate hinged on the same concerns.24 Clarifications and unease about
the overall position of minorities in the new state focused in part on the Resolution’s
clause whereby ‘adequate provision shall be made to safeguard the legitimate interests
of minorities and backward and depressed classes’. Concerns about what such safe-
guards for minorities could be were put forth in the language of constitutional safe-
guards and a need for precise, explicit terminology. For example, Kamini Kumar Datta,
a member of the opposition, made clear his anxiety that religious difference in Pakistan
would be reduced to ‘zimmies’ (sic), a fate that seemed to have been universally dispar-
aged in that audience.25 These concerns were responded to through the Prophet’s
example as a model for the state-to-come, focusing more on Islamic tolerance and hos-
pitality than the spectre of the dhimmi.26 Through an example from the time of the
Prophet in Medina, Mir Zafarullah Khan reiterated gestures of invitation and promises
of tolerance for all of Pakistan’s minorities, as did others.27
During this debate, Prem Hari Barma, a Congress member from East Bengal, raised
two amendments to the Resolution in the Constituent Assembly. While the first joined

22. Ibid.
23. Regarding the Dalit movement, the Congress had fretted over the creation of another minority that would
undermine its politics. This was the case in Bengal, but also emerges as a central fissure in many of Ambedkar’s
writings. See Sen, The Decline of the Caste Question; Rodrigues (ed.), The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar; and
Devji, Muslim Zion.
24. Hamid Khan, Constitutional and Political History of Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005).
25. The Islamic legal category of the ahl al-dhimma was often referenced in debates on full citizenship and the
loyalty of religious minorities to the new state. In Islamic scholarship, the ahl al-dhimma are understood
differently than these debates would suggest. In classical Islam, the dhimma was a ‘contract of protection’ used
to extend hospitality and protection on the part of the Ummah to non-Muslims living in Islamic territories. See
Rachel M. Scott, The Challenge of Political Islam: Non-Muslims and the Egyptian State (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2010), pp. 12–33.
26. During the Objectives Resolution debate in 1949, this language was the subject of debate. By 1953, it had
become deeply entrenched as Hindu members of the Opposition, such as Bhupendra Datta, fluently cited
examples from the Prophet’s life to press for joint electorates and a Minority Protection Bill. See Naveeda Khan,
Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 91–120.
27. Mir Zafarullah Khan, a prominent leader of the time, was soon vilified for his beliefs when the Ahmadiyya were
declared non-Muslims by law. See Ali Usman Qasmi, The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in
Pakistan (New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2014).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 7

other Congress voices concerned about legal safeguards for minorities, his second pro-
posed amendment addressed state recognition of caste:
I would like to say the word ‘depressed’ is not palatable to the Scheduled Castes and
they dislike it as it primarily connotes social degradation … . It should be remembered
that the word ‘depressed’ had not been used in the Government of India Act 1935 but
that the words ‘Scheduled Caste’ had been used. I therefore request the Honourable
Mover of the Resolution and the House to accept my amendment in accordance with
the wishes of the Scheduled Castes of Pakistan.28
The language of caste oppression and emancipation would have been familiar to the
Constituent Assembly. Some expected that, Islamic or not, the new polity would
enshrine recognition of Scheduled Castes when it promised protection to ‘backward
classes and minorities’. Barma’s proposed amendment was not pushing for the recogni-
tion of the Scheduled Castes by the state; instead, it took for granted that the term
‘backward and depressed classes’ in the Resolution was a recognisable but outdated ref-
erence to the necessity of constitutional safeguards for the Dalits. As such, the amend-
ment proposed only to correct this error. This was in sharp contrast to the debate
about minorities, the terms for their inclusion into the body politic, and their constitu-
tional safeguards. The amendment did not press for state recognition of the Scheduled
Castes or inclusion of their concerns—these were all taken for granted, given the
amendment was only to correct terminology. The commitment to the downtrodden
highlighted in this clause, therefore, is understood as an explicit commitment to caste
emancipation. Furthermore, the terms ‘minority’ and ‘Scheduled Caste’ appear as dis-
tinct yet discursively related because both are given the same rhetorical space in the
Resolution. Barma’s comment highlighted how minority was now legible only as reli-
gious minority; caste and the ill-defined ‘backward classes’ were another, albeit closely-
related, category for state welfare.
Shortly after Barma’s speech, another Congress member from East Bengal, Raj
Kumar Chakravarty, suggested that the term ‘backward and depressed classes’ in this
contentious clause should be qualified by the word ‘labouring’ so that the class dimen-
sions of the state’s commitment became clear. Unlike Barma’s amendment, posed as a
nomenclature error, Chakravarty’s proposal sought to include a recognition of workers
and peasants in a Resolution that did not seem to have any other space to include
them. Given the entanglement of caste, class and ongoing peasant uprisings in East
Bengal at the time, this too was an acknowledgement of the specific demands that cer-
tain agriculturist caste groups such as the Namasudras (coincidentally, the caste
Mandal himself was associated with) were making.29
Despite their different approaches, Barma’s and Chakravarty’s proposals highlight
the illegibility of the backward classes’ concerns to those debating the Objectives
Resolution, and both proposals failed in the Assembly. Both men had prefaced their
proposed changes by expressing concerns about the position of religious minorities
and the need for safeguards for them. The various responses to the proposed

28. Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates, Official Report, Vols. 1–4, 1947–52.
29. A.H. Ahmed Kamal, ‘Peasant Rebellions and the Muslim League Government in East Bengal, 1947–1954’, in
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar and Andrew Sartori (eds), From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India
and Pakistan in Transition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 210–20. See also Badruddin Umar, The
Emergence of Bangladesh: Class Struggles in East Pakistan, 1947–1958 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004).
8 G. ASIF

amendments focused only on the concerns regarding minorities, without mentioning

the caste and class dimensions that had been brought up as well. Maulana Shabbir
Ahmad Usmani’s reply to these proposals referred to the ‘oppressed and crushed soul
of humanity’ which was to be the bedrock of the Islamic polity; he assured the
Assembly that protection of minorities’ rights would be the duty of the state.30 In this
way, any attempts to highlight the caste dimensions of the future polity became folded
into the language of religious minority, such that this was the only legible form of dif-
ference the new state was able to consider and debate.
The formal category of caste itself, however, was not erased. The text of the
Objectives Resolution retains the language of backwards classes’ uplift that Barma and
Chakravarty had sought to amend.31 Rather, demands made by Dalits were elided and
addressed only as problems of minority, when they had far more specific genealogies
and horizons. Scholarship on Pakistani minorities has considered the introduction of
the Objectives Resolution as a moment when all minority concerns were put aside to
focus on creating an Islamic polity for Muslims,32 but this approach ignores the
demands and concerns such minorities might have voiced—the Dalit focus on consti-
tutional recognition, for example, did not necessarily conflict with the kind of polity
set out in the Resolution.33 Glossing over the various political currents at play in
Pakistan at the time, it assumes that all minorities could be imagined as commensurate
with one another, with identical needs and political stances.34

The trajectory of elision

As the Pakistan movement gained steam, vibrant debates ensued amidst competing
political and regional concerns.35 The Scheduled Caste leadership that had allied itself
to Pakistan during the independence struggle was not alone in making a seemingly
counter-intuitive move, as analyses of the Indian Communist Party’s own partition
show.36 It had been under Jogendranath Mandal’s influence that many Dalits felt reas-
sured about staying on in East Bengal after Partition though many other leaders in
Bengal disagreed with him, as Dwaipayan Sen has shown.37
Ambedkar, too, came very early to the conclusion that Dalits in both independent
India and Pakistan faced political erasure.38 The events of 1947 represented a moment

30. Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani was one of the first prominent Deobandi scholars to support the Pakistan
Movement. See Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Late
Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 353–88.
31. See Election Commission of Pakistan v M.P. Bhandara (PLD 1993 SC 439) for continuing concerns about caste
and minority that continued well into the 1990s.
32. Saeed, Politics of Desecularization; and Martin Lau, ‘Article 2A and the Objectives Resolution’, The Role of Islam in
the Legal System of Pakistan (Leiden: Brill Publications, 2006), pp. 47–74.
33. Clark B. Lombardi, ‘Islamism as a Response to Emergency Rule in Pakistan: The Surprising Proposal of Justice
A.R. Cornelius’, in Victor V. Ramraj and Arun K. Thiruvengadam (eds), Emergency Powers in Asia: Exploring the
Limits of Legality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 436–65.
34. Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: A History of Pakistan’s Religious Minorities (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2017).
35. Devji, Muslim Zion; and Megan Robb and Ali Usman Qasmi (eds), Muslims against the Muslim League: Critiques of
the Idea of Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
36. Kamran Asdar Ali, Surkh Salam: Communist Politics and Class Activism in Pakistan 1947–1972 (Karachi: Oxford
University Press, 2015).
37. Sen, Decline of the Caste Question, pp. 137–81.
38. Ibid., p. 185.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 9

of defeat, as those alternative possibilities which would have substantively included

Dalits in the political future of South Asia were comprehensively discarded in favour of
Partition.39 However, scholarship on independent Pakistan has oriented the new state
very differently, as inhabiting an ethos of experimentation that emerged in often unin-
tuitive ways.40
However, the vigorous debates around minority and caste in 1949 did not feature
Mandal’s voice despite his earlier promise of stridency. By this time he was the minister
for law and labour and increasingly spent a great deal of time in East Bengal tending to
his constituency, while also retaining close relations with important figures in
Karachi.41 A series of letters he wrote to Liaquat Ali Khan in 1950, the year after the
introduction of the Objectives Resolution as well as the year he resigned from the gov-
ernment, demonstrates some of his thinking and frustrations at this time. These letters
also demonstrate the trajectory and real costs of Scheduled Caste elision into religious
minority categories that were hinted at in the Objectives Resolution debates.

Two letters to Liaquat Ali Khan

In January 1950, a few months after the vigorous debates on the Objectives Resolution
in the Constituent Assembly, Mandal sent Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan a letter
from Dhaka that detailed ‘police atrocities perpetrated on the Scheduled Caste People
of East Bengal’. The letter was in response to an earlier request by Liaquat for a report,
and the letter methodically enumerates and elaborates upon various acts of violence
that had been carried out against Dalits by the police and local Muslims in rural East
Bengal.42 Along with his own writings, Mandal enclosed the English translations of
statements and petitions sent to him by local leaders in his constituency, the East
Bengal districts of Khulna and Barisal.
The list of crimes maps onto recognisable forms of violence from Partition as well
as casteist violence: Mandal cites forced conversion, the assault of women, looting,
extortion, cow slaughter, and the destruction of sacred images and artefacts.43
Similarly, the trajectory of the primary incident Mandal recounts is familiar: a village
quarrel ‘between two parties of a few Muslims and a few Scheduled Caste people over a
dispute regarding crop and cattle’, which transformed into something far more sinister
and dangerous. In retaliation for the death of one of the Muslim disputants, the houses
of Scheduled Caste (Namasudra) villagers were looted extensively with the help ‘of
local Ansars and support from police’.44

39. Rao, The Caste Question.

40. Anushay Malik, ‘Alternative Politics and Dominant Narratives: Communists and the Pakistani State in the Early
1950s’, in South Asian History and Culture, Vol. 4, no. 4 (2013), pp. 520–37; and Ansari, ‘Everyday Expectations of
the State during Pakistan’s Early Years’, pp. 159–78.
41. File No. 3 (18)-PMS/50, National Documentation Centre, Prime Minister’s Secretariat, Islamabad.
42. File No. 3 (3)-PMS/50, National Documentation Centre, Prime Minister’s Secretariat, Islamabad.
43. Very similar incidents were taken notice of and debated by the East Bengal Legislative Assembly in 1949. See
Kamal, ‘Peasant Rebellions and the Muslim League Government in East Bengal’, pp. 210–20.
44. The East Pakistan Ansars were a paramilitary auxiliary force created in 1948 to control the flow of people and
valuables at the Bengal border. See Willem van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in
South Asia (New York: Anthem Press, 2005), p. 96.
10 G. ASIF

The letter also makes clear Mandal’s distress about another layer to this violence.
‘The Ansars and local Muslims are trying to give it a communal colour to justify this
oppression on the Scheduled Caste people’, he wrote after describing the incident. For
Mandal, the escalation of petty disputes into attacks on homes and days-long looting
and violence in a largely Namasudra village, supported by the police, was an episode of
caste-based violence.45 Yet the casteist truth at the heart of this incident, he wrote, was
being masked by what he termed a ‘communal colour’ because the upper-caste attack-
ers and their police collaborators were all Muslim, thanks to the demographic shifts of
Partition.46 His choice of phrase indicates his concern that caste issues were being eli-
ded into ‘communal’ concerns between religious communities, masking the specific
protections Namasudras and other Scheduled Caste villagers might need.
Mandal’s dismay about the treatment of caste issues in the new state thus echoed
the arguments that had been voiced in the Constituent Assembly some months earlier.
The nascent national society at the time, it seems, only had the language and context to
conceive of such incidents of violence through the clear if crudely established categories
of Hindu and Muslim. The forms of casteist violence that Mandal painstakingly
pointed out were occluded, transposed onto a narrative of communal violence continu-
ing well beyond the Partition event. However, what Mandal was trying to show was the
very opposite: that ‘communal colour’ was hiding growing caste-based violence in rural
East Bengal.
Mandal does not mention the term ‘Hindu’ anywhere in his letter. He wished to
inform Liaquat Ali Khan, who knew him well, of the violence being perpetrated against
Scheduled Castes, rather than against Hindus in East Bengal more broadly. The letter
concludes by requesting Liaquat to order the government of East Bengal to investigate
and put a stop to the violence. By asking the prime minister to intercede in this man-
ner, Mandal underscored the importance of the Dalit question to the state as a whole.
He ended on an ominous note: if such persecution did not let up, the Scheduled Castes
would have no option other than a ‘mass exodus’ because they were ‘not entitled to get
the protection of the law in Pakistan’; the migration of Hindu refugees from East
Bengal to India continued long after 1947.47 Mandal’s intervention here was that he
claimed the migrants were mostly caste Hindus, and he threatened that if conditions
did not improve, the Scheduled Castes, too, would have to follow them.48 The reference
to the protection of the law sharply referenced the tension between constitutional

45. Other critical interpretations of these events range from peasant insurgency to deliberate conspiracy, as well as
communal or caste violence. See Kamal, ‘Peasant Rebellions and the Muslim League Government in East
Bengal’, pp. 210–20; and Bandyopadhyay and Chaudhury, ‘In Search of Space’. For more on registers of inter-
pretation for such acts of violence, see Rao, The Caste Question, pp. 163–80.
46. The language used throughout this period assumed a near absence of Muslim or Christian Dalits; consequently,
Scheduled Castes were all assumed to be Hindu, even by those who sought to separate caste Hindus and
Scheduled Castes as analytical categories. See Pieter H. Streefland, The Sweepers of Slaughterhouse: Conflict and
Survival in a Karachi Neighborhood (New York: Van Gorcum Press, 1979); and Sara Singha, ‘Dalit Christians and
Caste Consciousness in Pakistan’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, Washington, DC,
USA, 2015.
47. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries,
Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
48. Praskanva Sinharay, ‘To Be a Hindu Citizen: Politics of Dalit Migrants in Contemporary West Bengal’, in South
Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 42, no. 2 (2019), pp. 359–74 [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.
1080/00856401.2019.1581696, accessed 3 Nov. 2019].
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 11

safeguards and generalised guarantees of hospitality that were on display during the
Objectives Resolution debate.
In a second letter written in March of that year, Mandal presented a clearer picture
of the migration flow in the aftermath of the Dhaka riots of February 1950.49 That this
migration was not welcomed by the Pakistani government in 1950 is evidenced by the
fact that Mandal had to specially request Liaquat to open the roads and man them with
paramilitary soldiers to facilitate those trying to leave East Bengal.50 Given that he was
in Dhaka as a (minority) minister of the central government in the aftermath of deadly
violence, his language is much more in the manner of a preliminary govern-
ment report.
Mandal’s main concern was restoring peace and order in the city and refugee camps,
and working to ‘bring back the morale of the minority people’. It was to this end that
he met with ‘Muslim M.L.As and Hindu M.L.As, including Scheduled Caste people’.
The concern with ‘minority people’ in general rather than with his earlier, narrower
focus on Scheduled Castes was not just Mandal’s own doing, nor was the language of
the state being foisted upon him. Rather, the local response to his visits demonstrated
that people sought in him a representational figure that he had not necessarily consid-
ered himself to be. He was ‘pressed very hard’ by representatives not only of ‘his peo-
ple’, but also of caste Hindus to help resolve the situation. He decided he was prepared
to stay on, albeit primarily in the areas inhabited mostly by his Scheduled Caste
constituency:
Hindus of Eastern Bengal have become so much nervous and panicky that almost all of
them have become restless to migrate out of East Bengal … . The Scheduled Caste
people also suffer from the same nervousness … . Representatives from areas inhabited
largely by Scheduled Caste people approached me to request that I should visit their
places otherwise all of them would migrate to other countries. I have given assurance to
all of them that I would be visiting their areas and the Scheduled Caste people should
be asked to stay till they hear me … .
Emphasis on his indispensability aside, Mandal’s primary recommendation was that
the government ensure safe passage for evacuees, whose numbers were growing in the
post-riot panic.51 Mandal was indeed the most prominent ‘minority’ member of the
central government (most Hindu politicians were in the opposition). As disparate con-
cerns and issues began coalescing into the minority question, it was perhaps inevitable
that he would become a ‘minority minister’ of sorts, claimed as such by Dalits and
caste Hindus. It is worth noting that such claim-making reversed the position of
Barma and Chakravarty, the two upper-caste Hindu Congress members who had
sought to incorporate economic grievances and the caste issue into their representation
of the Hindu population while debating the Objectives Resolution. Instead, now it
appeared that Mandal was being asked to expand his portfolio to represent all Hindus
when he had earlier laboured to differentiate these various groups. Given that Mandal
and the Scheduled Caste Federation’s insistence on caste difference in undivided

49. Umar, The Emergence of Bangladesh.

50. van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland, pp. 87–103.
51. This would become part of the Liaquat–Nehru Pact of April 1950. See Bandyopadhyay and Chaudhury, ‘In
Search of Space’.
12 G. ASIF

Bengal had been a significant source of friction between them and Congress-affiliated
caste Hindus, this was a significant strategic shift for East Bengal’s Hindus.52
This second letter’s description of Mandal assuming the role of protector for Hindus
and minority communities in East Bengal across caste lines suggests that in the after-
math of the 1950 Dhaka riots, the rhetorical separation between caste Hindus and
Scheduled Castes as minorities had become untenable despite his long political trajec-
tory focusing on that very difference. This included his leadership position in undiv-
ided Bengal as well as his current position as head of the (East) Bengal Scheduled Caste
Federation which he held alongside his government posts. He now saw an assurance of
security for all the region’s minorities as the immediate need. Mandal’s politics had
always been focused on the separation of the political concerns of caste Hindus from
those of the Scheduled Castes to ensure caste emancipation at a time of intensely nar-
rowing communitarian identities. Now that caste Hindus were no longer the dominant,
would-be oppressors, but fellow minorities in Pakistan, their concerns began to bleed
into East Bengal’s Scheduled Caste population. If Scheduled Castes and caste Hindus
were now fellow minorities who urgently needed identical safeguards to stem the
immediate violence, and who gave identical warnings to the state of an exodus, then
the Dalit question which was built on an acknowledgement of their history of oppres-
sion had already been done away with.
While hospitality for resident religious minorities following the example of the
Prophet had been prioritised in Constituent Assembly statements, the migration of
Hindus from East Bengal threatened the so-called ‘hostage theory’ of using
Pakistani Hindus to ensure the welfare of Indian Muslims.53 Mandal’s letters, with
their threats of Dalit migration, show that he was well aware of such tactics. In
all these calculations, there was no place for Dalits to be anything other than
Hindu in the eyes of the Pakistani state. If this was so, then Mandal’s position in
the Pakistani government began to look increasingly untenable. He had promised
to work tirelessly for the Scheduled Caste cause, and that cause no longer made
sense in Pakistan.

‘This is about Hindus’

Months went by after Mandal sent these letters to the prime minister with no formal
written response. In the aftermath of the violence of 1950, as well as the
Liaquat–Nehru Pact of 1950, many Hindu leaders in East Bengal had been arrested for
their ‘anti-state’ politics.54 In October 1950, Mandal wrote a final public letter to
Liaquat from Calcutta where he had arrived from Dhaka a few weeks earlier. It was his
resignation letter as well as his public renunciation of the Pakistan project, and it made
his frustration and heartbreak evident.55 For the Pakistan government, it was an extra-
ordinary rupture as indicated by the issuing of frantic, indignant press statements as

52. Dwaipayan Sen, ‘“No Matter How, Jogendranath Had to Be Defeated”: The Scheduled Castes Federation and the
Making of Partition in Bengal, 1945–1947’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 49, no. 3 (2012),
pp. 321–64.
53. Zamindar, The Long Partition.
54. Kamal ‘Peasant Rebellions and the Muslim League Government in East Bengal’, pp. 210–20.
55. File No. 3 (3)-PMS/50, National Documentation Centre, Prime Minister’s Secretariat, Islamabad.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 13

well as a cache of communications marked ‘secret’ (see below).56 The letter appeared
amidst mounting internal speculation as to Mandal’s secret intentions to resign.57 This
speculation within the echelons of government suggests that Mandal had been margin-
alised there despite his access to the prime minister.
After boldly announcing his resignation in the very first sentences, the letter detailed
Mandal’s involvement with the Muslim League government in pre-Partition Bengal as
a representative of the Scheduled Caste Federation, as well as his role in the Interim
Government of India in 1946 and his decision to side with the Muslim League after the
3 June Plan based on the many assurances Muslim League leaders had given him.58
Startlingly, he stated that he had always held that ‘the creation of Pakistan would never
solve the communal problem … it would aggravate communal hatred and bitterness … .
I further apprehended that Pakistan might turn to be one of the most backward and
undeveloped countries of the South East Asia (sic)’. He claimed he had always consid-
ered the demand for Pakistan to be a ‘bargaining counter’. Nevertheless, he went on,
‘seven million Scheduled Caste people of Pakistan … lent me their unstinted support
sympathy and encouragement’.
One may read these statements as a rhetorical disconnection from the Pakistan pro-
ject on Mandal’s part.59 The juxtaposition of this intense disavowal with the repeated
sentiment that he nevertheless continued to try and protect the minorities added to the
momentousness of his resignation in the narrative arc of the letter:
My outspokenness, vigilance and sincere efforts to safeguard the interests of the
minorities of Pakistan, in general, and of the Scheduled Caste, in particular, were
considered a matter [of] annoyance to the East Bengal Govt. and [a] few League leaders.
Undaunted, I took my firm stand to safeguard the interests of the minorities
of Pakistan.
It was for this reason, he stated, that he continued to issue public statements in support
of the central government. Consequently, the moment of resignation was not one of
uncontainable doubt, or the coming to reason of one who should have known better,
but a demonstration of Mandal’s overwhelming and shattering heartbreak when he felt
no longer able to continue on an increasingly futile path. The trigger for Mandal’s res-
ignation was the appointment of D.N. Barori as East Bengal’s minister for minorities,
an appointment Mandal bitterly opposed:
Without any fear of contradiction, I can say that this action of Mr. Nurul Amin in
selecting Barari (sic) … is conclusive proof that the East Bengal Govt. was neither serious
nor sincere in its professions about the terms of the Delhi Agreement whose main
purpose is to create such conditions as would enable the Hindus to continue to live in
East Bengal with a sense of security to their life, property, honour, and religion.60
Finally, Mandal wrote, the last straw was the realisation that despite repeated assuran-
ces, Pakistan would divide the population into ‘full-fledged Muslim citizens and zim-
mies (sic)’. This was a betrayal because the idea of ‘zimmies’ contradicted Mandal’s

56. File No. 3 (18)-PMS/50, National Documentation Centre, Prime Minister’s Secretariat, Islamabad.
57. Ibid.
58. Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985).
59. File No. 3 (3)-PMS/50, National Documentation Centre, Prime Minister’s Secretariat, Islamabad.
60. Ibid.
14 G. ASIF

understanding and ambitions for the Scheduled Castes in Pakistan as full citizens who
would finally be free of the yoke of Brahmanism. The spectre of ‘zimmies’, the letter
made clear, was all the more alarming because it lumped caste Hindus and Dalits into
the same vulnerable category.61 The careful distinctions evinced in previous writings
and statements between Scheduled Castes, caste Hindus and Muslims had collapsed in
this letter into the Muslims of Pakistan and their sufferance (or not) of minorities.62
After anxious and prolonged struggle I have come to the conclusion that Pakistan is no
place for Hindus to live in and that their future is darkened by the ominous shadow of
conversion or liquidation … . When I am convinced that my continuance in office in the
Pakistan Central Government is not of any help to Hindus I should not with a clear
conscience create the false impression in the minds of the Hindus of Pakistan and
peoples abroad that Hindus can live there with honour, respect of their life, property,
and religion. This is about Hindus.
It seems clear from Mandal’s writings that year that the outbreak of violence in Bengal
and the attitude of the central government were the precipitating factors for the bitter
conclusion he reached. His politics of caste empowerment no longer held much mean-
ing in a context where Dalits and caste Hindus were both equally subject to the vio-
lence of the communal majority. It seemed as if the only political future he could have
in Pakistan was as a Hindu leader, working to protect the minorities of East Bengal in
a fraught climate, a repudiation of his entire life’s work. If so, if ‘this is about Hindus’
as he succinctly put it, then there was no place for him in the Pakistani state.

‘He should have fought in a constitutional manner’

Liaquat Ali Khan’s government had been worried about Mandal’s loyalties for some
time according to a tranche of telegrams from 1950 marked ‘secret’ between the prime
minister’s office, the governor’s office in Dhaka, and the Pakistan Foreign Service in
Calcutta.63 These show that the Foreign Service had been spying on Mandal all year as
he moved between Calcutta and Dhaka. The main worry was that Mandal was being
‘persuaded’ to abandon Pakistan by duplicitous Indian politicians who were feigning
concern for the situation in East Bengal—the implication being that as a Hindu leader,
Mandal was particularly susceptible to Indian manipulation. In the light of such
communiques, Mandal’s assertion in his resignation letter that he had always been
ambivalent about Pakistan seems to almost delight in confirming these suspicions. All
this occurred in a context where growing outbreaks of violence in Pakistan against
Hindus, as well as by organised peasantry, were both regularly labelled as the actions of
enemies of the state and communists. As well, speeches in the Assemblies talked of
supposed Indian sympathisers among the Hindu political leadership in East Bengal.64
Mandal’s last letter was a scandal for a new state struggling to consolidate its foreign
relations. The Foreign Service sent telegrams to embassies as varied as New Delhi,

61. I cite this description of dhimmi from the archive of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, as this was the sense in
which the word was used in debates at the time and thus may be understood as the meaning Mandal also
gives it.
62. File No. 3 (3)-PMS/50, National Documentation Centre, Prime Minister’s Secretariat, Islamabad.
63. File No. 3 (18)-PMS/50, National Documentation Centre, Prime Minister’s Secretariat, Islamabad.
64. See, for example, the Constituent Assembly debate on 31 Mar. 1950.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 15

Moscow and Washington, DC, to Cairo, Tehran, Baghdad, Kabul and Ankara contain-
ing a public relations statement in response to the entire affair. The prime minister
approved the statement before it was sent out. It highlighted the appointment of Barori
as a minister in the East Bengal government as the root cause of Mandal’s resignation
(Barori was described as ‘another Scheduled Caste leader [who] did not belong to
Mandal’s party’). But it also termed Mandal’s actions a betrayal that marked him ‘as a
self-confessed liar, traitor, and a coward. If he really felt that his community
(Scheduled Castes) needed redress he should have had the courage to resign his
appointment and to fight for the rights of his community in a constitutional manner
instead of selling himself to the worst enemies of Pakistan in India’.65 Yet a constitu-
tional fight was exactly what the state of affairs in the Constituent Assembly had been
unable to allow. It was because the members of the Assembly had shown themselves to
be unable to hear the specificity of Dalit needs outside the broad category of religious
minority that Mandal had turned to other avenues of what he saw as his solitary strug-
gle until he was unable to continue.
In the wake of this explosive resignation, cast as an unambiguous betrayal and act of
treachery, the East Bengal Scheduled Caste Federation condemned Mandal’s actions.66
In a resolution passed at an emergency meeting that was then circulated to the prime
minister’s office as a memo, it stripped Mandal of his leadership and banned him for
life for having ‘grossly betrayed the best interests of the Scheduled Castes in East
Pakistan’.67 Reiterating the loyalty of the Federation and the Scheduled Castes as a
whole to the Pakistani state, the resolution sought to shield the organisation from any
repercussions from Mandal’s resignation. It made no mention of the Dhaka riots or the
recent crackdown on Hindu politicians that Mandal explicitly referred to. Instead, it
focused on ensuring that the Federation was not rendered suspect in the aftermath of
Mandal’s betrayal.
The Federation’s memo urged the government to ‘cancel membership of Pakistani
legislatures … of those members of the Minorities who attend sessions of the same
from India where they pass the rest of their time … and to nominate in their place
bona fide citizens of Pakistan belonging to Minorities’.68 In the aftermath of the Dhaka
violence, which had been painted as playing into the hands of India and those who
opposed the creation of Pakistan, the question of who owed direct allegiance to
Pakistan took on new sinister overtones that were then refracted through the language
of allegiance and ‘bona fide’ citizenship. The questions and dilemmas Mandal had
raised were lost. Instead, concerns about security and a preoccupation with state ene-
mies predominated. As the Hindu population thus became coagulated and articulated
in the rhetoric of state agencies and tied to the political unrest in East Bengal, one can
discern a prefiguration of the events of 1971.

65. File No. 3 (18)-PMS/50, National Documentation Centre, Prime Minister’s Secretariat, Islamabad.
66. Ibid.
67. Mandal’s letter also describes his disappointment at a leadership struggle within the Federation which
sedimented his disillusionment. This was picked up by press statements from the Pakistani Foreign Service to
Iran and other neighbouring countries that used it to play down his statements about minorities. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
16 G. ASIF

Conclusion
By 1950, the question of caste was increasingly illegible in Pakistan. The new state
became fixated on creating institutional powers and on developing a coherent national
identity complete with ‘worst enemies’—i.e. Hindu India. In this framework, the state
was unable to engage with the specific needs of the Scheduled Castes, who were swept
into the broader category of an increasingly unwelcome minority in East Bengal.
Despite the more open nature of debates in the Constituent Assembly in 1949 and ear-
lier, there, too, Scheduled Caste concerns and calls for constitutional safeguards were
dismissed as unnecessary in the hospitable and tolerant new Muslim polity to come. It
seems as if ambitions for caste emancipation in a Pakistan created for the minorities of
British India could be reconciled with neither the harsh realities nor lofty aspirations of
the new state.
The Objectives Resolution has often been interpreted as foreclosing any political
alternatives as the state moved closer to an Islamic ideal.69 However, the logic of Dalit
empowerment was more concerned about whether or not specific safeguards for the
historically oppressed could be built into whatever political framework was being con-
structed, Islamic or not. The debates in the Constituent Assembly, however vociferous
or frustrating, took place in a promising new context where everybody understood
themselves as committed, albeit vaguely, in some shape or form to the uplift of the
‘backward classes’. It was the vague nature of this commitment that Scheduled Caste
advocates sought to clarify during the debates on the Objectives Resolution. Yet clarifi-
cation would have required a reinterpretation of rapidly combining ideas about minor-
ities in Pakistan, and so it failed.
In a similar spirit, by 1950, Mandal had become a minority leader who despaired of
his role. He had intended to be an advocate for Scheduled Castes in the new state. His
letters track his movement from ruing caste violence being given communal inflections,
through advocating for general minority relief in the aftermath of violence, to finally
excoriating the government for deliberately creating a state that was unliveable for all
Hindus regardless of caste. His public resignation was brought about by the growing
knowledge that the closure of any possibility for Dalit politics rendered his understand-
ing of the Pakistan project meaningless. Ironically, at the same time as Mandal articu-
lated this sense of betrayal, the state was able to confirm its emerging suspicion that all
Hindu politicians, including those who were allied to the government (Mandal), were
simply traitors-in-waiting. In the wake of his resignation, Mandal was officially
declared to have always been a traitor to Pakistan. Perhaps the mutual betrayals under-
scored the sense of having briefly shared a goal to begin with.

Acknowledgements
The staff at the National Documentation Centre, Islamabad, as well as Basharat Saeed were
gracious with their research assistance. Two anonymous reviewers for South Asia, along with
Veena Das and Naveeda Khan, gave insightful comments. I thank Simon W. Fuchs and
Maria-Magdalena Fuchs for putting this issue together, and Ameem Lutfi for his support.

69. Hamid Khan, Constitutional and Political History; and Saeed, Politics of Desecularization. However, see Naveeda
Khan, Muslim Becoming, pp. 91–120, for a more nuanced reading of the debates.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 17

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This research was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation [Grant no. 9257] and the
Mellon-IDRF Social Science Research Council.

ORCID
Ghazal Asif http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0667-5538