Jogendranath Mandal and the Politics of Dalit Recognition in Pakistan

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies ISSN: 0085-6401 (Print) 1479-0270 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20 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, 43:1, 119-135, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1689472 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2020.1689472 Published online: 03 Jan 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 89 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=csas20 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 2020, VOL. 43, NO. 1, 119–135 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 The imperatives of Dalit emancipation interacted with concerns Resolution; Pakistan; Partition; Scheduled Caste about the position of minorities, thereby revealing the conditions by which difference became legible in the new state. In the creation 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 [email protected] 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 120 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 minorities 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 minorities, 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 minority remains an unstable analytical category in the context of modern South Asian history. Existing scholarship on Pakistan often puts contemporary minorities together without considering how historical circumstances may have forged specific relationships 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’,inPolicies 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 121 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 minorities 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 movement 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 movement toward Dalit empowerment, all the

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