Jogendranath Mandal and the Politics of Dalit Recognition in Pakistan

Home , Liaquat Ali Khan, Nurul Amin, Objectives Resolution

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

ISSN: 0085-6401 (Print) 1479-0270 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20

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 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. 122 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 … .Itis 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 contract 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 considered 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’,inModern 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 123 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 constitutional 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 themselves 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 language throughout remained that of protection of minorities in general as a gesture following Islamic precepts of generosity towards others often at the expense of the Scheduled Castes’ specificity. Although always uttered as assurance, the framing of protection 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. 124 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 safeguards for minorities could be were put forth in the language of constitutional safeguards 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 hospitality 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 125 other Congress voices concerned about legal safeguards for minorities, his second proposed 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 recognition 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 reference to the necessity of constitutional safeguards for the Dalits. As such, the amendment 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 constitutional 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 religious 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 dimensions 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 certain 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). 126 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 difference 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 constitutional 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 127 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 government, 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’,inSouth 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. 128 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 elided 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 continuing 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 manner, 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’,inSouth 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 129 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 government 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 considered himself to be. He was ‘pressed very hard’ by representatives not only of ‘his people’, 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 concerns 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’. 130 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 aftermath of the 1950 Dhaka riots, the rhetorical separation between caste Hindus and Scheduled Castes as minorities had become untenable despite his long political trajectory focusing on that very difference. This included his leadership position in undivided 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 oppression 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’,inIndian 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 131 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 considered 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 project 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 resignation 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 assurances, Pakistan would divide the population into ‘full-fledged Muslim citizens and zimmies (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. 132 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 meaning in a context where Dalits and caste Hindus were both equally subject to the violence 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 133

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 constitutional 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 struggle 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 enemies 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. 134 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 earlier, 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 minorities 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 understanding of the Pakistan project meaningless. Ironically, at the same time as Mandal articulated 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 underscored 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 135

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