Fifth October holds no special significance for the residents of 64 A, Sultan Alam Road, where a two-storeyed house stands in the bylanes opposite the South City Mall, in the Lake Gardens area of south Kolkata.
Few in this lower middle-class neighbourhood remember that the first law and labour minister of Pakistan, Jogendranath Mandal, spent the last chapter of his life in this house, reminiscing perhaps about his dashed dream of Hindu-Muslim unity in erstwhile East Pakistan. He died unsung in Bongaon in 1968 in the North 24 Parganas, West Bengal.
The house, with its blue windows and colourless outer walls, belongs to Bharat Chandra Adhikary, who gave refuge to Mandal when he returned to India in 1950 as a broken man. He had left Pakistan after resigning from the cabinet.
“I remember Jogen Mandal. He was a friend of my father and came to stay with us when I was a child. He was a kind man but we didn’t know who he was at that time,” Dinesh Chandra Adhikary, the current owner of the house, told ThePrint.
Adhikary said that the neighbourhood doesn’t remember that a former Pakistan minister had spent his last years here.
“When Mandal died, no one from the West Bengal government, the central government, or Bangladesh came to visit. The room upstairs where he stayed has undergone many changes over the years. From outside, the house looks the same though,” said Adhikary.
But even this remnant of his story will soon vanish.
“We plan to sell this house to a property developer who will build a high-rise building here. That would be the end of its history I guess,” he said.
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Mandal, the nowhere man
Prior to this, Mandal was living at the more upscale address in Kolkata at 64, Southern Avenue as a sub-tenant. Oral historian Avishek Biswas, who specialises in the Partition history of Bengali Dalits, said Mandal was “kicked out” on 29 May 1960.
The Landlord-Tenant Agreement clauses of West Bengal had undergone big changes in 1959. “A student of law and the first law and labour minister of Pakistan failed to notice a change in the law that would directly affect him. He was thrown out by his landlord who didn’t give two hoots about who he was and Jogen could do nothing about it,” said Biswas.
Changing houses was the least of Mandal’s problems. He wanted to change the course of history.
He had come to India from East Pakistan, disillusioned. Biswas said that though Mandal was the tallest Dalit leader in pre-partition East Bengal, he had lost most of his followers after he chose Pakistan over India and stood with Muhammad Ali Jinnah during the Partition.
Mandal had thought Dalits and Muslims would live like brothers in Pakistan. They didn’t, and as communal tension rose and Hindus left East Pakistan for India in large numbers, Mandal was looked at as a short-sighted leader at best and a self-serving politician at worst.
His critics called him Jogen Ali Molla, mocking his affinity to Pakistan.
But Mandal had not given up, yet. The Dalit leader was vying for a last hurrah; he wanted to steer the refugee movement in West Bengal after he came to India. The United Central Refugee Council (UCRC), founded in 1950, had taken up the fight for East Pakistan’s Hindu refugees. Mandal found that more than helping the refugees, the organisation was politically benefitting the Communist Party of India in their battle against the ruling Congress. Mandal also believed UCRC spoke more for caste Hindus than the casteless.
But most Dalit Hindus, who formed his political constituency, had stopped seeing Mandal as a messiah and were trying to blend into a larger Hindu narrative.
Mandal hopped from one refugee camp to another in faraway districts of Birbhum and 24 Parganas, in search of an audience and lost glory.
In one such meeting at Uttartilpara camp in Birbhum, as recorded in the West Bengal State Archives, Mandal attacked the Indian National Congress. “It was Congress stalwarts who created this Partition… the Congress leaders did so for the love of power.”
In the same meeting, Mandal read out articles about him published in various newspapers to convince refugees from East Pakistan that he was always in favour of a sovereign United Bengal.
Biswas said few believed Mandal at this juncture. “This was the same Jogen Mandal who had sided with Jinnah, after all. This was the same Jogen Mandal who had told Dalit Hindus to stick with Muslims before, during, and after the Partition, arguing both are victims of upper caste tyranny,” he said.
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Mandal’s dreams come undone
In his resignation letter to Pakistan Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, dated 8 October 1950, Mandal said that his cooperation with the Muslim League was born from the understanding that the economic interests of the Muslims in Bengal were generally identical with those of the Scheduled Castes. “Muslims were mostly cultivators and labourers, and so were members of the Scheduled Castes. One section of Muslims were fishermen, so was a section of the Scheduled Castes as well, and secondly that the Scheduled Castes and the Muslims were both educationally backward,” Mandal wrote.
He believed this unity would last and opposed Partition. He had unflinching faith in the Muslim League and scepticism towards the Indian National Congress and Hindu Mahasabha even after the communal riots in Calcutta on 16 August 1946. Later, he accepted that this was an unpopular decision.
“The 16th day of August of that year [1946] was observed in Calcutta as ‘The Direct Action Day’ by the Muslim League. It resulted, as you know, in a holocaust. Hindus demanded my resignation from the League Ministry…But I remained steadfast to my policy…I cannot but gratefully acknowledge the fact that I was saved from the wrath of infuriated Hindu mobs by my Caste Hindu neighbours,” Mandal wrote in his resignation letter.
A year after the riots, India was partitioned and Pakistan was born. And Mandal became a minister in the Pakistan cabinet, still dreaming of Hindu-Muslim unity.
By 1950, Mandal’s dreams had come undone. He knew that most upper-caste Hindus had left East Pakistan. Those who stayed back were mainly Dalits. But despite talks of Dalit-Muslim unity, the administration in East Pakistan did little to stop the violence against Dalit Hindus.
Muslim League had taken out an advertisement in a newspaper in 1946 — “Muslim League tamam kamzor jama’aton ke huq chahti hai! (The Muslim League unequivocally demands the rights of underprivileged)” Where was Jinnah and the vision for the uplift of the downtrodden among Hindus now?
A contested legacy
In 1950, Mandal submitted his resignation citing the inaction of the Pakistani administration against rioters who committed atrocities against his people.
“I would like to reiterate in this connection my firm conviction that East Bengal Govt. is still following the well-planned policy of squeezing Hindus out of the Province. In my discussion with you on more than one occasion, I gave expression to this view of mine. I must say that this policy of driving out Hindus from Pakistan has succeeded completely in West Pakistan and is nearing completion in East Pakistan too.”
And with that, Mandal came to West Bengal. On 15 September 1950, he was supposed to preside over a meeting at Mari in west Punjab. But a telegram from Kolkata told him of his son’s illness. His son recovered but Mandal decided to never go back to Pakistan.
Dalit Hindus, who had stayed back in East Pakistan by rejecting the Congress and India, had no one to turn to.
“That man was a villain,” Jayanta Karmakar, a Hindu rights activist in Bangladesh who documents attacks on Hindus on his social media accounts, told ThePrint.
Karmakar belongs to Barishal, Bangladesh, the same district as Mandal. “Hindus in Bangladesh are suffering today because of that man. He led us up the garden path by talking about Dalit-Hindu and Muslim unity. Many upper-caste Hindus left during Partition. Dalits stayed back because he was the leader everyone looked up to. And what did he do? He resigned and ran away to India. We stayed back to face the music! If he is not a villain, who is?” Karmakar asked.
Except for a small brick building, nothing remains of Mandal in today’s Bangladesh, says Karmakar.
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The forgotten village home
At Moisterkandi village, which falls under the Gour Nodi sub-district in Bangladesh’s Barishal district, stands a one-storey brick building with a large wooden table, some chairs and posters of Mandal hanging from the wall.
This building, a memorial of sorts, is all that remains of Mandal.
Mantulal Mandal, a frail man in his 60s, is the only surviving member of Mandal’s family in Bangladesh. He is the grandson of Mandal’s elder brother. Mantulal says he is proud of his granduncle’s legacy, even if it is now restricted to this village. He is part of a committee formed in memory of Mandal.
“The building came up 15 years ago. But this village has celebrated Jogendranath Mandal from much earlier. On his birth and death anniversaries, we have kabigaan (folk performances). We remember him in our own way,” Mantulal told ThePrint.
He points to four bamboo poles just outside the memorial building. “That was where Jogendranath Mandal’s house was. Now that vegetable garden is all there is,” he says.
Mantulal rejects the notion that Mandal is now entirely irrelevant.
“I won’t say what my granduncle stood for has failed completely in today’s Bangladesh. At least in this village, we have been living in peace. No matter what happens outside, we live in harmony. There was a lot of violence during Durga Puja in 2021 across Bangladesh. Pandals were ransacked, Durga idols were broken, and Hindus were killed. But there was no tension in our village between Hindus and Muslims. It was only because of Jogendranath Mandal that the poor Scheduled Caste Hindus and Muslim students could continue their studies with a governmental stipend that he started.”
Bin Murtaza Abdul Sardar is part of the village committee that studies Mandal’s life and times. He remains an avid fan of Mahapran (The Great Man). “Mandal was a man much ahead of his time. History has not been kind to him. But Muslims and Dalit Hindus live as brothers in this village,” he said.
Mantulal says he has never been to India. “I have only heard stories of his political life on the other side of the border. He was not who he was in East Pakistan once he went to India. There is no point in going to India to trace his legacy. Whatever remains of his memory is in this village,” he said.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)