Thread. The story of Jogendra Nath Mandal (1904-1968) is so illuminating. He was a leader of the Scheduled Castes (Dalits) and close to Jinnah. He made the mistake of thinking that Dalits & Muslims had a common set of grievances against the so-called upper-caste Hindus. (1)
Jogendra Nath Mandal became a supporter of the Muslim League. In fact, he was a fan of Subhash Chandra Bose and went over to the Muslim League only after Bose was expelled from the Indian National Congress. At that time, the League was the only alternative to INC. (2)
When Pakistan was partitioned out of a multi-religious India, Jinnah invited JN Mandal to be the 1st Law Minister. In fact, Mandal was one of the founding fathers of Pakistan & helped to draft its constitution. He was the highest-ranking Hindu in the newly formed govt in 1947.(3)
Jogendra Nath Mandal was under the impression that he was helping to create a secular Pakistan! But guess what? Just 3 years later, in 1950, Mandal resigned from his position & requested Nehru for Indian citizenship because living in Pakistan had become a nightmare for Hindus (4)
The resignation letter Jogendra Nath Mandal addressed to Pakistan's Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan is a long, moving one in which he predicts how Hindus would be systematically wiped out from both East & West Pakistan with violence, rapes, false cases & forced conversions (5)
The letter has been removed from Wikipedia but I found it in quora as well as someone's blog. The reference to Hindus of Sindh made me think of all the Sindhi refugees I met during my recent trip to Rajasthan. Read and weep! (6) tinyurl.com/wpts9qp
Here is an excerpt from the 1950 letter. "Leaving aside the question of East Pakistan, let me now refer to West Pakistan, especially Sind. The West Punjab had after partition about a lakh of Scheduled Castes people. (7)
"It may be noted that a large number of them (SCs) were converted to Islam. Only 4 out of a dozen Scheduled Castes girls abducted by Muslims have yet been recovered in spite of repeated petitions to the Authority. (8)
"Names of those girls with names of their abductors were supplied to the government. The last reply recently given by the Officer-in-Charge of recovery of abducted girls said that "his function was to recover Hindu girls and 'Achhuts' (Scheduled Castes) were not Hindus". (9)
"The condition of the small number of Hindus still living in Sind & Karachi, the capital of Pakistan, is simply deplorable. I have a list of 363 Hindu temples & gurdwaras of Karachi and Sind (which is by no means an exhaustive list) which are still in possession of Muslims. (10)
"Some of the temples have been converted into cobbler's shops, slaughterhouses and hotels. None of the Hindus has got back. Possession of their landed properties were taken away from them without any notice and distributed amongst refugees and local Muslims." (11)
"In Karachi I received petitions from many unfortunate fathers & husbands of abducted Hindu girls, mostly SCs. I drew the attention of Govt. There was little effect. To my regret I received info that large number of SCs living in Sind have been forcibly converted to Islam. (12)
Mandal goes on to say in his resignation letter to Liaqat Ali Khan that Hindus had become stateless in Pakistan. "They have no other fault than that they profess the Hindu religion. (13)
"Declarations are being repeatedly made by Muslim League leaders that Pakistan is & shall be an Islamic State. Islam is being offered as the sovereign remedy for all earthly evils. (14)
In that grand setting of the Shariat, Muslims alone are rulers while Hindus and other minorities are zimmies who are entitled to protection at price, and you know more than anybody else Mr Prime Minister, what that price is. (15)
"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. (16)
"The bulk of the upper-class Hindus & politically conscious scheduled castes have left East Bengal. Those Hindus who will continue to stay accursed in Pakistan will, I am afraid, by gradual stages & in planned manner be either converted to Islam or completely exterminated. (17)
"It is really amazing that a man of your education, culture and experience should be an exponent of a doctrine fraught with so great a danger to humanity and subversive of all principles of equality and good sense." (18)
I do not know what happened to Jogendra Nath Mandal after he moved back from Pakistan to India but I wish more Dalits would read his story, and recognize that shunning their Hindu identity and cosying up to violent monotheists only leads to tragedy. (19) End of thread. 
