J. N. Mondal: The Man who Snatched Sylhet from India

Dr. Sudhir Kumar Das

(dasudhirk@gmail.com)

An objective evaluation of historical personalities, especially those associated with the Partition of India, is a very challenging task. A politician is normally judged on the basis of his decisions and the enduring consequences of those decisions on the people he represents. A communitarian leader like Jogendra Nath Mondal, the unchallenged leader of the Scheduled Caste Namasudra community during the 1947 Partition, committed a blunder of Himalayan dimension by exhorting his followers to choose Pakistan over India, which later proved fatal for them. The present problem of Hindu persecution in Bangladesh can be traced back to this irreversible blunder of J. N. Mondal at the time of the Partition. He hailed from the Barisal district of East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) and joined politics in 1937 by winning the Bakharganj North-East constituency in the Indian Provincial Assembly elections, defeating the then president of the District Congress Committee of the Indian National Congress, Sarat Kumar Dutta. He emerged as the leader of the Scheduled Caste community in Bengal and collaborated with Baba Saheb Bhimrao Ambedkar and founded the Scheduled Castes Federation to challenge the influence of the Congress-supported Depressed Classes League, consisting of leaders like Babu Jagjivan Ram, Radhanath Das, and Prithvi Singh Azad. When Ambedkar lost in the 1946 elections to the Constituent Assembly in Maharashtra, J. N. Mondal vacated his seat and offered it to Ambedkar. On 8th April 1946, a delegation of the All-India Depressed Classes League met the Cabinet Mission and asserted their claim as the sole representative of Scheduled Caste communities, as Ambedkar’s Scheduled Castes Federation had been defeated everywhere in the elections. The Depressed Classes League stood for an undivided and independent India, contrary to the stance of the Scheduled Caste Federation’s inclination towards partition. The Bengal Prime Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy met the members of the Cabinet Mission delegation and hailed Jinnah as the leader of all Muslims. He wanted the whole of Bengal and Assam to be merged with East Pakistan, even if that meant a large Hindu minority, because Hindu and Muslim Bengalis shared the same language and culture. Jogendra Nath Mondal wholeheartedly supported this proposition of Suhrawardy.

He joined the Muslim League in 1939. On October 26th, 1946, a Congress-Muslim League coalition interim government was formed. Mondal was appointed as the minister of law and labour in that cabinet. Jinnah had nominated him as the representative of Scheduled Caste Hindus to counter the Congress’ Muslim representative Abul Kalam Azad, a nationalist who stood for a united India. When the Muslim League declared the ‘Direct Action Day’ on 16th August 1946 and the violence against Hindus continued for three days, Jogendra Nath Mondal played a very controversial role by calling upon the Namasudra community to remain neutral in the anti-Hindu riots. When aggrieved Hindus demanded that he should resign from the Shaheed Suhrawardy ministry in protest against the government’s inaction in protecting the Hindus in Bengal, he refused and earned the sobriquet “Jogen-Ali-Mullah”.  The cynicism shown by J.N. Mondal during the Great Calcutta Killings portrayed him as an opportunistic, power-greedy politician among the people of Bengal. The Indian Independence Act, 1947, gave an official stamp to the formation of Pakistan. Jinnah delivered his famously pretentious speech on 11th August 1947 that Pakistan will follow secularism in practice; J. N. Mondal, in unequivocal terms, hailed him as the unchallenged leader not only of Muslims but also of 8 million Scheduled Caste Hindus living in the subcontinent. He exhorted his Scheduled Castes constituency to vote for Pakistan in the 1947 Sylhet Referendum along with Muslims, as he remained a staunch supporter of the partition of India on religious lines. He was rewarded with the post of minister of law and labour in the first cabinet of Pakistan. He was also made a member of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan by Jinnah, albeit a decorative position. In fact, Jinnah used Mondal as a pawn in his plan to gain as much territory as possible for Pakistan, and Mondal unwittingly walked into the trap. The demarcation of the boundary between India and Pakistan was carried out on the sole basis of the religious contiguity of the people living in the area. The province of Bengal was partitioned, with the Muslim-majority East Bengal going to Pakistan and the Hindu-majority West Bengal going to India. Sylhet district had an almost equal population of Hindus and Muslims; hence, a plebiscite was held to decide whether it would go with India or Pakistan. In Sylhet in 1947 there was a significantly large population of the Namasudra community and they were considered the deciding factorin the plebiscite held on 6th and 7th July of 1947. Jinnah, overenthusiastic to merge Sylhet with Pakistan, sent J. N. Mondal as his representative specifically to influence the Namasudra community to vote for Pakistan.

According to the 1941 census, East Bengal had 28% non-Muslim population, the majority of them being Bengali Hindus. West Bengal had a 30.2% Muslim population; the rest were Hindus. At the time of the Sylhet Plebiscite, there was a total population of 546,815 in 1947, out of which the number of eligible electorates was 423,660 in Sylhet. On the day of the polling, the voter turnout was 77.48%. In the final counting it turned out that 184,041 voters (43.44%) of Sylhet had voted for India, whereas 239,619 (56.56%) voted for Pakistan. There was a thin difference of only 13.12% of votes that separated the winner from the loser.

There were widespread reports of tea garden workers, the majority Hindus, physically stopped from voting by the belligerent Muslim League workers. Jogendra Nath Mondal played the role of a loyal lieutenant of Jinnah and toured extensively in areas like Sylhet North, Sylhet South, Moulavi Bazar, Sunamganj, Habiganj, and Karimganj at his behest and campaigned against India among the members of the Namasudra community. He succeeded in convincing them that living in a Muslim-majority society will be much better for the Namasudras than living with the upper-caste Hindus. The members of the Namasudra community blindly followed him, which later proved fatal for them soon after the Partition. His canvassing tilted the results of the Sylhet Referendum in Pakistan’s favour. Two factors largely influenced the results of the Sylhet Referendum—first, a large number of Namasudras voted along with the Muslims in favour of Pakistan, and second, the reluctance of the tall regional Congress leaders like Lokpriya Gopinath Bordoloi and others to carry out an equally effective campaign to counter Mondal and forward the case of India among the voters of Sylhet. As a consequence, India lost Sylhet to Pakistan in 1947. The reason behind Mr Bordoloi’s disinclination to keep Sylhet in undivided Assam is attributed to his political objective of making Assam a homogeneous state for the people of Assamese linguistic groups. He did not want to fight for a Bengali-speaking area to be included in Assam. This may be true to some extent, but it does not absolve Jogendra Nath Mondal and the dubious role he played during the Partition in general and the Sylhet Referendum in particular. Had the results of the Sylhet Plebiscite gone in favour of India, Mr Bordoloi would not have any say in the matter of the merger of Sylhet with India. J.N. Mondal played a very important role in tilting the results of the Sylhet Referendum in Pakistan’s favour. Karimganj subdivision of Sylhet remained within the Indian state of Assam despite the majority voting for Pakistan in the Sylhet Referendum. In the Sylhet Referendum Karimganj subdivision had voted for Pakistan (49.56% in favour of India and 50.44% in favour of Pakistan), but it was given to India as a land corridor to connect the state of Tripura with the rest of the country.

Soon after the Partition and Sylhet’s merger with Pakistan, the Hindus, Scheduled Caste and Upper Castes, equally faced persecution there at the hands of Muslim majority. Gandhian social activist Suhasini Das records the existence of Hindus in constant fear of violence in East Pakistan in her diary, A Partition Diary, where she provides a graphic description of the barbaric atrocities committed against Hindus of all hues by the marauding Muslim mobs. The anti-Hindu violence in East Pakistan in 1950 was the last straw on the camel’s back. Mondal did not fail to notice that he had been sidelined by the new political leaders of Islamic Pakistan. But it was too late to rectify his grave political blunder. On 8th October 1950 he submitted his resignation to the then Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, while he was in India. In a 15-page resignation letter, he chronologically outlined the inhuman atrocities against the Hindus, including his own community members of Namasudras, in the Islamic Pakistan. He tried to revive his political career in West Bengal. No one trusted this opportunistic politician anymore, who had deserted his followers, consigning them to a life of hell, but returned to India seeking safety for himself. He contested elections many times in West Bengal and even joined Congress, his bete noire throughout his political career, but failed to win and finally died in obscurity in Calcutta on 5th October 1968.