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Ever since its beginning, organized dalit politics under the leadership of Dr B. R. Ambedkar had been consistently moving away from the Indian National Congress and the Gandhian politics of integration. It was drifting towards an assertion of separate political identity of its own, which in the end was enshrined formally in the new constitution of the All India Scheduled Caste Federation, established in 1942. A textual discursive representation of this sense of alienation may be found in Ambedkar's book, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, published in 1945. Yet, within two years, in July 1947, we find Ambedkar accepting Congress nomination for a seat in the Constituent Assembly. A few months later he was inducted into the first Nehru Cabinet of free India, ostensibly on the basis of a recommendation from Gandhi himself. In January 1950, speaking at a general public meeting in Bombay, organized by the All India Scheduled Castes Federation, he advised the dalits to co-operate with the Congress and to think of their country first, before considering their sectarian interests. But then within a few months again, this alliance broke down over his differences with Congress stalwarts, who, among other things, refused to support him on the Hindu Code Bill. He resigned from the Cabinet in 1951 and in the subsequent general election in 1952, he was defeated in the Bombay parliamentary constituency by a political nonentity, whose only advantage was that he contested on a Congress ticket. Ambedkar's chief election agent, Kamalakant Chitre described this electoral debacle as nothing but a ‘crisis’.

The chapter begins with a brief description of how the autonomous Scheduled Caste (SC) movement developed in colonial Bengal, spearheaded by two communities—the Rajbansis in the north and the Namasudras in the eastern districts. It looks critically at how space was important for their social mobilisation in the early twentieth century. When that cultural habitat was threatened by the Partition, they could hardly remain unaffected. It looks at how Partition politics affected and disrupted the organised SC movement in Bengal, taking the narrative through the election of 1946, the riots in Calcutta, Noakhali, and other parts of east Bengal, the Hindu mobilisation of the Dalit, and the Communist intervention through the Tebhaga movement. It looks critically at the question of Dalit identity on the eve of Partition and the division of Dalit leadership into two rival groups on the issue of Partition and alliance with the Muslim League. It concludes that we need to understand their participation in Partition politics within the context of a complex relationship between subalternity, religion, identity, space, and political mobilisation.

India-New Zealand relations, which could be historically dated back to the days of the British Empire, lacked until recently in substance and were rocked by several irritants, the most important of which were the divergent views on the issue of nuclear non-proliferation. However, in last one decade or so there have been some remarkable developments in this bilateral relation, as the security interests of the two nations have converged, volume of trade increased, educational ties grew stronger and people-topeople contacts improved significantly. While there still remain some challenges, as negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement have taken longer time than expected, there are also immense possibilities. This essay looks critically at those challenges and possibilities in the relationship between two countries, which on the one hand share some historic common grounds, but are also set apart by geography as well as numerous systemic dissimilarities.

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