Partition politics absorbed caste identity and drew Untouchables into Hindu militant mobilization.

Evidence

The timing was wrong. By then, the national movement was reigniting. Gandhi had announced the Quit India Movement. The Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan was gaining traction, and for a while caste identity became less important that the Hindu–Muslim issue. … By the mid-1940s, as the prospect of partition loomed, the subordinated castes in several states had been ‘assimilated’ into Hinduism. They began to participate in militant Hindu rallies; in Noakhali in Bengal, for instance, they functioned as an outlying vigilante army in the run-up to the bloodbath of partition. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 427

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the reader’s stated interest in how caste annihilation was thought, implemented, and how it scaled or failed to scale. — connects to: Partition’s fratricide turned subcontinental nationalism into mourning and self-critique. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 465