Jaswant Singh's Biography on Mr Jinnah

Viceroy · #1 Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Recently, a biography of Mr Jinnah authored by Jaswant Singh was published. It's interesting to know that at least among the intellectuals of India a rational approach towards the facts is taking the place of the conventional demonisation of one of the greatest men known to the history of sub-continent in specific and the world in general. Below is the interview of the author.

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Monday sees the publication of a biography of Mohammed Ali Jinnah which challenges the way we in India have seen the founder of Pakistan. It reassess Nehru's role in Partition, it sheds fresh light on the relationship between the Mahatma Gandhi and Jinnah.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Jaswant Singh’s book is likely to attract considerable attention and may be even a fair amount of controversy. Karan Thapar, in a special two-part interview with the author, discusses the book with Singh, a former defence, foreign and finance minister of India and also a former soldier.

Karan Thapar: Mr Jaswant Singh, let's start by establishing how you as the author view Mohammed Ali Jinnah? After reading your book, I get the feeling that you don't subscribe to the popular demonisation of the man.

Jaswant Singh: Of course, I don't. To that I don’t subscribe. I was attracted by the personality which has resulted in a book. If I wasn't drawn to the personality, I wouldn't have written the book. It's an intricate, complex personality of great character, determination.

Karan Thapar: And it's a personality that you found quite attractive?

Jaswant Singh: Naturally, otherwise, I wouldn't have ventured down the book. I found the personality sufficiently attractive to go and research it for five years. And I was drawn to it, yes.

Karan Thapar: As a politician, Jinnah joined the Congress party long before he joined the Muslim League and in fact when he joined the Muslim League, he issued a statement to say that this in no way implies “even the shadow of disloyalty to the national cause”. Would you say that in the 20s and 30s and may be even the early years of the 40s, Jinnah was a nationalist?

Jaswant Singh: Actually speaking the acme of his nationalistic achievement was the 1916 Lucknow Pact of Hindu-Muslim unity and that's why Gopal Krishna Gokhale called him the Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity.

Karan Thapar: In your assessment as his biographer, for most if not the predominant part of his life, Jinnah was a nationalist.

Jaswant Singh: Oh, yes. He fought the British for an independent India but he also fought resolutely and relentlessly for the interest of the Muslims of India.

Karan Thapar: Was Jinnah secular or was he communal?

Jaswant Singh: It depends on the way you view the word 'secular' because I don't know whether secular is really fully applicable to a country like India. It's a word borne of the socio-historical and religious history of Western Europe.

Karan Thapar: Let me put it like this. Many people believe that Jinnah hated Hindus and that he was a Hindu basher.

Jaswant Singh: Wrong, totally wrong. That certainly he was not. His principal disagreement was with the Congress party. Repeatedly he says and he says this even in his last statements to the press and to the constituent Assembly of Pakistan.

Karan Thapar: So his problem was with Congress and with some Congress leaders but he had no problem with Hindus.

Jaswant Singh: No, he had no problems whatsoever with the Hindus. Because he was not in that sense, until in the later part of his years, he became exactly what he charged Mahatma Gandhi with. He had charged Mahatma Gandhi of being a demagogue.

Karan Thapar: He became one as well?

Jaswant Singh: That was the most flattering way of emulating Gandhi. I refer of course to the Calcutta killings.

Karan Thapar: As you look back on Jinnah's life, would you say that he was a great man?

Jaswant Singh: Oh yes, because he created something out of nothing and single-handedly he stood up against the might of the Congress party and against the British who didn't really like him.

Karan Thapar: So you are saying to me he was a great man?

Jaswant Singh: But I am saying so.

Karan Thapar:Let me put it like this. Do you admire Jinnah?

Jaswant Singh: I admire certain aspects of his personality: his determination and the will to rise. He was a self-made man--Mahatma Gandhi was a son of a Dewan.

Karan Thapar: Nehru was born to great wealth.

Jaswant Singh: All of them were born to wealth and position, Jinnah created for himself a position. He carved out in Bombay a position in that cosmopolitan city being what he was, poor. He was so poor he had to walk to work. He lived in a hotel called Watsons in Bombay and he told one of the biographers that there's always room at the top but there is no lift and he never sought a lift.

Karan Thapar: Do you admire the way he created success for himself, born to poverty but he ended up successful, rich?

Jaswant Singh: I would admire that in any man, self-made man, who resolutely worked towards achieving what he had set out to.

Karan Thapar: How seriously has India misunderstood Jinnah?

Jaswant Singh: I think we misunderstood because we needed to create a demon.

Karan Thapar: We needed a demon and he was the convenient scapegoat?

Jaswant Singh: I don't know if he was convenient. We needed a demon because in the 20th century the most telling event in the entire subcontinent was the partition of the country.

Karan Thapar: I’ll come to that in a moment but first the critical question that your book raises is that how is it that the man, considered as the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity in 1916 had transformed 30 years later by 1947 into the 'Qaid-e-Azam' of Pakistan? And your book suggests that underlying this was Congress' repeated inability to accept that Muslims feared domination by Hindus and that they wanted “space” in “a reassuring system”.

Jaswant Singh: Here is the central contest between minoritism and majoritarianism. With the loss of the Mughal empire, the Muslims of India had lost power but majoritarianism didn't begin to influence them until 1947. Then they saw that unless they had a voice in their own political, economical and social destiny, they would be obliterated. That is the beginning. That is still the purpose.

Karan Thapar: Let me ask you this. Was Jinnah's fear or anxiety about Congress majoritarianism justified or understandable? Your book in its account of how Congress refused to form a government with the League in UP in 1937 after fighting the elections in alliance with that party, suggests that Jinnah's fears were substantial and real.

Jaswant Singh: Yes. You have to go not just to 1937, which you just cited. See other examples. In the 1946 elections, Jinnah's Muslim League wins all the Muslim seats and yet they do not have sufficient number to be in office because the Congress party has, even without a single Muslim, enough to form a government and they are outside of the government. So it was realised that simply contesting election was not enough.

Karan Thapar: They needed certain assurances within the system to give them that space?

Jaswant Singh : That’s right. And those assurances amounted to reservation, which I dispute frankly. Reservations went from 25 per cent to 33 per cent. And then from reservation that became parity, of being on equal terms. Parity to Partition.

Karan Thapar : All of this was search for space?

Jaswant Singh: All of this was a search for some kind of autonomy of decision making in their own social and economic destiny.

Karan Thapar: Your book reveals how people like Gandhi, Rajagopalachari and Azad could understand the Jinnah or the Muslim fear of Congress majoritarianism but Nehru simply couldn't understand. Was Nehru insensitive to this?

Jaswant Singh: No, he wasn't. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was a deeply sensitive man.

Karan Thapar: But why couldn't he understand?

Jaswant Singh: He was deeply influenced by Western and European socialist thought of those days. For example dominion status would have given virtual independence to India in the 20s (but Nehru shot it down).

Karan Thapar: In other words, Nehru's political thinking and his commitment to Western socialist thought meant that he couldn't understand Jinnah's concerns about majoritarianism? Nehru was a centralist, Jinnah was a decentraliser?

Jaswant Singh: That's right. That is exactly (the point). Nehru believed in a highly centralised polity. That's what he wanted India to be. Jinnah wanted a federal polity.

Karan Thapar: Because that would give Muslims the space?

Jaswant Singh: That even Gandhi also accepted.

Karan Thapar: But Nehru couldn't.

Jaswant Singh: Nehru didn't.

Karan Thapar: He refused to?

Jaswant Singh: Well, consistently, he stood in the way of a federal India until 1947 when it became a partitioned India.

Karan Thapar: In fact, the conclusion of your book is that if Congress could have accepted a decentralised federal India, then a united India, as you put it, “was clearly ours to attain”. You add that the problem was that this was in “an anathema to Nehru's centralising approach and policies”.
Do you see Nehru at least as responsible for Partition as Jinnah?

Jaswant Singh: I think he says it himself. He recognised it and his correspondence, for example with late Nawab Sahab of Bhopal, his official biographer and others. His letters to the late Nawab Sahab of Bhopal are very moving letters.

Karan Thapar: You are saying Nehru recognised that he was as much of an obstacle.

Jaswant Singh: No, he recognised his mistakes afterwards.

Karan Thapar: Afterwards?

Jaswant Singh: Afterwards.

Karan Thapar: Today, Nehru's heirs and party will find it very surprising that you think that Nehru was as responsible for Partition as Jinnah.

Jaswant Singh: I am not blaming anybody. I’m not assigning blame. I am simply recording what I have found as the development of issues and events of that period.

Karan Thapar: When Indians turn around and say that Jinnah was, to use a colloquialism, the villain of Partition, your answer is that there were many people responsible and to single out Jinnah, as the only person or as the principal person, is both factually wrong and unfair?

Jaswant Singh: It is. It is not borne out of events. Go to the last All India Congress Committee meeting in Delhi in the June of 1947 to discuss and accept the June 3, 1947 resolution. Nehru-Patel’s resolution was defeated by the Congress, supported by Gandhi in the defeat.
Ram Manohar Lohia had moved the amendment. It was a very moving intervention by Ram Manohar Lohia and then Gandhi finally said we must accept this Partition. Partition is a very painful event. It is very easy to assign blame but very difficult thereafter. Because all events that we are judging are ex post facto.

Karan Thapar: Absolutely, and what your book does is to shed light in terms of a new assessment of Partition and the responsibility of the different players. And in that re-assessment, you have balanced differently between Jinnah and Nehru?

Jaswant Singh: All vision which is ex post facto is 20/20. It is when you actually live the event.

Karan Thapar: Quite right. Those who have lived it would have seen it differently but today, with the benefit of hindsight, you can say that Jinnah wasn't the only or the principal villain and the Indian impression that he was is mistaken and wrong?

Jaswant Singh: And we need to correct it.

Karan Thapar: Let's turn to Jinnah and Pakistan. Your book shows that right through the 20s and the 30s, or may be even the early years of the 40s, Pakistan for Jinnah was more of a political strategy, less of a target and a goal. Did he consciously, from the very start, seek to dismember and divide India?

Jaswant Singh: I don't think it was dismemberment. He wanted space for the Muslims. And he could just not define Pakistan ever. Geographically, it was a vague idea. That's why ultimately it became a moth-eaten Pakistan. He had ideas about certain provinces which must be Islamic and one-third of the seats in the Central legislature must be Muslims.

Karan Thapar: So Pakistan was in fact a way of finding, as you call it, 'space' for Muslims?

Jaswant Singh: He wanted space in the Central legislature and in the provinces and protection of the minorities so that the Muslims could have a say in their own political, economic and social destiny.

Karan Thapar: And that was his primary concern, not dividing India or breaking up the country?

Jaswant Singh: No. He in fact went to the extent of saying that let there be a Pakistan within India.

Karan Thapar: A Pakistan within India was acceptable to him?

Jaswant Singh: Yes.

Karan Thapar: So in other words, Pakistan was often 'code' for space for Muslims?

Jaswant Singh:That's right. From what I have written, I find that it was a negotiating tactic because he wanted certain provinces to be with the Muslim League. He wanted a certain percentage (of seats) in the Central legislature. If he had that, there would not have been a partition.

Karan Thapar: Would you therefore say that when people turn around and say that Jinnah was communal, he was a Hindu hater, a Hindu basher that they are mistaken and wrong?

Jaswant Singh: He was not a Hindu hater but he had great animosity with the Congress party and Congress leadership. He said so repeatedly: I have no enmity against the Hindu.

Karan Thapar: Do you as an author believe him when he said so?

Jaswant Singh: I don't live in the same time as him. I go by what his contemporaries have said, I go by what he himself says and I reproduce it.

Karan Thapar: Let's come again to this business of using Pakistan to create space for Muslims. Your book shows how repeatedly people like Rajagopalachari, Gandhi and Azad were understanding of the Jinnah need or the Muslim need for space. Nehru wasn't. Nehru had a European-inherited centralised vision of how India should be run. In a sense was Nehru's vision of a centralised India, a problem that eventually led to partition?

Jaswant Singh: Jawaharlal Nehru was not always that. He became that after his European tour of the 20s. Then he came back imbued with, as Madhu Limaye puts it, 'spirit of socialism' and he was all for highly centralised India.

Karan Thapar: And a highly centralized India denied the space Jinnah wanted.

Jaswant Singh: A highly centralised India meant that the dominant party was the Congress party. He (Nehru) in fact said there are only two powers in India -- the Congress party and the British.

Karan Thapar: That attitude in a sense left no room for Jinnah and the Muslim League in India?

Jaswant Singh: That is what made Jinnah repeatedly say but there is a third force -- we. The Congress could have dealt with the Moplas but there were other Muslims.

Karan Thapar: So it was this majoritarianism of Nehru that actually left no room for Jinnah?

Jaswant Singh: It became a contest between excessive majoritarianism, exaggerated minoritism and giving the referee's whistle to the British.

Karan Thapar: Was the exaggerated minoritism a response to the excessive majoritarianism of Congress?

Jaswant Singh: In part. Also in response to the historical circumstances that had come up

Karan Thapar: If the final decision had been taken by people like Gandhi, Rajagopalachari or Azad, could we have ended up with united India?

Jaswant Singh: Yes, I believe so. It could have. Gandhi said let the British go home, we will settle this amongst ourselves, we will find a Pakistan. In fact, he said so in the last AICC meetings.

Karan Thapar: It was therefore Nehru's centralising vision that made that extra search for united India difficult at the critical moment?

Jaswant Singh: He continued to say so but subsequently, after Partition, he began to realise what a great mistake he had made.

Karan Thapar: Nehru realised his mistakes but it was too late, by then it had happened.

Jaswant Singh: It was too late. It was too late.

Karan Thapar: Let's end this first interview there. In the next part I want to talk to you about the relationship between the early Gandhi and Jinnah, the questions you raise about Partition and the predicament of Indian Muslims.

Viceroy · #2 Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Karan Thapar: Let us start this second interview with the portrait you paint of the relationship between the early Gandhi and the early Jinnah.
You say of their first meeting in January 1915 that Gandhi's response to Jinnah's “warm welcome” was “ungracious”. You say Gandhi would only see Jinnah “in Muslim terms”, and the sort of implication that comes across is Gandhi was less accommodating than Jinnah was.

Jaswant Singh: I have perhaps not used the adjective you have used. Jinnah returned from his education in 1896. Gandhi went to South Africa and was returning finally--in between he had come once--to India it was 1915 already.
Jinnah had gone to receive him with Gokhale and he referred fulsomely to Gandhi. Gandhi referred to Jinnah and said that I am very grateful that we have a Muslim leader. That I think was born really of Gandhi's working in South Africa and not so much the reality of what he felt. The relationship subsequently became competitive.

Karan Thapar: But you do call that response “ungracious”?

Jaswant Singh: I don't know whether I call it ungracious?

Karan Thapar: You do.

Jaswant Singh: But I might have. Jinnah is fulsomely receiving Gandhi and Gandhi says I am glad that I am being received by a Muslim leader.

Karan Thapar: So he was only seeing Jinnah in Muslim terms?

Jaswant Singh: Yes, which Jinnah didn't want to be seen.

Karan Thapar: Even when you discuss the impact of their political strategies in the early years before 1920 you suggest that Jinnah was perhaps more effective than Gandhi, who in a sense permitted the Raj to continue for three decades. You write "Jinnah had successfully kept the Indian political forces together, simultaneously exerting pressure on the government."
Of Gandhi you say “that pressure dissipated and the Raj remained for three more decades”.

Jaswant Singh: That is a later development, because the political style of the two was totally different. Jinnah was essentially a logician.
He believed in the strength of logic; he was a Parliamentarian; he believed in the efficacy of parliamentary politics. Gandhi, after testing the water, took to the trails of India and he took politics into the dusty villages of India.

Karan Thapar: But in the early years up till 1920 you see Jinnah as more effective in putting pressure on the British than Gandhi.

Jaswant Singh: Yes, because entire politics was parliamentary.

Karan Thapar: The adjectives you use to characterise their leadership in the early years suggests a sort of, how shall I put it, slight tilt in Jinnah's favour.
You say of Gandhi's leadership that it had “an entirely religious, provincial character”. Of Jinnah's you say he was “doubtless imbued by a non-sectarian nationalistic zeal.”

Jaswant Singh: He was non-sectarian. Gandhi used religion as a personal expression. Jinnah used religion as a tool to create something but that came later. For Gandhi religion was an integral part of his politics from the very beginning.

Karan Thapar: And Jinnah wanted religion out of politics.

Jaswant Singh: Out of politics. That is right--there are innumerable examples.

Karan Thapar: In fact, Jinnah sensed or feared instinctively that if politics came into religion it would divide.

Jaswant Singh: There were two fears here. His one fear was that if the whole question or practice of mass movement was introduced into India then the minority in India would be threatened.
There could be Hindu-Muslim riots as a consequence. The second fear was that this will result in bringing in religion into Indian politics. He didn't want that--Khilafat movement, etc are all examples of that.

Karan Thapar: And in a sense would you say events have borne out Jinnah?

Jaswant Singh: Not just Jinnah, Annie Besant also. When the Home Rule League broke up--resigning from the League, Annie Beasant cautioned Gandhi you are going down this path, this is a path full of peril.

Karan Thapar: Both Jinnah and Beasant have been borne out.

Jaswant Singh: In the sense that mass movement, unless combined with a great sense of discipline, leadership and restraint, becomes chaotic.

Karan Thapar: As you look back on their lives and their achievements, Jinnah, at the end of the day, stood for creating a homeland for Indian Muslims. But what he produced was moth-eaten and broke up into two pieces in less than 25 years. Gandhi struggled to keep India united, but ended up not just with Partition but with communal passion and communal killing. Would you say at the end of their lives both were failures?

Jaswant Singh: Gandhi was transparently a honest man. He lived his political life openly. Jinnah didn't even live his political life, leave alone his private life, openly. Gandhi led his private life openly--(in) Noakhali with a pencil stub he wrote movingly “I don't want to die a failure but I fear I might.”

Karan Thapar: And did he in your opinion.

Jaswant Singh: Yes, I am afraid the Partition of land, the Hindu-Muslim divide, cannot be really called Gandhiji's great success.
Jinnah, I think, did not achieve what he set out to. He got what is called a moth-eaten Pakistan, but the philosophy which underlaid that Muslims are a separate nation was completely rejected within years of Pakistan coming into being.

Karan Thapar: So, in a sense, both failed.

Jaswant Singh: I am afraid I have to say that. I am, in comparison, a lay practitioner of politics in India. I cannot compare myself to these two great Indians but my assessment would lead me to the conclusion that I cannot treat this as a success either by Gandhi or by Jinnah.

Karan Thapar: Your book also raises disturbing questions about the Partition of India. You say it was done in a way “that multiplied our problems without solving any communal issue”.
Then you ask “if the communal, the principal issue, remains in an even more exacerbated form than before then why did we divide at all?”

Jaswant Singh: Yes, indeed why? I cannot yet find the answer. Look into the eyes of the Muslims who live in India and if you truly see through the pain they live--to which land do they belong?
We treat them as aliens, somewhere inside, because we continue to ask even after Partition you still want something? These are citizens of India--it was Jinnah's failure because he never advised Muslims who stayed back.

Karan Thapar: One of the most moving passages of your biography is when you write of Indian Muslims who stayed on in India and didn't go to Pakistan.
You say they are “abandoned”, you say they are “bereft of a sense of kinship”, not “one with the entirety” and then you add that “this robs them of the essence of psychological security”.

Jaswant Singh: That is right, it does. That lies at the root of the Sachar Committee report.

Karan Thapar:So, in fact, Indian Muslims have paid the price in their personal lives.

Jaswant Singh: Without doubt, as have Pakistani Muslims.

Karan Thapar: Muslims have paid a price on both sides.

Jaswant Singh: I think Muslims have paid a price in Partition. They would have been significantly stronger in a united India, effectively so--much larger land, every potential is here. Of course Pakistan or Bangladesh won't like what I am saying.

Karan Thapar: Let us for a moment focus on Indian Muslims. You are a leader of the BJP. Do you think the rhetoric of your party sometimes adds to that insecurity?

Jaswant Singh: I didn't write this book as a BJP parliamentarian or leader, which I am not. I wrote this book as an Indian.

Karan Thapar: Your book also suggests, at least intellectually, you believe India could face more Partitions. You write: "In India, having once accepted this principle of reservation, then of Partition, how can now we deny it to others, even such Muslims as have had to or chosen to live in India."

Jaswant Singh: The problem started with the 1906 reservation. What does Sachar committee report say? Reserve for the Muslim. What are we doing now? Reserve. I think this reservation for Muslims is a disastrous path. I have myself, personally, in Parliament heard a member subscribing to Islam saying we could have a third Partition too. These are the pains that trouble me. What have we solved?

Karan Thapar:In fact you say in your book how can we deny it to others, having accepted it once it becomes very difficult intellectually to refuse it again.

Jaswant Singh: You have to refuse it.

Karan Thapar: Even if you contradict yourself?

Jaswant Singh: Of course, I am contradicting myself. It is intellectual contradiction.

Karan Thapar: But you are being honest enough to point out that this intellectual contradiction lies today at the very heart of our predicament as a nation.

Jaswant Singh: It is. Unless we find an answer, we won't find an answer to India-Pakistan-Bangladesh relations.

Karan Thapar: And this continuing contradiction is the legacy of Partition?

Jaswant Singh: Of course, it is self-evident.

Karan Thapar: Mr. Jaswant Singh, let’s come to how your book will be received. Are you worried that a biography of Jinnah, that turns on its head the received demonisation of the man; where you concede that for a large part he was a nationalist with admirable qualities, could bring down on your head a storm of protest?

Jaswant Singh: Firstly, I am not an academic. Sixty years down the line someone else--an academic--should have done it. Then I wouldn't have persisted for five years. I have written what I have researched and believed in. I have not written to please--it's a journey that I have undertaken, as I explained myself, along with Mohd Ali Jinnah - from his being an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity to the Qaid-e-Azam of Pakistan

Karan Thapar: In a sense you were driven to write this book.

Jaswant Singh: Indeed, I still search for answers. Having worked with the responsibilities that I had, it is my duty to try and find answers.

Karan Thapar: And your position is that if people don't like the truth as you see it - so be it, but you have to tell the truth as you know it.

Jaswant Singh: Well, so be it is your way of putting it, my dear Karan, but how do I abandon my search, my yearning and what I have found? If I am wrong then somebody else should go and do the research and prove me as wrong.

Karan Thapar: In other words you are presenting what you believe is the truth and you can't hide it.

Jaswant Singh: What else can I do, what else can I present?

Karan Thapar: In 2005, when L K Advani called Jinnah's August 11, 1947 speech secular he was forced to resign the presidentship of the party, are you worried that your party might turn on you in a similar manner?

Jaswant Singh: This is not a party document, and my party knows that I have been working on this. I have mentioned this to Shri Advani as also to others.

Karan Thapar: But are they aware of your views and the content of the book?

Jaswant Singh: They can't be aware unless they read it.

Karan Thapar: Are you worried that when they find out about your views, and your analyses and your conclusion, they might be embarrassed and angry?

Jaswant Singh: No, they might disagree, that's a different matter. Anger? Why should there be anger about disagreement?

Karan Thapar: Can I put something to you?

Jaswant Singh: Yes.

Karan Thapar: Mr Advani in a sense suffered because he called Jinnah secular. You have gone further, you have compared him to the early Gandhi. And some would say that Gandhi is found a little wanting in that comparison. Will that inflame passions?

Jaswant Singh: I don't think Gandhi is found wanting. He was a different person. They are two different personalities, each with their characteristics, why should passions be inflamed? Let a self-sufficient majority, 60 years down the line of Independence, be able to stand up to what actually happened pre-47 and in 1947.

Karan Thapar: So what you are saying is that Gandhi and Jinnah were different people, we must learn to accept that both had good points.

Jaswant Singh: Of course.

Karan Thapar: And both had weaknesses.

Jaswant Singh: Of course. Gandhi himself calls Jinnah a great Indian, why don't we recognise that? Why did he call him that? He tells Mountbatten "give the Prime Ministership of India to Jinnah." Mountbatten scoffs at him, "are you joking?" He says, "no I am serious, I will travel India and convince India and carry this message".

Karan Thapar: So if today's Gandhians, reading the passages where you compare between the two, come to the conclusion that you are more of praise of Jinnah than of Gandhi.

Jaswant Singh: I don't think I am. I am objective as far as human beings have ability to be objective. As balanced as an author can be.

Karan Thapar: As balanced as an author can be.

Jaswant Singh: Indeed, indeed. How else can it be?

Karan Thapar: Your party has a Chintan Baithak starting in two days time, does it worry you that at that occasion some of your colleagues might stand up and say - your views, your comments about Jinnah, your comments about Gandhi and Nehru have embarrassed the BJP?

Jaswant Singh: I don't think so, I don't think they will. Because in two days time the book would not have been (read). It's almost a 600-page book. Difficult to read 600 pages in two days.

Karan Thapar: No one will have read the book by the time you go to Simla!

Jaswant Singh: Yes (Laughs).

Karan Thapar: But what about afterwards?

Jaswant Singh: Well, we will deal with the afters when the afters come.

Karan Thapar: Let me raise two issues, that could be a problem for you. First of all, your sympathetic understanding of Muslims left behind in India. You say they are abandoned, you say they are bereft, you say they suffer from psychological insecurity. That's not normally a position leaders of the BJP take.

Jaswant Singh: I think, the BJP is misunderstood also in its attitude towards the minorities. I don't think it is so. Every Muslim that lives in India is a loyal Indian and we must treat them as so.

Karan Thapar: But you are the first person from the BJP I have ever heard say, "look into the eyes of Indian Muslims and see the pain." No one has ever spoken in such sensitive terms about them before.

Jaswant Singh: I am born in a district, that is my home--we adjoin Sind, it was not part of British India. We have lived with Muslims and Islam for centuries. They are part.... In fact in Jaisalmer, I don't mind telling you, Muslims don't eat cow and the Rajputs don't eat pig.

Karan Thapar: So your understanding of Indian Muslims and their predicament is uniquely personal and you would say...

Jaswant Singh: Indeed because I think what has happened is that we try and treat this whole thing as if it’s an extension of the image of the UP Muslim. Of course the UP (Muslim) is...Pakistan is a stepchild of UP in a sense.

Karan Thapar: The second issue that your book raises, which could cause problems for you, is that at least theoretically, at least intellectually, you accept that their could be, although you hope their won't be, further partitions. Could that embarrass you?

Jaswant Singh: No, I am cautioning. I am cautioning India, Indian leadership. I have said that I am not going to be a politician all my life, or even a member of Parliament. But I do say this – we should learn from what we did wrong, or didn't do right, so that we don't repeat the mistakes.

Karan Thapar: In other words this is – how shall I put it, a wake up call?

Jaswant Singh: Wake-up? Shaking....

Karan Thapar: A shake-up call!

Jaswant Singh: Yeah (Smiles)

Karan Thapar: My last question. Critics in your party, allege that you are responsible for the party losing seats in Rajasthan, they allege that you are responsible for asking questions about the sanctity of Hindutva. Now, after this book, have you fed your critics more ammunition against yourself?

Jaswant Singh: Time will tell (Smiles).

Karan Thapar: But does it worry you?

Jaswant Singh: Do I look worried? (Smiles)

Karan Thapar: With that smile on your face Mr. Jaswant Singh. Thank you very much for these two special interviews.

Jaswant Singh: Thank you very much.

Source Part I
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/nehru-jin...37-single.html

Source Part II
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/gandhi-ji...37-single.html

Viceroy · #3 Wednesday, August 19, 2009

India's Hindu nationalist BJP has "disassociated" itself from a new book on Pakistan's founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah, written by a party leader.

Jaswant Singh's book, Jinnah-India, Partition, Independence says that Mr Jinnah has been "demonised in India". The book also holds former PM Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress party responsible for the partition of India. Mr Jinnah is a controversial figure in India and considered the architect of the partition.

'Painful'

BJP chief Rajnath Singh said in a statement that the views expressed by Jaswant Singh in the book "do not represent the views of the party".

"In fact, the party completely disassociates itself from the contents of the book," he said.

Mr Singh said that Mr Jinnah had played an important role in the "division of India which led to a lot of dislocation and destabilisation of millions of people". "It is too well known a fact - we cannot wish away this painful part of our history."

Mr Singh has said that his book is a "purely academic exercise, which should be read and understood". "My book is not an attempt to malign or glorify anyone," he told a TV channel.

None of the party leaders attended the launch of the book in the capital, Delhi, on Monday evening.

Mr Singh is the second leader of the BJP who has been criticised for his remarks on Mr Jinnah.

In 2005, party chief LK Advani offered to step down after he described Mr Jinnah as "secular", causing a furore in India.

Mr Jinnah is still widely blamed for the partition of India because of his drive for a Muslim homeland.

Source
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8207027.stm

Viceroy · #4 Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Why the Hindu right wing loves Mr Jinnah

Why are some of India's Hindu nationalist leaders in love with Mohammed Ali Jinnah? The founder of Pakistan is a much reviled man in India, treated as a minor conspiratorial figure, and considered to be the architect of the bloody partition of the country on religious lines in 1947. Even the secular Congress party abhors him.
So when leaders of the Hindu right sing praises for Mr Jinnah, they stir up a hornet's nest. Four years ago, the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) LK Advani, who led a successful Hindu revivalist movement in the early 1990s, praised the founder of Pakistan during a visit to the country. This raised the hackles of Hindu fellow travellers and invited scorn from the Congress party. The BJP leader even offered to put in his papers after the kerfuffle.

Now Jaswant Singh, a doughty senior party leader and former finance and external affairs minister, who counts people like Strobe Talbott as his friends and chess, golf and polo as his pursuits, has praised Mr Jinnah as a "self made man" who "created something out of nothing and single-handedly stood up against the might of the Congress party and against the British who didn't really like him." He has expanded on his thesis in his new, unimaginatively titled 669-page book Jinnah: India-Partition- Independence, which released this week.

What is surprising is Mr Singh's defence of Mr Jinnah in a TV interview in the run-up to the book release where he is even more effusive in his praise of the Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader) as Mr Jinnah is remembered as in his homeland. He demolishes the popular Indian historiography of Mr Jinnah being a Hindu-basher and a born demagogue. "That certainly he was not," says the BJP leader. "His principal disagreement was with the Congress party. Repeatedly he says and he says this even in his last statements to the press and to the constituent Assembly of Pakistan."

Then Mr Singh goes on to say that India misunderstood Mr Jinnah "because we needed to create a demon". He insists the Congress party's majoritarian instincts were responsible for the federalist Mr Jinnah turning away from the idea of India and asking for a separate nation for Muslims.

Yet Mr Jinnah began his political career with the Congress and until after World War I remained India's best "ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity". Biographer Stanley Wolpert says he was as "as enigmatic as Gandhi, more powerful than Nehru, and one of the most charismatic leaders and least known personalities". Historians like Patrick French believe that though Mr Jinnah "remained a secularist of sorts until his death, but also at times... willing to use communal antagonism in a strategic way."

Listen to Mr Jinnah before the formation of Pakistan, raising the spectre of Hindu majoritaranism: "We Muslims have got everything - brains, intelligence, capacity and courage- virtues that nations must possess. But two things are lacking, and I want you to concentrate your attention on these. One thing is that foreign domination from without and Hindu domination here, particularly on our economic life that has caused a certain degeneration of these virtues in us."

Or listen to him after a meeting with Egyptian and Palestinian Arab leaders in 1946: "I told them of the danger that a Hindu empire would represent for the Middle-East ... If a Hindu empire is achieved, it will mean the end of Islam in India, and even in other Muslim countries."

At the same time, it is true that Mr Jinnah felt short changed by the Congress. On 26 July 1946, Jinnah and his working committee spoke about Muslim India having "exhausted, without success, all efforts to find a peaceful solution of the Indian problem by compromise and constitutional means; and whereas the Congress is bent upon setting up Caste-Hindu Raj in India with the connivance of the British..."

In Mr Singh's book, Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress emerge as some of the principal architects of the partition. He writes that the Congress "overestimated its strength, its influence, and its leaders were extremely reluctant to accept Jinnah as the leader of just not the Muslim League but eventually of most Muslims in India".

There is some truth in all this. But in trying to say that Mr Nehru and Congress were largely responsible for partition, Mr Singh is possibly ignoring the larger political realities of the time. Mr Jinnah positioned himself as the "sole spokesman of Pakistan", but his party Muslim League which led the Pakistan movement, won the last election in 1946 in British India with the number of Muslim voters at significantly no more than 10 to 12% of the total Muslim population in that year. As many historians say, the nation of Pakistan came into being "even before its mass base was established." The fault lines have widened since.

But to return to the original question, why did Mr Singh write this book? Does it have to do with his wider political ambitions? He is a self professed liberal in a party of hawks. In 1992, at the zenith of the BJP's rathyatra (motorised chariot) movement to whip up support for a temple at Ayodhya, Mr Singh did not attend a single function on the road. His induction into the cabinet in the late 1990s was vetoed once by the party's ideological fountainhead, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

With his mentor and BJP's only pan-Indian leader and former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee fading out and Mr Advani himself weakened by political defeat and party infighting, is Mr Singh trying to position himself as a liberal party leader-paterfamilias that Mr Vajpayee once occupied? It is difficult to say.

In a sense, one could argue, Mr Singh kills two birds with one stone with his revisionist take on the partition - as a senior leader of the main opposition party, he goes for the Congress's jugular by holding it responsible for the partition along with Mr Jinnah; and by heaping encomiums on Mr Jinnah, he endears himself to Indian Muslims, who have been lukewarm to the BJP's overtures. Is Mohammed Ali Jinnah a way for Mr Singh to reach out to Muslims and push his political ambitions in a party which appears to have lost its way in modern India? We will know in the days ahead.

Source
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/

Viceroy · #5 Wednesday, August 19, 2009

To most Indians, Mohammed Ali Jinnah was the architect of the bloody partition of the country on communal lines in 1947.

So when the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader LK Advani praised the founder of Pakistan as a "secular" leader during his recent trip to the country, it raised the hackles of his fellow Hindu nationalists and the ruling Congress party alike.

A hardline Hindu leader even accused Mr Advani of treason for praising Mr Jinnah - "Mr Jinnah was a traitor, is a traitor and will remain a traitor and a person glorifying him is also a traitor," screamed Praveen Togadia of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP).

India's grand old party, the Congress, joined issue saying that the secularism of India's freedom movement could not be compared with that of Mr Jinnah's - "It is truly ironic and astounding that Mr Advani considers Mr Jinnah secular," said party spokesman Abhishek Singhvi.

Incensed by the row over his encomiums for Mr Jinnah, Mr Advani has now handed in an offer to resign as leader of his party.

At the root of the antipathy towards Mr Jinnah, who is fondly called Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader) in Pakistan, is a general reluctance among many Indians to come to terms with the founder of Pakistan and his country.
It has been only a little over a year since the two nuclear-armed neighbours have embarked on a peace process after fighting three wars since Independence.

'Minor figure'

"The dominant Indian historical narrative is that Mr Jinnah was a minor conspiratorial figure who aligned with the British to bring about partition. We simply do not want to accept him as a significant historical figure," says political philosopher Pratap Bhanu Mehta.

In most popular Indian accounts of the freedom struggle, Mr Jinnah's role is overshadowed by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Mr Jinnah is painted as an obstinate villain of the piece, while Mr Gandhi and Mr Nehru are praised as the true leaders.

"Jinnah has either been ignored or, as in the case of the hugely successful film Gandhi, portrayed as a cold megalomaniac, bent on the bloody partition of India," says historian Akbar Ahmed, writing in his book Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity.

The truth is more complex - something many Indians still do not accept.
After joining the Muslim League in 1913, Mr Jinnah, a natty westernised Muslim with Victorian manners, showed himself as a true liberal who believed in education, rationality, equality of law and democracy.
For the first two decades of his political life, he was seen as a secular politician.

From 1925, he moved away from the Congress after differences with Mahatma Gandhi over his strategies to gain freedom.

Much later, in 1940, he announced the demand for a separate homeland for Muslims.

Secular vision

British historian Patrick French believes that Mr Jinnah "remained a secularist of sorts until his death, but also at times he was willing to use communal antagonism in a strategic way".

After the partition, Mr Jinnah envisaged a secular, liberal and democratic nation serving the needs of the Muslims, says Mr French.

"His vision of Pakistan was that it would be a homeland from which Muslims could come and go at leisure. He never wanted it to become a theocratic state, and hoped that it would co-exist in harmony with India," Mr French has said.

But Mr Jinnah also confounded liberals after taking over as the ruler of newly independent Pakistan.

He declared Urdu as the national language of Pakistan riding roughshod over the aspirations of the Bengali speaking people in the populous eastern part of the country (which itself separated in 1971 and became Bangladesh).
He also backed the tribal invasion of Kashmir in 1947, which led to the first war over the region.

"Jinnah was a liberal of the pre-Gandhian variety. He was a never a very democratic mass politician," says analyst Mahesh Rangarajan.

At the root of the popular Indian historical narrative of Mr Jinnah as the villain of partition is also the belief that the man and his party - Muslim League - were solely responsible for the division of the subcontinent.
What is conveniently forgotten is the British policy of divide and rule and exploiting communal schisms. In addition, the last viceroy Lord Mountbatten has been accused of speeding up independence at the cost of unity.
Many Indians also believe that intransigent Islam alone was responsible for the breaking up of India.

What is again forgotten that most Muslim theologians did not support division.

Muslim scholar Maulana Azad opposed partition and Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani did not support Mr Jinnah's 'two-nation' theory along religious lines.
"The separatist movement was finally led by a westernised leader like Mr Jinnah. Thus politics, not religion was responsible for partition," says Indian historian Asghar Ali Engineer.

"It is true that Mr Jinnah spearheaded the movement and he articulated the aspirations of the Muslim elite, specially of the Muslim minority areas," says Mr Engineer.

Legacy

Some commentators believe that Mr Advani's endorsement of Mr Jinnah has more to do with his own political ambitions of becoming a truly acceptance pan-Indian leader and an obsession to leave behind a legacy.

In a way, the 77-year-old leader was trying to do what former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has done rather successfully in the past - appealing to the non-Hindu nationalist constituency.

"But it is going to be more difficult for Mr Advani. He can't simply walk away from his past," says Mahesh Rangarajan.

Mr Rangarajan is referring to communal riots in India after Mr Advani's rathyatra (motorised chariot) journey in the early 1990's to whip up support for a temple at Ayodhya that culminated in the destruction of the Babri mosque there.

Source
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4617667.stm

Nonchalant · #6 Wednesday, August 19, 2009

BJP expels Jaswant Singh for praising Jinnah

Wednesday, 19 Aug, 2009

NEW DELHI: The BJP expelled the former foreign minister Jaswant Singh from the party following his recent book praising Pakistani leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah, DawnNews reported.

The BJP president Rajnath Singh told reporters in Shimla that his party’s parliamentary board decided to expel Singh from the primary membership of the party.

‘Yesterday, I issued a statement about the BJP dissociating itself from Jaswant Singh’s views. The party discussed the matter at the chintan baithak and it was decided to expel him,’ AFP quoted Rajnath as saying.

Singh’s recent book ‘Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence,’ reflects the politician’s personal admiration for the founder of Pakistan, and has stoked a storm of controversy.

Conservative members of the right-wing BJP have slammed the publication, and had mounted a campaign to ostracize Singh, trashing the BJP with epithets such as the ‘Bhartiya Jinnah Party.’

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/...jinnah--il--08

ravaila · #7 Friday, August 21, 2009

A tearful, bewildered Jaswant Singh has been expelled from his party of old, the BJP, and his new book, Jinnah: India–Partition–Independence, has been banned in Gujarat. The reason? ‘Ideological deviation’, according to the BJP’s party leadership, because Mr Singh has praised Mohammad Ali Jinnah and criticised India’s first home minister and hero of the independence struggle, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

‘I thought this book would set Pakistan on fire. But it is troubling India,’ Mr Singh told reporters after his sacking from the party which he helped form nearly 30 years ago. The furore over the book, the ban imposed by the Gujarat state government and, not least, Mr Singh’s expulsion will be received in some quarters in Pakistan as yet more evidence that India remains congenitally allergic to the idea of Pakistan and that sections of its political establishment have, and never will be able to, come to terms with this country’s existence. The corollary: peace with India is not possible.

But that is far from the case. India does have its hawkish elements, but to tar everyone with the same brush of jingoistic nationalism is not fair. The reaction, indeed over-reaction, by the BJP is already being criticised in India itself and voices are being raised in favour of freedom of expression and the need to determine if sacrosanct ‘truths’ stand up to genuine scrutiny. Indeed, the fact that a stalwart of the BJP has once again praised Jinnah — L.K. Advani famously praised Jinnah on a visit to Pakistan in 2005 and was forced out as party chief as a result — is an indication of just how untenable a black-and-white view of history is.

Here in Pakistan, the more important question is: can we imagine a similar statement about India’s independence leaders? Mr Singh has been treated shabbily, but the whole affair demonstrates that India, or parts thereof, is at least trying to come to terms with the ghosts of partition and assess it in a frank, honest manner. Can anyone in Pakistani politics claim such boldness

Janas · #8 Friday, August 21, 2009

As a matter of fact, Jinnah is seen as a separatist leader in India. And most of the Indians don't know that the jingoistic behavior of the Congress in terms of establishing Hindu hegemony and a dominant society lead to the partition of the Sub-continent.

Even now Muslims in India are seen even worse than scheduled caste Hindu. They are seen with outlandish eyes and bizarre looks if they are reading a holy Koranic text in hospitals or other public places, said an acquaintance of mine who hailed from Uttar Pradesh in India. "It was Nehru who lead to partition of India, not Jinnah Sahab," he added. We (Muslims) had no other choice to do partition as the extremist-Hindus were not ready to accept the Muslim contribution in the society of the Sub-continent and protecting Islamic values.

The Muslims who are left behind in India are subject to discrimination and torture until or unless they do not abide by the rules of the hindu dominance. Most of the muslims are bound to say "Namaskar" instead of "Adab arz." Though "Adab Arz" is not an Islamic greeting but still hindus do not like it as it hails from Urdu. Urdu language is dying down in India, the younger generation of Indian Muslims are only sticking to Hindi (devnagari) as Urdu has not any longer importance in the society.

Pseudo-Muslims or "so called muslims" are given facilities and power who are pro-Hindu ideology. They are rather given many incentives and benefits for contaminating the brains of the young muslim youths against the ideology of Islam, Pakistan or Islam as one nation. These Mir Jafars are doing adequate propaganda to propagate the anti-Iqbal ideas to such an extent that the intermarriages of Hindu and Muslim are taking place and this practice is increasing day by day. Muslim girls are wedded with Hindu men in large number to get a social protection.

The Star · #9 Saturday, August 22, 2009

I have not read that book by Jaswant Singh yet,but having gone through the interview posted by our respected mod and other stuff on media i smell that this is another attack on the ideology and genesis of Pakistan.though Jaswant Singh has praised Jinnah in many ways but he again and again says that Nehru rather than Muslim consciousness and long history of Hindu Muslim confrontation,was responsible for the creation of Pakistan.In other words he gives all the credit of creation of Pakistan to Nehru and Congress.Demand for Pakistan,to him,was a conscious strategy of Jinnah to achieve greater assurance of the safety of Muslim interests.In other words Jinnah's strategy was "mout dikha kar bukhar pay razi karna".He delt the issue only in a limited time period ie from the beginning of 20th century to 1947.In fact muslim separatism was not the product of british occupation of india.It has a long history.many eminent muslim thinkers contributed in this regard.i admit that this book is a biography of jinnah and only delt with jinnah but while addressing the issue of genesis of pakistan he should have gone beyond this time frame.he totally sidelined many muslim thinkers like mujadid alf sani and shah wali ullah and many more.further more he did not expose hindu mentality of pre british era.He praises jinnah,calls him a great man and on the other hand he stresses that pakistan was the creation of some of the mistakes on the part of congress in general and nehru in particular.He is of the opinion that if congress had not comitted these mistakes pakistan would have not emerged.In fact this is the thinking of every indian and jaswat is no exception.Muslims of the subcontinent were destined to have a separate home land.Even if congress and its nehru like leaders had come to terms on the issue of future of indian federation in the middle of the 40s,even then pakistan was inevitable,though its creation would have occured in 1950s.Creation of pakistan was,in fact only solution to the communal problems of india.In my humble perception jaswant singh,s book is a deliberate effort to infuse in the minds of pakistanies that pakistan was created due to the mistakes of some hindu leaders rather than a long struggle of muslims.it is like "gulab jaman ain kadvi goli rakh k daina".we all are very well aware of our history,we know that our leader jinnah was a great leader and man,gandhi,nehru etc were no match to him.

I know many ppl may not agree with me.but this was what i read in between the lines.

regards

Viceroy · #10 Saturday, August 22, 2009

@ Farooq Basir

AoA Dear Brother

It's always great to read your posts and especially those related to history. I will not completely disagree with your opinion, there might be some elements of infusion present in the book even though if Mr Singh claims it to be an honest scholarly work. We study in sociology that bias can hardly be stopped from effecting such researches ,however, as far as the point regarding congress' mistakes is concerned I think it's not far from truth as the I.H Qureshi's Struggle for Pakistan also suggests the same thing at certain points, in my own words I can translate that suggestion like "Quaid transformed every political mistake of the Congress into a major success for the Muslim League"

However, there can be an interesting discussion on the book but let's hope we get to go through it soon

Regards

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