Jaswant — from Hanuman to Rawan

Jaswant Singh, senior BJP leader and former Minister for Finance and Foreign Affairs was expelled from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday for praising Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah in his recently launched book on Jinnah and partition of India. Jaswant Singh, who is a member of Lok Sabha, has been under attack from BJP and Sangh Parivar since writing his book “Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence”. The BJP Party Parliamentary Board took the decision of his expulsion during the opening session of the three-day session of its top leaders. The party President Rajnath Singh while briefing the media on Wednesday said he had issued a statement on Tuesday that the party fully dissociates itself from the contents of the book and announced his expulsion from the party. Earlier, the BJP top brass and other leaders had boycotted the launching ceremony of the book on Monday.
Jaswant Singh, who had served with the Indian Army, was elected to Lok Sabha from Darjeeling in West Bengal with the support of Gorkhaland outfit. Earlier, BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani also faced the same situation when he was made to step down as president of BJP on his observations about Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah he made during his visit to Pakistan in 2005. Jaswant Singh’s “crime” is that he described the personality of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah as possessing a “great character and determination”. He created something out of nothing and single handedly stood against the might of the Congress Party and against the British who didn’t really like him.” Adding that “Gandhi himself called Jinnah a great Indian. Why don’t we recognize that? Why don’t we see (and try to understand) why he called him that?”
Last week, defending his comments in a two-part interview to the CNN-IBN program “Devil’s Advocate” with Karan Thapar, Jaswant Singh stated that he was “attracted by (and) drawn to” Jinnah’s personality. He was a great Indian who India has demonized”. He also admitted that Indian Muslims were treated “as aliens”. When asked if he subscribed to the ‘demonization’ of Mohammed Ali Jinnah he said, “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 was not drawn to the personality I wouldn’t have written the book. It’s an intricate, complex personality, of great character, determination.” When asked whether he (the Quaid) was a nationalist, Jaswant Singh said, “Oh yes. He fought the British for an independent India but also fought resolutely and relentlessly for the interest of the Muslims of India - the acme of his nationalistic achievement was the 1916 Lucknow Pact of Hindu-Muslim unity.”
Jaswant Singh said there was a lot in Jinnah’s character that he personally admired, stressing, “I admire certain aspects of his personality. His determination and the will to rise. He was a self-made man. Mahatma Gandhi was the son of a Diwan. All these (people) ‘Nehru and others’ were born to wealth and position. Jinnah created for himself a position. He carved in Bombay, a metropolitan city, a position for himself. He was so poor he had to walk to work, he told one of his biographers there was always room at the top but there’s no lift. And he never sought a lift,” Jaswant Singh said. Asked if he agree with the view held by many in India that Jinnah hated Hindus, Jaswant Singh said “Wrong. Totally wrong. That certainly he was not - his principal disagreement was with the Congress Party. He had no problems whatsoever with Hindus.” Jaswant Singh said that India had not only misunderstood Jinnah but made a demon out of him and this was a direct result of partition. “I think we have misunderstood him because we needed to create a demon - we needed a demon because in the 20th century the most telling event in the subcontinent was the partition of the country,” he said.
When asked on Partition of India in 1947, Jaswant Singh said that if Congress could have accepted a decentralized federal country then, in that event, a united India ‘was ours to attain’. The problem, he added, was Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘highly centralized polity’. “Nehru believed in a high centralized policy. That’s what he wanted India to be. Jinnah wanted a federal polity. That even Gandhi accepted. Nehru didn’t. Consistently he stood in the way of a federal India until 1947 when it became a partitioned India.” Jaswant Singh strongly contested the Indian view that Quaid-e-Azam was the villain of partition or the man principally responsible for it. Asked if he thought this view was wrong, he said, “It is not borne out of the facts, we need to correct it.”
Speaking about Quaid-e-Azam’s call for Pakistan, Jaswant Singh said from his five-year long research into the subject he believed that this was “a negotiating tactic” to obtain ‘space’ for Muslims ‘in a reassuring system’ where they wouldn’t be dominated by the Hindu majority.
When asked about the relationship between Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Mahatma Gandhi, he said, “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.” Describing his book and its contents “a shake-up call”, he said, “We should learn from what we did wrong or didn’t do right so that we do not repeat the mistakes.”

Unfortunately, India, which calls itself the biggest democracy, has once again exposed its own bigotry by sacking Jaswant Singh from the BJP in a shoddy manner. Praise for Quaid-e-Azam by an Indian politician is considered the greatest crime in “secular” India where “freedom of speech” is professed and “respected” by the West. In his post sacking interview to the media, Jaswant said that in a cartoon published in the Indian magazine “Outlook”, he had been depicted as “Hanuman”, the monkey god but now he had been tainted to become “Rawan” the villain of the Hindu epic “Ramayana”.

Sultan M Hali