The unveiling of the book "Jinnah-Partition-India" by Jaswant Singh, a leading figure of India's right wing Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, has triggered a refreshing debate on both sides of the Indo-Pak border about the reasons that led to the partition of India and the emergence of Pakistan.
Indian politicians find it difficult to react to the book (few have read it, most people have gleaned its gist from newspaper excerpts) in any other way than to be angry, since it questions the established Indian narrative that deals with events leading up to the Partition. Singh has had to face the wrath of his own party, which has expelled him for glorifying Mohammad Ali Jinnah and criticising Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.
The BJP government in Gujarat state, headed by the unashamed Muslim hater, Chief Minister Narendar Singh Modi, has banned it. The Congress party is furious, too, because the book blames India's division not on the founder of Pakistan, whom Jaswant Singh depicts as a great Indian and a hero of the independence struggle, but on two of the country's independence heroes, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel.
In his pre-launch interviews, Jaswant Singh had been expressing a lot of admiration for Jinnah as a person and also countering the mainstream Indian narrative that painted him as a villain of the Partition story. There is nothing new about any of this. Several authors-- Indian, Pakistani as well as western - have written books saying the same thing.
What makes this one so special is that it has come from a prominent Indian politician, who until last week, was an influential member of a party, which built its support base on fanning anti-Muslim hatred, and has also been a proponent of 'Akhund Bharat' (greater India). Singh's apparent objective to write the book was to look into the issue that continues to bother Hindu extremists, in particular, and other Indians in general: the Partition of India. Which is why he is surprised at the reaction his book has elicited.
He says he had been discussing it with the party's leading light, L.K. Advani, who did not seem to have any objection to his line of argument. In fact, Advani himself had said during his visit to Pakistan a few years ago that Jinnah was a secular leader, triggering a storm of protests from his party men, since that image of Jinnah collided head-on with their version of history.
Many in Pakistan are impressed by the book's apparent impartiality, largely because it is eulogistic of the founder of Pakistan. It is being projected as a pure scholarly endeavour. That though is hard to believe, considering that Jaswant Singh is one of the founders of the BJP, and its contributing ideologue. Singh himself sees the response in India as a case of misplaced trepidation. He told the press, "I thought this book would set Pakistan on fire.
But it is troubling India." Pakistanis are happy seeing the book describe India's independence heroes as a lot less than perfect leaders, and Jinnah receiving accolades for his sincerity, both in dealing with the Congress leaders and fighting for the rights of fellow Muslims. Most have failed to notice that in showing Jinnah in a positive light, Singh has tried to establish that had Nehru and Patel been more open-minded about accommodating of the concerns of Muslims, India would have remained undivided. And there would be no Pakistan.
This part of the account is in conformity with our own, but his motivation seems to be different from the one it is taken to be in Pakistan. As a BJP ideologue, Singh needed to disprove the rationale for the Partition. In doing so, the usual heroes and villains had to change places - something for which the hate-filled narrow minds of most BJP leaders and cadres have no room for acceptance.
In the excitement his laudatory comments for Jinnah have created, this aspect of the issue has gone unnoticed here. Hence contrary to the writer's expectation, no one in Pakistan is in a fierce mood. Our history books mention that Jinnah started off his political career as a member of the Indian National Congress. That he was the main architect of the Lucknow Pact of 1916, which bound the Muslim and Hindu communities to an agreement that resolved the issue of their respective representation in the new legislative assemblies.
And for that the famous poet and Congress leader, Sarojini Naidu, had called Jinnah "the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity." But then the narrative changes. Jinnah is often quoted as having explained his decision to initially join the Congress thus, "once I was in a primary school, too." The inference being that a self-confessed political immaturity was responsible for his decision to join the Congress and think of the future within a united India.
But leaders, including the visionary ones, are a product of their times and circumstances. Muslims and Hindus had lived in the subcontinent for nearly a 1000 years when Jinnah entered politics. The two communities were used to living together, both in amity and enmity, arising alternately from a tumultuous common history. Had the Congress leadership adopted a more inclusive and liberal approach towards the Muslims, their leadership would have taken a different path.
Experience told them that their fellow Muslims could not get their due economic and political rights within India, and had to have a separate homeland - just what Jaswant Singh demonstrates in his book from a different perspective. Interestingly, though, when the Muslim League headed by Jinnah, decided to part ways with the Hindu majority and create a new state, Muslim religious parties, such as the Jamaat Islami and the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind, the predecessor of the present-day Jamiat-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), opposed the move.
So did most other religious groups. They had argued that Islam, with its universal message, could not be confined to the boundaries of a nation-state. Those same parties and groups were to later declare Pakistan as the 'Fortress of Islam' and they, its self-appointed custodians. Over the years, these elements, along with the establishment, have worked to distort history, excising even Jinnah's speeches that laid out his vision for Pakistan as a secular state.
One good thing about Jaswant Singh's book - aside from its reappraisal of important questions - is that it has not only provoked an important debate in India, it has also started discussion here about the need to revisit history and remove distortions from our account of it. That way, Singh has done a great service to the peoples of both countries, encouraging honest and objective history writing. Hopefully, it will lead to uncovering of more convenient untruths on both sides of the border.
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