India's opposition Hindu nationalists expelled one of the most senior figures in their party on Wednesday amid a row over his book praising Pakistan's founding father Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Jaswant Singh, a former foreign minister and member of parliament for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had questioned the demonisation of Jinnah, whom Hindu nationalists blame for the partition of the subcontinent in 1947.
"We decided that he will no more be a member of any party forum," BJP president Rajnath Singh told reporters in the northern hill resort of Shimla, where the party was meeting for a brainstorming session. Singh's book, "Jinnah - India, Partition, Independence," was published on Monday. In it, he calls the Pakistani leader as a "great personality". The furore goes to the heart of a highly sensitive debate in India about blame for partition of the British-controlled subcontinent into Pakistan and India which sparked communal riots that left up to a million dead.
At the time of partition, Jinnah was leader of the Muslim League party, which had called for a separate Muslim state, and he spearheaded negotiations with Britain and India's founding Congress party. Reacting to his expulsion, Singh said he was "saddened immensely" that his ouster was triggered by the fact that he had written a book.
"You can dispute what I write, but the day you start questioning thought, start questioning reading, writing, publishing you are entering a very dark alley," he warned.
"I am convinced in my mind I have committed no sin... I will not ask the party to take me back." Singh was one of the founding members of the BJP and served as foreign, defence and finance minister between 1998 and 2004 when the Hindu nationalists held power nationally.
In 2005, BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani was forced to quit as party head after he sparked controversy by lauding Jinnah as a "great man" and a secular leader during a visit to Pakistan. Such views directly contradict the position of the BJP and its ideological head the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (National Volunteer Corps), which dreams of reuniting Pakistan, Bangladesh and India into a confederation.
The BJP has nationally fallen out of favour and suffered a dismal performance in national polls earlier this year. In a television interview aired over the weekend, Singh said he had chosen the controversial leader as his subject because Jinnah had "an intricate, complex personality of great character, determination."
Singh also rejected the popularly-held view that Jinnah was "a Hindu basher" and solely responsible for the "dismemberment" of undivided India. "I don't think it was dismemberment. He wanted space for the Muslims," he told the CNN-IBN channel.
If the Congress Party, which led India to freedom in 1947, had agreed to fixed representation for Muslims in India's parliament and provincial assemblies, "there would not have been a partition," Singh said.
"He in fact went to the extent of saying that let there be a Pakistan within India," Singh, a former Indian army officer from western Rajasthan state, added. Hindu-majority India and Muslim Pakistan have fought three wars and been at loggerheads since their emergence as independent states.