Jas chilled

Jaswant Singh bites the dust. The BJP silently assassinated his political career because he sang paeans of the man who made Pakistan happen: Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
The BJP, already bruised by in-house wrangling, justified its abrupt action, saying Jaswant Singh’s comments in his book, Jinnah: India-partition-Independence, went against the party’s ideological position. The struggling party’s emerging muscle man, Narendra Modi, banned the book in his Gujarat, citing that Jaswant has not been too generous with Sardar Vallabhai Patel. And, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka may follow suit.
Modi reportedly raised this issue at the party’s chintan baithak, saying comments on Patel could affect the BJP’s prospect in Gujarat. So what if Patel was a staunch Congressman, who as Home Minister had banned the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) after the Mahatma’s assassination!
The unceremonious move against Jaswant Singh, without allowing him to offer any explanation, is at best a desperate attempt by the party to gain mileage after its electoral debacle and the rebellion brewing in Rajasthan over the marching orders to the former chief minister, Vijayaraje Scindia.
Political parties, specially the Congress, have lost no time in giving quick bytes against Jaswant Singh’s munificence to Jinnah. Now they are all obviously playing the nationalist card and the best way to do that is to deride whatever is Pakistan. But in all this, it is rather depressing to find intolerance creeping into every aspect of creativity.
It is a known historical fact that Jinnah was indeed an advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity during the struggle for independence. He sought the knifing of Hindustan only after Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleague Sardar Patel refused to agree to an equitable power-sharing agreement between Hindus and Muslims in independent India. A research work by Pakistani historian, Ayesha Jalal, published more than 15 years ago, clearly points to Nehru’s obsession of centralized control used by the British in India, and hence Jinnah’s raising his pitch for Pakistan. No wonder then, that Jaswant Singh’s depiction of Nehru has ruffled the Congress feathers, too.
Hindustan was anyway a creation of British imperialism as small independent states and kingdoms were amalgamated for the purpose of administration. Again, the animosity between the Hindus and Muslims was a creation of the empire’s divide and rule strategy. Later, the idea of partition in the already troubled run-up to the Transfer of Power was sown to foster the political ambitions of young Indian leaders, who were destined to shape the sub-continent’s polity. Now who sowed those bitter seeds will remain a matter of debate. Was it Jinnah, Nehru, Patel? Or was it the ultimate imperialist design?
Whatever is documented in the pages of history, or will emerge following further research, the fact is no political entity has come out against the Indian polity’s intolerance and its throttling of the freedom of expression. These same parties had hogged multiple news columns against acts of intolerance of fundamentalist outfits: whether it was for Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses or Taslima Nasreen’s Lajja, or even M.F. Husain’s depiction of Saraswati.
Before the book is banned in other parts of the country by the saffronites or the white-capped dynastic followers, I’d better grab a copy for myself.