Splitting hairs over partition, again

Rake up the dead, especially controversial figures from history, and they'll bite you in the behind. India's former foreign minister Jaswant Singh certainly learnt that lesson yesterday. His book on Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of the Pakistani nation, got him unceremoniously kicked out of the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Calling Jinnah secular proved Singh's undoing even though his political boss, Lal Krishna Advani, had survived a similar mistake some years ago. While Singh would surely have expected - perhaps even hoped for - some protest and controversy over his just released book Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence, I don't think he had anticipated expulsion from the BJP. Controversy can be very profitable for authors because suddenly thousands of people who would otherwise not have considered reading the book in question will rush out to buy a copy to figure out what all the fuss is about. But this proved to be more than a storm in a teacup.

Now I've been a student of history at university, and even a cursory glance through books on the Indian independence movement make it amply clear that Jinnah was a suave politician from a previleged background who was deeply secular in his thinking. It was merely his personal ambition that made him back the British idea of breaking India up on religious lines. Jinnah was, clearly, an opportunist. But, for a member of an aggressively Hindu political party to go and write that in a book is fraught with danger.

I personally believe that splitting hairs over partition is an exercise in futility. It creates bitterness, dredging up emotions that would better have been left buried. It keeps us from moving forward. There aren't many left of the generation that lived through the horrific bloodbath that accompanied the biggest mass human migration in history in 1947. We, a generation born into freedom, should now keep our sights focused on the future, ending decades of mutual hate and suspicion between India and Pakistan.

I can't quite understand why Jaswant Singh had to write about Jinnah in the first place. What was the compulsion? There are plenty of Indian historical figures, even controversial ones, that he could easily have chosen as subjects. So why Pakistan's Quaid-e-Azam?

For the BJP, a party that has always questioned the Indian subcontinent's break-up into Hindu-majority India and Mulsim-dominated Pakistan, it is impossible to stay quiet when one of its own is perceived to be glorifying the man they hold responsible for partition. To add insult to injury, Singh is reported to have written that Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Pandit Jawharlal Nehru were perhaps as culpable. That is what pushed the BJP leadership over the edge. While they might let the dig at Nehru slide because he was the patriarch of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that dominates the rival Congress party, any assault on Patel's reputation is unacceptable. Iron Man Patel, independent India's first minister of the interior who orchestrated the formation of this gigantic union of states, is one of the BJP's prime historic idols. In fact its current leader, Advani, aspires to the Iron Man epithet.

Jaswant Singh is now going hoarse telling whoever cares to listen that he is shocked at the expulsion from a party he has served for three decades. But I really cannot understand why he set out on a literary project that would surely sour - if not sever - relations with the leadership of the BJP. Even he cannot be fool enough to have not anticipated that.

This will certainly be right up there among some the darkest hours of Jaswant Singh's long career, first in the army and then in politics. The darkest hour by far was when he, as India's external affairs minister, personally escorted three Islamic terrorists to Kandahar in Afghanistan in December 1999. The terrorists were freed in exchange for hostages on board the hijacked Indian Airlines flight IC 814. It'll be interesting to see if Jaswant Singh can now manage to salvage his political career.