INDIA’S OPPOSITION Hindu nationalists yesterday expelled one of their senior MPs over a book that praises Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, who is demonised in Hindu-majority India as a Muslim fanatic.
Jaswant Singh (71), one of the founder members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who has also served it as federal defence, foreign and finance minister during its six years in power till 2004, said he was "saddened" by his expulsion over his book Jinnah – India, Partition, Independence.
The 600-page biography portrays the Pakistani leader, responsible for the partition of the sub-continent that led to the founding of predominantly Muslim Pakistan at the end of colonial rule in 1947, as a “great personality”.
As leader of the Muslim League party, the whisky-drinking, pork-eating and largely non-religious Jinnah had demanded a separate Islamic state of Pakistan from the British, fearing Muslims would be insecure under the rule of the larger Hindu community.
The resultant partition of India triggered sectarian riots in which over a million people died, tens of millions were displaced and the adverse ramifications of which persist 62 years later.
Since independence, the neighbours have not only fought three wars and an 11-week-long border skirmish in 1999, but have also become nuclear weapon-states, following tit-for-tat atomic tests in 1998.
They also came close to war in 2001, which threatened to turn into a nuclear conflagration, and once again last November, following the attack on India’s financial capital, Mumbai, by 10 gunmen, trained and launched from Pakistan.
India also blames Pakistan for fuelling the 20-year long Muslim insurgency in northern Kashmir province, which is divided between them but claimed by both, and for frequently launching terrorist strikes against it. Pakistan denies the allegations.
“What I have written is my account of a chapter of India’s history,” Singh said. “You can dispute what I write but the day in India we start questioning thought, we start questioning reading, writing, publishing, you’re entering a very, very dark alley,” he warned.
He also rejected the view widely-held in India, and particularly in the BJP, that Jinnah was “a Hindu basher” and solely responsible for the “dismemberment” of undivided India.
“Jinnah struggled to keep India united but was forced into opting for a Muslim state by recalcitrant Hindu leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and independent India’s beloved first prime minister Jawahar Lal Nehru,” Singh said.India misunderstood Jinnah “because it needed to create a demon”.
BJP president Rajnath Singh said the party had dissociated itself from Singh’s book and had decided to end his membership.