India’s heterodox religions and their traditions remain stronger than the idea of a unified nation-state. They have survived a long and violent history, writes Pankaj Mishra in The National
India is one of the world’s oldest civilisations; but as a nation-state it is relatively very new, and its nationalism can still appear weak and unresolved, as became freshly clear in August, when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party expelled its veteran leader Jaswant Singh. Singh had dared to praise, in a new book about the partition of India, the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Indian nationalists, of both the hardline Hindu and soft-secular kind, see Jinnah as the Muslim fanatic primarily responsible for the vivisection of their “Mother India” in 1947. But Singh chose to blame the partition on allegedly power-hungry Hindu freedom fighters, rather than Jinnah, who he claimed had stood for a united India. more
In the Telegraph, Sunanda K. Datta-Ray reviews Jaswant Singh’s “Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence“:
Jinnah and Gandhi
If Mohammad Ali Jinnah was the first Paki and Lord Mountbatten the first Paki-basher (as an old joke went), Calcutta’s Direct Action Day was the first Jehad. Jaswant Singh records that a leaflet warning the “Kafer” of “the general massacre” on August 16, 1946 also reminded Muslims they had once worn the crown and ruled this country but “had become slaves of Hindus and the British”. Displaying Jinnah’s picture, the leaflet spoke of “a Jehad in this very month of Ramzan”.
This is worth repeating because inspired gossip accuses the author of glorifying Jinnah as the apostle of Indian unity and of blaming Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel for demonizing him. Neither charge can be sustained, confirming that the contrived furore over the book reflects the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s dislike of the author and a demoralized Bharatiya Janata Party’s internal power struggles. The ambitions of the egregious Narendra Modi, who cannot have read this massive volume of 669 pages and probably would not have understood it if he had, obviously helped to whip up hysteria.
Modi’s understanding must not be faulted too much, however, for in his anxiety to be fair to all sides, Jaswant Singh often seems to contradict what appears to be his thesis. More:
Chetan Bhagat, author of the bestseller, One Night @ the Call Centre, in the Times of India:
The BJP is screaming that Mr Jinnah was not indeed as secular as claimed by Jaswant Singh. Experts on TV are citing events in 1932 which prove that Jinnah was a good person; countered by an equal number of experts citing historical events which prove that Jinnah did terrible things.
To answer the Jinnah question from the point of view of the young generation – Who cares?
Really, whether Mr Jinnah did wonderful things or he did horrible things and whatever point of view your party likes to take – who gives a damn? How is this relevant to the India we have to build today? Are we electing leaders for the future or selecting a history teacher?
The strange thing is the media buys into this pointless debate – about Mr Jinnah being good or bad and spends hours discussing it. By doing so, it gives legitimacy to the whole exercise.
Meanwhile, the young generation fails to understand why do our politicians become so passionate defending these relics of the past? Why don’t they have a fanatical debate about how fast we will make roads, colleges, bridges and power plants? Why don’t people get expelled over current non-performance rather than historical opinions? Why don’t we ban useless government paperwork rather than banning books about dead people? More:
