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Jinnah, Jaswant Singh and fallible heroes

A STANDARD response from the largely pro-Congress members of India’s chattering classes to Jaswant Singh’s controversial book on Jinnah almost always involves a predictable question: where was this man’s secularism all these days? In other words his critics do not want us to forget that Jaswant Singh was a member of the rightwing Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party till the other day, and that it was not entirely unreasonable to probe if his secular posture towards the founder of Pakistan masked a hidden political agenda. 
No one from the chattering classes, of course, is willing to say what that agenda might be, if indeed there is one. A livid Marxist historian present at the crowded book release hissed: “Why has he written this now?” Mani Shankar Aiyar, well regarded for his lacerating views about his own party – the Congress – and who describes himself as a secular fundamentalist of sorts, praised Jaswant Singh’s research but not before accusing him of writing the book out of visceral hatred of Nehru, rather than for the love of Jinnah. 
The fact is that Jaswant Singh has not singled out Jawaharlal Nehru alone for criticism but has taken to task Sardar Patel among those who together with Jinnah partitioned India. It is always useful to have an idea of a political biographer’s ideological moorings. 
To hazard a good guess, it may help to bear in mind the resentment that Rajput and Muslim princes who were threatened or cajoled by Patel and Nehru into giving up their sovereign powers to a post-colonial republic, have generally felt towards the duo. 
Whether Jaswant Singh who wears his Rajput lineage as a badge of honour was influenced by the underlying animosity of the erstwhile princes towards their two main quarries is a matter of conjecture. 
However, from a key thesis in his book -- that a federated India which was possible as early as Dominion Status was first offered might not have been better than a communally divided and motheaten unitarian Indian state -- appears to follow a belief that Rajput royals (and their Muslim cousins) would have had a fairer deal in a federation rather than the no choice they were given after1947. 
Rajputs, also known in different parts of northern India as Thakurs, have been generally better disposed towards Muslims than the other Hindu elite but they have not always lived in harmony with lower castes.They have fought with foreign aggressors of different faiths and have also mingled well with the arriving ruling elites. And it is not apparent in Jaswant Singh’s book where he places his heroes and villains of 1947 in the wider world beyond the easy Hindu-Muslim paradigm. 
In a maudlin nationalist historiography Rajput icons have been often lauded beyond their legitimate heroic roles as nation-builders. Similarly a closer look at Begum Hazrat Mahal, for example, a Muslim heroine of the 1857, throws up unsettling facts about a world beyond the Hindu-Muslim paradigm that the Jinnah book is devoted to. 
Without meaning to diminish Hazrat Mahal’s heroic battle with colonialism, let us simply quote from an original document, a proclamation by her son, Birjis Qadar, that carries the full authority of the Begum. There is an intense bias against the lower class of Indians, as well as towards people of inferior caste. And since caste is not a feature of the Hindu social order alone, for it includes Christians, Muslims and Sikhs in its ambit, there is reason to revisit how India’s royalty fought the British but were scornful of fellow Indians of the lower order. Was Jinnah, or Gandhi or Nehru willing to address the malaise beyond the cosmetic acknowledgement of its existence? 
The Indian Council of Historical Research has come out with a collection of proclamations issued by the rebel leaders of 1857. Documented by Dr Iqbal Hussain of Aligarh Muslim University, it is a must read for anyone writing a true history of what 1947 was all about, and what it left out of its purview, to the detriment of both countries. 
Prince Birjis Qadar (Wali of Oudh) urges his subjects in a proclamation dated 25th June 1858 that his government respected the right of religion, honour, life and property, in that order, something the British ostensibly didn’t. Then he explains his claim. “Everyone follows his own religion (in my domain). And enjoys respect according to their worth and status. Men of high extraction, be they Syed, Sheikh, Mughal or Pathan, among the Mohammedans, or Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaish or Kayasth, among the Hindoos, all these retain the respectability according to their respective ranks. And all persons of a lower order such as a Sweeper, Chamar, Dhanook, or Pasi cannot claim equality with them.” Prince Birjis Qadar doesn’t stop here. He twists the knife deeper: “The honour and respectability of every person of high extraction are considered by (the British) equal to the honour and respectability of the lower orders. Nay, compared with the latter, they treat the former with contempt and disrespect. Wherever they go they hang the respectable persons to death, and at the instance of the chamar, force the attendance of a nawab or a rajah, and subject him to indignity.”This is the reality the partition discourse tends to overlook. How much was the support of the Ajlaaf Muslims and the Ashraaf Muslims — the lower and upper crusts — to the Muslim League and the Congress respectively? 
We can’t absolutely fairly address a question like why Jaswant Singh joined the BJP. Or why, if he is indeed as secular as he sounds in the book on Mohammed Ali Jinnah, did he not raise his voice against the communal carnage in Gujarat or about the vandalising of the mosque in Ayodhya, both handiworks of his erstwhile party, the BJP? 
It’s a legitimate question to pose to Jaswant Singh. However, to be fair to him the same ques tion should also be asked of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ostensibly a secular man. Where was Manmohan Singh in 1984, when his fellow Sikhs were being massacred on the streets of Delhi by Hindu zealots led by Congress leaders? Later, when the Babri mosque was torn down by a mob led by Lal Kishan Advani, Dr Singh was finance minister in P.V. Narasimha Rao’s Congress government. 
We know that Narasimha Rao was a great one to duck and dodge a crisis big or small and he has been slammed for his outrageous dereliction of duty over the demolition of the mosque. But why didn’t Manmohan Singh, a senior cabinet minister in Rao’s government, speak up? It is not as though other cabinet members in the Rao ministry remained silent. Arjun Singh among others did protest in the cabinet and outside against Rao’s failure to stall the tragedy in Ayodhya. Arjun Singh was recently thrown out from Manmohan Singh’s cabinet. 
I use the description religious revivalist for the BJP instead of the misleading sobriquet of Hindu nationalist. This is because a majority of Indian Hindus are nationalists but they do not see eye to eye with the BJP. In other words most Hindus are not revivalists, which the BJP is. 
Moreover, if we were to use the nationalist suffix for Sikhs or Christians not to speak of Muslims who did not or could not go to Pakistan, we would be skating on precariously thin ice – the ice, shall we say, of India’s fabled unity in a slew of potentially centrifugal forces. 
So what made Jaswant Singh, a former high-ranking minister in BJP government praise the creator of Pakistan? In the author’s own words, he was intrigued and possibly overwhelmed by Jinnah’s personality. And the recent availability of the crucial partition papers together with at least five years of research set the direction and the discourse of the book. 
Whatever may be his reasons for being a member of the BJP until recently, it has to be said on his behalf that Jaswant Singh did try to build bridges with Pakistan but was tripped up by his own colleagues. The first occasion was in Agra and the second time when, as he recently told me in a TV interview, he found himself in “disharmony” with the military mobilisation of 2002, when the two countries came close to a potentially devastating co

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