Jinnah re-visited, thank you Jaswant Singh

The issues Jinnah outlined still haunt India and Pakistan today
Beena Sarwar Karachi

Generations have grown up in India and Pakistan fed on distorted versions of history. Attempts to counter these versions don't go down too well at home, as Jaswant Singh found out when he challenged the Indian version that lays the entire blame for the Partition on the shoulders of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, ignoring the parts played by Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress and the British.

Ironically, while eulogising the country's founder as the Quaid-e-Azam or Great Leader, Pakistan has also censored him, sweeping aside his guiding principles, secularism and insistence on justice and constitutionalism. Similarly, in India, Mahatma Gandhi is eulogised while his guiding principles and insistence on non-violence are made increasingly irrelevant.
Each side conveniently forgets the extremisms of its dominant faith. Hindu extremism existed well before 1947 (remember who killed Gandhi) as did Muslim extremism, particularly since 1857, when the British drove a wedge between the two religious communities. Both continue to feed off each other.

Official textbooks, policies or public discourse ignore the findings of scholars like Mubarik Ali, Ayesha Jalal and KK Aziz in Pakistan, and Romila Thapar, KN Panikkar and Sumit Sarkar in India whose work is based on solid research and facts rather than emotive myths. There is no official support for a joint history project.

Jaswant Singh's latest work on Jinnah had not hit the Pakistani bookstalls at the time of writing. But from reported and televised statements and published extracts his thesis appears to be similar to Ayesha Jalal's seminal work, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

The controversy arises not from what Singh has written but from who he is: a founding member of the BJP, a party that has long attempted to communalise or saffronise India's history. Given this agenda, what is surprising is not that the BJP sacked him or that the Gujarat government banned his book, but that Singh did not expect this. After all, he is not the first BJP leader to acknowledge Jinnah as secular - LK Advani did that during his groundbreaking June 2005 visit to his birthplace: Karachi. The BJP didn't go as far as expelling him, but he did have to resign as party head.

In Pakistan, this pettiness triggers off a puerile satisfaction that 'their' communal-mindedness has been exposed, for all 'their' posturing on democracy. But then, as some Pakistani newspaper columnists and editorials have commented, no one here (let alone from among 'our' Rightwing nationalists, the BJP's counterparts), is likely to embark on similar research on an Indian leader.

We know that Jinnah was an unlikely contender for a 'Muslim leader'. But in Pakistan, there will be no public mention of his non-fasting during Ramzan or ignorance about the Muslim prayer. Jinnah's marriage to the Zoroastrian Rati Petit is similarly glossed over. Jinnah joined Congress in 1906, remained a member after joining the All India Muslim League (AIML) in 1913, and brokered the Congress-League Lucknow Pact of 1916. Ever the constitutionalist, he played a key role in the formation of the All India Home Rule League pushing for India's recognition as a British dominion, like Ireland or New Zealand. How did this 'architect of Hindu-Muslim unity', as Sarojini Naidu termed him, end up founding a 'Muslim country'?