Finally. Or is he? This time the verdict absolving him of the many charges Indian historians have heaped on him comes from Jaswant Singh, until recently a top BJP leader who, if you were to ask Madeline Albright, the former US Secretary of State, was someone single-mindedly obsessed with Pakistan’s role in destabilising India as the Clinton administration opened up American diplomacy to forge a new strategic partnership with New Delhi in the 1990s.
Even Strobe Talbott, the chief US interlocutor tasked with interfacing with Mr Singh over the years, and whom the latter calls his friend, could not get over Singh’s vitriolic view of Pakistan, including its foundation. Why then this sudden change of heart and mind?
The answer lies in Singh’s well know erudition, and his quest to get to the bottom of matters that have bothered him. His research into the life and times of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and probe into partition of India, which remains the starting point of any Indian response – be it academic or political – to its historically dogged relations with Pakistan, comes across as intellectual honesty and bravery. More so, because what has emerged went against his own hitherto held convictions. Singh is a man steeped in Rajasthan aristocratic mannerism; as a chess enthusiast, he is used to doing a lot of thinking before he makes his moves.
Not surprisingly, the BJP has reacted to the book with a lack of vision and moral courage to own up to its – now expelled – leader’s revisionist stance on the creation of Pakistan.
Singh has minced no words in analysing the results of his probe into Partition and the role of India’s all time favourite demagogue, Jinnah. And he has been vociferously defending his conclusions. Soutik Biswas, a BBC blogger who has been following the debate in the Indian media since the launching of Singh’s book, documents:
Mr Singh goes on to say that India misunderstood Mr Jinnah “because we needed to create a demon”. He insists the Congress party’s majoritarian instincts were responsible for the federalist Mr Jinnah turning away from the idea of India and asking for a separate nation for Muslims.’
This is conceding more than what Mr L K Advani did on his visit to Jinnah’s mausoleum in Karachi some four years ago. He had called Jinnah the only truly secular leader of stature in India’s freedom movement, and caused a similar uproar in India. What is this popular, negative reaction in India to the book and its author if not the very kind of majoritarian tyranny that Jinnah feared for his Muslims? Singh has now also testified to it by saying that most Indians still consider Muslims as somewhat alien to India.
That said, the redeeming factor in India is that democracy as an uninterrupted process will continue to cough up whistleblowers on historical and political myths created by ‘patriotic’ historians of the past—and that too from the least expected quarters. By comparison, in Pakistan, our academics can be seen to have lacked similar moral courage or the conviction with which to lay historical facts bare; that is, even if someone is able to see the reality from a non-established viewpoint.
Consider Ayesha Jalal’s monumental work on Jinnah; she only sheepishly tries to apportion blame on Congress for the partition of India. Akbar S. Ahmed, the decorated British-Pakistani scholar, was even more evasive when, in the movie Jinnah – supposedly a tribute to the founder of Pakistan – he literally put Jinnah in the dock in the hereafter. Shying of giving an unequivocal verdict, the case is resolved by God giving Jinnah the benefit of the doubt and sending him to paradise, simply because some of his papers have gone missing from divine records! God is truly forgiving.
Now, with the help of Singh’s authoritative, thoroughly researched book, would Ahmed consider revising his script? He won’t be that lonely anymore in supporting his own conviction – if conviction is the right word in this context – of Jinnah’s role in partition of India.
Conversely, what the lack of democratic institutions has done on our side of the border is nothing short of intellectual crime and bankruptcy. History books portray the ‘ham-eating, whiskey-drinking’ leader (though that is not his claim to fame) as a holy warrior fighting for the lost glory of Islam by establishing an Islamic republic. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We have not held a single, dispassionate academic inquiry into the genesis of Pakistan.
A Pakistani academic writing a well-researched book on Gandhi, arguably the only friend Pakistan had in the immediate pre-partition and post-partition years of India, is out of the question. ‘Blasphemy,’ did someone say?
Murtaza Razvi is the Editor, Magazines of Dawn.
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