hide-and-seek with history

It is tempting to dismiss the furore over Jaswant Singh’s expulsion from the BJP as a matter of no great consequence. After all, the BJP is a party that is out of power and seemingly in terminal decline. Jaswant Singh is at the end of his career and even if the BJP does manage to recapture power in five years’ time, he would probably have been too old to play an active role in the next government.
But as tempting as it would be to treat this episode as yet another saga of yesterday’s people fighting over yesterday’s issues because they know that they have no tomorrow, the fracas is more significant than we may think at first.
First of all, the Jaswant controversy is only partly about Jinnah. It is also about the BJP’s attitude to Indian Muslims. For instance, in the last days of the Vajpayee government L.K. Advani declared that Muslims would vote for the BJP because it had improved relations with Pakistan.
The sub-text to this bizarre claim was that Advani regarded Indian Muslims as being sympathetic, if not loyal, to Pakistan and therefore inclined to support anyone who was pro-Pakistan. Naturally, Indian Muslims were outraged and an uproar resulted.
But Advani did not learn his lesson. Eager to cast himself in the Vajpayee mould and advised by a coterie of dimwits, he flew off to Pakistan to pose as a great sub-continental liberal. He believed that if he was perceived as being friendly towards Pakistan, he would gain moderate support in India along with a share of the elusive Muslim vote. His whole trip and the foolish remarks he made praising M.A. Jinnah only make sense when seen in that context.
As the writer Javed Akhtar said at the time, “Mr Advani thinks that Indian Muslims are all deeply loyal to Pakistan and put up pictures of Jinnah on their walls. He doesn’t realise that Indian Muslims don’t care at all about Jinnah.”

Advani’s Pakistan adventure nearly ended his political career. But, when it measured the outrage that emanated from its solidly Hindu vote base, the BJP also realised that Jinnah was a hot potato.

The attempt to whitewash Jinnah’s role in the history of the independence movement — partly as an attempt to criticise Jawaharlal Nehru — had backfired badly.
Some of the negative reaction to Jaswant Singh’s book emerges from the fall-out of Advani’s Pakistan fiasco. Jinnah is now a dirty word in the BJP and the party will not risk alienating its Hindu base with any suggestion that Jinnah has been judged too harshly. As for winning Muslim votes, that dream evaporated a long time ago....