Thursday, August 20, 2009

Vajpayee -Mujhe itni oonchaie kabhi mat dena, gairon ko gale na lago sakon, itni rukhai kabhi mat dena!

Pratap Bhanu Mehta on Jaswant Singh book Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence

  • “The book’s big villains are the Congress party and Jawaharlal Nehru, both of whom are indicted as being driven by a combination of dogmatism, attraction for power, excessive centralisation and deep historical misjudgment. Yes, Sardar Patel has been thrown into the mix. But it is hard to think of Patel as anything but a Congressman. How the BJP managed to claim him is a mystery. The book also poses the question whether Islam has the room for separating religion and society. And if it does not, what is the prospect for secularism. This is a very BJP-compatible line of inquiry. And it rather cleverly insinuates the thought that the difference between Jinnah and the Congress was not that one believed the two-nation theory and the other did not. It is that the Congress also did not have room for the thought that our rights and obligations should be independent of religious affiliations. And, at its most subtle, it suggests that denying the two-nation theory does not do away with the thorny problem of how we conceptualise the relationship between Hindus and Muslims. The Congress wishes this question away rather than solving it.

“Lord Mountbatten: I tried every trick I could play... to shake Jinnah's resolve….Nothing would…move him from his consuming determination to realise the dream of Pakistan...The date I chose (for Independence) came out of the blue. I was determined to show I was master of the whole event.

Excerpts from Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence by Jaswant Singh:

  • "The basic and structural fault in Jinnah's notion remains a rejection of his origins; of being an Indian, having been shaped by the soil of India, tempered in the heat of Indian experience. Muslims in India were no doubt subscribers to a different faith but that is all; they were not any different stock or of alien origin."
  • "It is in this, a false 'minority syndrome' that the dry rot of partition first set in, and then unstoppably it afflicted the entire structure, the magnificent edifice of an united India. The answer (cure?), Jinnah asserted, lay only in parting, and Nehru and Patel and others of the Congress also finally agreed. Thus was born Pakistan".
  • "His opposition was not against the Hindus or Hinduism, it was the Congress that he considered as the true political rival of the Muslim League, and the League he considered as being just an 'extension of himself'. He, of course, made much of the Hindu-Muslim riots (1946; Bengal, Bihar, etc.) to 'prove the incapacity of Congress Governments to protect Muslims; and also expressed fear of "Hindu raj" to frighten Muslims into joining the League, but during innumerable conversations with him I can rarely recall him attacking Hindus or Hinduism as such. His opposition, which later developed into almost hatred, remained focused upon the Congress leadership' (M.R.A. Baig, Jinnah's secretary)."
  • "Religion in all this was entirely incidental; Pakistan alone gave him all that his personality and character demanded. If Mr. Jinnah was necessary for achieving Pakistan, Pakistan, too was necessary for the fulfilment of Mr. Jinnah."
  • "However, it has to be said, and with great sadness, that despite some early indications to the contrary, the leaders of the Indian National Congress, in the period between the outbreak of war in 1939 and the country's partition in 1947, showed in general, a sad lack of realism, of foresight, of purpose and of will."
  • "As (Maulana Azad) wrote in his memoirs, he had come to the conclusion that Indian federation should deal with just three subjects: defence, foreign affairs and communications; thus granting the maximum possible autonomy to the provinces. According to the Maulana, Gandhi accepted this suggestion, while Sardar Patel did not."
  • "For, along with several other there is one central difficult that India, Pakistan, Bangladesh face: our 'past' has, in reality never gone into the 'past', it continues to reinvent itself, constantly becoming our 'present', thus preventing us from escaping the imprisonment of memories. To this we have to find an answer, who else can or will?"

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