DEVIL'S ADVOCATE | JASWANT SINGH

17 August 2009,Monday sees the publication of a biography of Mohammed Ali Jinnah which
challenges the way we in India have seen the founder of Pakistan. It reassess Nehru's role in
Partition, it sheds fresh light on the relationship between the Mahatma Gandhi and Jinnah.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Jaswant Singh’s book is likely to attract considerable
attention and may be even a fair amount of controversy. Karan Thapar, in a special two-part
interview with the author, discusses the book with Singh, a former defence, foreign and
finance minister of India and also a former soldier.

THIS INTRO AND THE INTERVIEW THAT ARE SHOWN IN THE TWO WORD FILES ARE
COURTESY OF ibnlive.com. These are the excerpts of the interview done by Mr.Karan
Thapar on the senior BJP Leader Jaswant Singh.
Nehru as responsible for Partition as Jinnah: Jaswant
Karan Thapar / CNN-IBN
Published on Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 01:23, Updated on Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 08:54 in Politics section

Karan Thapar: Mr Jaswant Singh, let's start by establishing how you as the author view
Mohammed Ali Jinnah? After reading your book, I get the feeling that you don't subscribe to the
popular demonisation of the man.
Jaswant Singh: Of course, I don't. To that I don’t subscribe. I was attracted by the personality
which has resulted in a book. If I wasn't drawn to the personality, I wouldn't have written the book.
It's an intricate, complex personality of great character, determination.
Karan Thapar: And it's a personality that you found quite attractive?
Jaswant Singh: Naturally, otherwise, I wouldn't have ventured down the book. I found the
personality sufficiently attractive to go and research it for five years. And I was drawn to it, yes.
Karan Thapar: As a politician, Jinnah joined the Congress party long before he joined the Muslim
League and in fact when he joined the Muslim League, he issued a statement to say that this in
no way implies “even the shadow of disloyalty to the national cause”.
Would you say that in the 20s and 30s and may be even the early years of the 40s, Jinnah was a
nationalist?
Jaswant Singh: Actually speaking the acme of his nationalistic achievement was the 1916
Lucknow Pact of Hindu-Muslim unity and that's why Gopal Krishna Gokhale called him the
Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity.
Karan Thapar: In your assessment as his biographer, for most if not the predominant part of his
life, Jinnah was a nationalist.
Jaswant Singh: Oh, yes. He fought the British for an independent India but he also fought
resolutely and relentlessly for the interest of the Muslims of India.
Karan Thapar: Was Jinnah secular or was he communal?
Jaswant Singh: It depends on the way you view the word 'secular' because I don't know whether
secular is really fully applicable to a country like India. It's a word borne of the socio-historical and
religious history of Western Europe.
Karan Thapar: Let me put it like this. Many people believe that Jinnah hated Hindus and that he
was a Hindu basher.
Jaswant Singh: Wrong, totally wrong. That certainly he was not. His principal disagreement was
with the Congress party. Repeatedly he says and he says this even in his last statements to the
press and to the constituent Assembly of Pakistan.
Karan Thapar: So his problem was with Congress and with some Congress leaders but he had
no problem with Hindus.
Jaswant Singh: No, he had no problems whatsoever with the Hindus. Because he was not in
that sense, until in the later part of his years, he became exactly what he charged Mahatma
Gandhi with. He had charged Mahatma Gandhi of being a demagogue.
Karan Thapar: He became one as well?
Jaswant Singh: That was the most flattering way of emulating Gandhi. I refer of course to the
Calcutta killings.
Karan Thapar: As you look back on Jinnah's life, would you say that he was a great man?
Jaswant Singh: Oh yes, because he created something out of nothing and single-handedly he
stood up against the might of the Congress party and against the British who didn't really like him.
Karan Thapar: So you are saying to me he was a great man?
Jaswant Singh: But I am saying so.
Karan Thapar:Let me put it like this. Do you admire Jinnah?
Jaswant Singh: I admire certain aspects of his personality: his determination and the will to rise.
He was a self-made man--Mahatma Gandhi was a son of a Dewan.
Karan Thapar: Nehru was born to great wealth.
Jaswant Singh: All of them were born to wealth and position, Jinnah created for himself a
position. He carved out in Bombay a position in that cosmopolitan city being what he was, poor.
He was so poor he had to walk to work. He lived in a hotel called Watsons in Bombay and he told
one of the biographers that there's always room at the top but there is no lift and he never sought
a lift.
Karan Thapar: Do you admire the way he created success for himself, born to poverty but he
ended up successful, rich?
Jaswant Singh: I would admire that in any man, self-made man, who resolutely worked towards
achieving what he had set out to.
Karan Thapar: How seriously has India misunderstood Jinnah?
Jaswant Singh: I think we misunderstood because we needed to create a demon.
Karan Thapar: We needed a demon and he was the convenient scapegoat?
Jaswant Singh: I don't know if he was convenient. We needed a demon because in the 20th
century the most telling event in the entire subcontinent was the partition of the country.
Karan Thapar: I’ll come to that in a moment but first the critical question that your book raises is
that how is it that the man, considered as the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity in 1916 had
transformed 30 years later by 1947 into the 'Qaid-e-Azam' of Pakistan?
And your book suggests that underlying this was Congress' repeated inability to accept that
Muslims feared domination by Hindus and that they wanted “space” in “a reassuring system”.
Jaswant Singh: Here is the central contest between minoritism and majoritarianism. With the
loss of the Mughal empire, the Muslims of India had lost power but majoritarianism didn't begin to
influence them until 1947. Then they saw that unless they had a voice in their own political,
economical and social destiny, they would be obliterated. That is the beginning. That is still the
purpose.
Karan Thapar: Let me ask you this. Was Jinnah's fear or anxiety about Congress majoritarianism
justified or understandable? Your book in its account of how Congress refused to form a
government with the League in UP in 1937 after fighting the elections in alliance with that party,
suggests that Jinnah's fears were substantial and real.
Jaswant Singh: Yes. You have to go not just to 1937, which you just cited. See other examples.
In the 1946 elections, Jinnah's Muslim League wins all the Muslim seats and yet they do not have
sufficient number to be in office because the Congress party has, even without a single Muslim,
enough to form a government and they are outside of the government. So it was realised that
simply contesting election was not enough.
Karan Thapar: They needed certain assurances within the system to give them that space?
Jaswant Singh : That’s right. And those assurances amounted to reservation, which I dispute
frankly. Reservations went from 25 per cent to 33 per cent. And then from reservation that
became parity, of being on equal terms. Parity to Partition.
Karan Thapar : All of this was search for space?
Jaswant Singh: All of this was a search for some kind of autonomy of decision making in their
own social and economic destiny.
Karan Thapar: Your book reveals how people like Gandhi, Rajagopalachari and Azad could
understand the Jinnah or the Muslim fear of Congress majoritarianism but Nehru simply couldn't
understand. Was Nehru insensitive to this?
Jaswant Singh: No, he wasn't. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was a deeply sensitive man.
Karan Thapar: But why couldn't he understand?
Jaswant Singh: He was deeply influenced by Western and European socialist thought of those
days. For example dominion status would have given virtual independence to India in the 20s (but
Nehru shot it down).
Karan Thapar: In other words, Nehru's political thinking and his commitment to Western socialist
thought meant that he couldn't understand Jinnah's concerns about majoritarianism? Nehru was
a centralist, Jinnah was a decentraliser?
Jaswant Singh: That's right. That is exactly (the point). Nehru believed in a highly centralised
polity. That's what he wanted India to be. Jinnah wanted a federal polity.
Karan Thapar: Because that would give Muslims the space?
Jaswant Singh: That even Gandhi also accepted.
Karan Thapar: But Nehru couldn't.
Jaswant Singh: Nehru didn't.
Karan Thapar: He refused to?
Jaswant Singh: Well, consistently, he stood in the way of a federal India until 1947 when it
became a partitioned India.
Karan Thapar: In fact, the conclusion of your book is that if Congress could have accepted a
decentralised federal India, then a united India, as you put it, “was clearly ours to attain”. You add
that the problem was that this was in “an anathema to Nehru's centralising approach and
policies”.
Do you see Nehru at least as responsible for Partition as Jinnah?
Jaswant Singh: I think he says it himself. He recognised it and his correspondence, for example
with late Nawab Sahab of Bhopal, his official biographer and others. His letters to the late Nawab
Sahab of Bhopal are very moving letters.
Karan Thapar: You are saying Nehru recognised that he was as much of an obstacle.
Jaswant Singh: No, he recognised his mistakes afterwards.
Karan Thapar: Afterwards?
Jaswant Singh: Afterwards.
Karan Thapar: Today, Nehru's heirs and party will find it very surprising that you think that Nehru
was as responsible for Partition as Jinnah.
Jaswant Singh: I am not blaming anybody. I’m not assigning blame. I am simply recording what I
have found as the development of issues and events of that period.
Karan Thapar: When Indians turn around and say that Jinnah was, to use a colloquialism, the
villain of Partition, your answer is that there were many people responsible and to single out
Jinnah, as the only person or as the principal person, is both factually wrong and unfair?
Jaswant Singh: It is. It is not borne out of events. Go to the last All India Congress Committee
meeting in Delhi in the June of 1947 to discuss and accept the June 3, 1947 resolution. Nehru-
Patel’s resolution was defeated by the Congress, supported by Gandhi in the defeat.
Ram Manohar Lohia had moved the amendment. It was a very moving intervention by Ram
Manohar Lohia and then Gandhi finally said we must accept this Partition. Partition is a very
painful event. It is very easy to assign blame but very difficult thereafter. Because all events that
we are judging are ex post facto.
Karan Thapar: Absolutely, and what your book does is to shed light in terms of a new
assessment of Partition and the responsibility of the different players. And in that re-assessment,
you have balanced differently between Jinnah and Nehru?
Jaswant Singh: All vision which is ex post facto is 20/20. It is when you actually live the event.
Karan Thapar: Quite right. Those who have lived it would have seen it differently but today, with
the benefit of hindsight, you can say that Jinnah wasn't the only or the principal villain and the
Indian impression that he was is mistaken and wrong?
Jaswant Singh: And we need to correct it.
Karan Thapar: Let's turn to Jinnah and Pakistan. Your book shows that right through the 20s and
the 30s, or may be even the early years of the 40s, Pakistan for Jinnah was more of a political
strategy, less of a target and a goal. Did he consciously, from the very start, seek to dismember
and divide India?
Jaswant Singh: I don't think it was dismemberment. He wanted space for the Muslims. And he
could just not define Pakistan ever. Geographically, it was a vague idea. That's why ultimately it
became a moth-eaten Pakistan. He had ideas about certain provinces which must be Islamic and
one-third of the seats in the Central legislature must be Muslims.
Karan Thapar: So Pakistan was in fact a way of finding, as you call it, 'space' for Muslims?
Jaswant Singh: He wanted space in the Central legislature and in the provinces and protection
of the minorities so that the Muslims could have a say in their own political, economic and social
destiny.
Karan Thapar: And that was his primary concern, not dividing India or breaking up the country?
Jaswant Singh: No. He in fact went to the extent of saying that let there be a Pakistan within
India.
Karan Thapar: A Pakistan within India was acceptable to him?
Jaswant Singh: Yes.
Karan Thapar: So in other words, Pakistan was often 'code' for space for Muslims?
Jaswant Singh:That's right. From what I have written, I find that it was a negotiating tactic
because he wanted certain provinces to be with the Muslim League. He wanted a certain
percentage (of seats) in the Central legislature. If he had that, there would not have been a
partition.
Karan Thapar: Would you therefore say that when people turn around and say that Jinnah was
communal, he was a Hindu hater, a Hindu basher that they are mistaken and wrong?
Jaswant Singh: He was not a Hindu hater but he had great animosity with the Congress party
and Congress leadership. He said so repeatedly: I have no enmity against the Hindu.
Karan Thapar: Do you as an author believe him when he said so?
Jaswant Singh: I don't live in the same time as him. I go by what his contemporaries have said, I
go by what he himself says and I reproduce it.
Karan Thapar: Let's come again to this business of using Pakistan to create space for Muslims.
Your book shows how repeatedly people like Rajagopalachari, Gandhi and Azad were
understanding of the Jinnah need or the Muslim need for space. Nehru wasn't. Nehru had a
European-inherited centralised vision of how India should be run. In a sense was Nehru's vision
of a centralised India, a problem that eventually led to partition?
Jaswant Singh: Jawaharlal Nehru was not always that. He became that after his European tour
of the 20s. Then he came back imbued with, as Madhu Limaye puts it, 'spirit of socialism' and he
was all for highly centralised India.
Karan Thapar: And a highly centralized India denied the space Jinnah wanted.
Jaswant Singh: A highly centralised India meant that the dominant party was the Congress
party. He (Nehru) in fact said there are only two powers in India -- the Congress party and the
British.
Karan Thapar: That attitude in a sense left no room for Jinnah and the Muslim League in India?
Jaswant Singh: That is what made Jinnah repeatedly say but there is a third force -- we. The
Congress could have dealt with the Moplas but there were other Muslims.
Karan Thapar: So it was this majoritarianism of Nehru that actually left no room for Jinnah?
Jaswant Singh: It became a contest between excessive majoritarianism, exaggerated minoritism
and giving the referee's whistle to the British.
Karan Thapar: Was the exaggerated minoritism a response to the excessive majoritarianism of
Congress?
Jaswant Singh: In part. Also in response to the historical circumstances that had come up.
Karan Thapar: If the final decision had been taken by people like Gandhi, Rajagopalachari or
Azad, could we have ended up with united India?
Jaswant Singh: Yes, I believe so. It could have. Gandhi said let the British go home, we will
settle this amongst ourselves, we will find a Pakistan. In fact, he said so in the last AICC
meetings.
Karan Thapar: It was therefore Nehru's centralising vision that made that extra search for united
India difficult at the critical moment?
Jaswant Singh: He continued to say so but subsequently, after Partition, he began to realise
what a great mistake he had made.
Karan Thapar: Nehru realised his mistakes but it was too late, by then it had happened.
Jaswant Singh: It was too late. It was too late.
Karan Thapar: Let's end this first interview there. In the next part I want to talk to you about the
relationship between the early Gandhi and Jinnah, the questions you raise about Partition and the
predicament of Indian Muslims.
Gandhi, Jinnah both failed: Jaswant
Karan Thapar / CNN-IBN
Published on Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 01:43, Updated on Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 07:30 in Politics section

Karan Thapar: Let us start this second interview with the portrait you paint of the relationship
between the early Gandhi and the early Jinnah.
You say of their first meeting in January 1915 that Gandhi's response to Jinnah's “warm
welcome” was “ungracious”. You say Gandhi would only see Jinnah “in Muslim terms”, and the
sort of implication that comes across is Gandhi was less accommodating than Jinnah was.
Jaswant Singh: I have perhaps not used the adjective you have used. Jinnah returned from his
education in 1896. Gandhi went to South Africa and was returning finally--in between he had
come once--to India it was 1915 already.
Jinnah had gone to receive him with Gokhale and he referred fulsomely to Gandhi. Gandhi
referred to Jinnah and said that I am very grateful that we have a Muslim leader. That I think was
born really of Gandhi's working in South Africa and not so much the reality of what he felt. The
relationship subsequently became competitive.
Karan Thapar: But you do call that response “ungracious”?
Jaswant Singh: I don't know whether I call it ungracious?
Karan Thapar: You do.
Jaswant Singh: But I might have. Jinnah is fulsomely receiving Gandhi and Gandhi says I am
glad that I am being received by a Muslim leader.
Karan Thapar: So he was only seeing Jinnah in Muslim terms?
Jaswant Singh: Yes, which Jinnah didn't want to be seen.
Karan Thapar: Even when you discuss the impact of their political strategies in the early years
before 1920 you suggest that Jinnah was perhaps more effective than Gandhi, who in a sense
permitted the Raj to continue for three decades. You write "Jinnah had successfully kept the
Indian political forces together, simultaneously exerting pressure on the government."
Of Gandhi you say “that pressure dissipated and the Raj remained for three more decades”.
Jaswant Singh: That is a later development, because the political style of the two was totally
different. Jinnah was essentially a logician.
He believed in the strength of logic; he was a Parliamentarian; he believed in the efficacy of
parliamentary politics. Gandhi, after testing the water, took to the trails of India and he took
politics into the dusty villages of India.
Karan Thapar: But in the early years up till 1920 you see Jinnah as more effective in putting
pressure on the British than Gandhi.
Jaswant Singh: Yes, because entire politics was parliamentary.
Karan Thapar: The adjectives you use to characterise their leadership in the early years
suggests a sort of, how shall I put it, slight tilt in Jinnah's favour.
You say of Gandhi's leadership that it had “an entirely religious, provincial character”. Of Jinnah's
you say he was “doubtless imbued by a non-sectarian nationalistic zeal.”
Jaswant Singh: He was non-sectarian. Gandhi used religion as a personal expression. Jinnah
used religion as a tool to create something but that came later. For Gandhi religion was an
integral part of his politics from the very beginning.
Karan Thapar: And Jinnah wanted religion out of politics.
Jaswant Singh: Out of politics. That is right--there are innumerable examples.
Karan Thapar: In fact, Jinnah sensed or feared instinctively that if politics came into religion it
would divide.
Jaswant Singh: There were two fears here. His one fear was that if the whole question or
practice of mass movement was introduced into India then the minority in India would be
threatened.
There could be Hindu-Muslim riots as a consequence. The second fear was that this will result in
bringing in religion into Indian politics. He didn't want that--Khilafat movement, etc are all
examples of that.
Karan Thapar: And in a sense would you say events have borne out Jinnah?
Jaswant Singh: Not just Jinnah, Annie Besant also. When the Home Rule League broke up--
resigning from the League, Annie Beasant cautioned Gandhi you are going down this path, this is
a path full of peril.
Karan Thapar: Both Jinnah and Beasant have been borne out.
Jaswant Singh: In the sense that mass movement, unless combined with a great sense of
discipline, leadership and restraint, becomes chaotic.
Karan Thapar: As you look back on their lives and their achievements, Jinnah, at the end of the
day, stood for creating a homeland for Indian Muslims. But what he produced was moth-eaten
and broke up into two pieces in less than 25 years. Gandhi struggled to keep India united, but
ended up not just with Partition but with communal passion and communal killing. Would you say
at the end of their lives both were failures?
Jaswant Singh: Gandhi was transparently a honest man. He lived his political life openly. Jinnah
didn't even live his political life, leave alone his private life, openly. Gandhi led his private life
openly--(in) Noakhali with a pencil stub he wrote movingly “I don't want to die a failure but I fear I
might.”
Karan Thapar: And did he in your opinion.
Jaswant Singh: Yes, I am afraid the Partition of land, the Hindu-Muslim divide, cannot be really
called Gandhiji's great success.
Jinnah, I think, did not achieve what he set out to. He got what is called a moth-eaten Pakistan,
but the philosophy which underlaid that Muslims are a separate nation was completely rejected
within years of Pakistan coming into being.
Karan Thapar: So, in a sense, both failed.
Jaswant Singh: I am afraid I have to say that. I am, in comparison, a lay practitioner of politics in
India. I cannot compare myself to these two great Indians but my assessment would lead me to
the conclusion that I cannot treat this as a success either by Gandhi or by Jinnah.
Karan Thapar: Your book also raises disturbing questions about the Partition of India. You say it
was done in a way “that multiplied our problems without solving any communal issue”.
Then you ask “if the communal, the principal issue, remains in an even more exacerbated form
than before then why did we divide at all?”
Jaswant Singh: Yes, indeed why? I cannot yet find the answer. Look into the eyes of the
Muslims who live in India and if you truly see through the pain they live--to which land do they
belong?
We treat them as aliens, somewhere inside, because we continue to ask even after Partition you
still want something? These are citizens of India--it was Jinnah's failure because he never
advised Muslims who stayed back.
Karan Thapar: One of the most moving passages of your biography is when you write of Indian
Muslims who stayed on in India and didn't go to Pakistan.
You say they are “abandoned”, you say they are “bereft of a sense of kinship”, not “one with the
entirety” and then you add that “this robs them of the essence of psychological security”.
Jaswant Singh: That is right, it does. That lies at the root of the Sachar Committee report.
Karan Thapar:So, in fact, Indian Muslims have paid the price in their personal lives.
Jaswant Singh: Without doubt, as have Pakistani Muslims.
Karan Thapar: Muslims have paid a price on both sides.
Jaswant Singh: I think Muslims have paid a price in Partition. They would have been significantly
stronger in a united India, effectively so--much larger land, every potential is here. Of course
Pakistan or Bangladesh won't like what I am saying.
Karan Thapar: Let us for a moment focus on Indian Muslims. You are a leader of the BJP. Do
you think the rhetoric of your party sometimes adds to that insecurity?
Jaswant Singh: I didn't write this book as a BJP parliamentarian or leader, which I am not. I
wrote this book as an Indian.
Karan Thapar: Your book also suggests, at least intellectually, you believe India could face more
Partitions. You write: "In India, having once accepted this principle of reservation, then of
Partition, how can now we deny it to others, even such Muslims as have had to or chosen to live
in India."
Jaswant Singh: The problem started with the 1906 reservation. What does Sachar committee
report say? Reserve for the Muslim. What are we doing now? Reserve. I think this reservation for
Muslims is a disastrous path. I have myself, personally, in Parliament heard a member
subscribing to Islam saying we could have a third Partition too. These are the pains that trouble
me. What have we solved?
Karan Thapar:In fact you say in your book how can we deny it to others, having accepted it once
it becomes very difficult intellectually to refuse it again.
Jaswant Singh: You have to refuse it.
Karan Thapar: Even if you contradict yourself?
Jaswant Singh: Of course, I am contradicting myself. It is intellectual contradiction.
Karan Thapar: But you are being honest enough to point out that this intellectual contradiction
lies today at the very heart of our predicament as a nation.
Jaswant Singh: It is. Unless we find an answer, we won't find an answer to India-Pakistan-
Bangladesh relations.
Karan Thapar: And this continuing contradiction is the legacy of Partition?
Jaswant Singh: Of course, it is self-evident.
Karan Thapar: Mr. Jaswant Singh, let’s come to how your book will be received. Are you worried
that a biography of Jinnah, that turns on its head the received demonisation of the man; where
you concede that for a large part he was a nationalist with admirable qualities, could bring down
on your head a storm of protest?
Jaswant Singh: Firstly, I am not an academic. Sixty years down the line someone else--an
academic--should have done it. Then I wouldn't have persisted for five years. I have written what I
have researched and believed in. I have not written to please--it's a journey that I have
undertaken, as I explained myself, along with Mohd Ali Jinnah - from his being an ambassador of
Hindu-Muslim unity to the Qaid-e-Azam of Pakistan
Karan Thapar: In a sense you were driven to write this book.
Jaswant Singh: Indeed, I still search for answers. Having worked with the responsibilities that I
had, it is my duty to try and find answers.
Karan Thapar: And your position is that if people don't like the truth as you see it - so be it, but
you have to tell the truth as you know it.
Jaswant Singh: Well, so be it is your way of putting it, my dear Karan, but how do I abandon my
search, my yearning and what I have found? If I am wrong then somebody else should go and do
the research and prove me as wrong.
Karan Thapar: In other words you are presenting what you believe is the truth and you can't hide
it.
Jaswant Singh: What else can I do, what else can I present?
Karan Thapar: In 2005, when L K Advani called Jinnah's August 11, 1947 speech secular he
was forced to resign the presidentship of the party, are you worried that your party might turn on
you in a similar manner?
Jaswant Singh: This is not a party document, and my party knows that I have been working on
this. I have mentioned this to Shri Advani as also to others.
Karan Thapar: But are they aware of your views and the content of the book?
Jaswant Singh: They can't be aware unless they read it.
Karan Thapar: Are you worried that when they find out about your views, and your analyses and
your conclusion, they might be embarrassed and angry?
Jaswant Singh: No, they might disagree, that's a different matter. Anger? Why should there be
anger about disagreement?
Karan Thapar: Can I put something to you?
Jaswant Singh: Yes.
Karan Thapar: Mr Advani in a sense suffered because he called Jinnah secular. You have gone
further, you have compared him to the early Gandhi. And some would say that Gandhi is found a
little wanting in that comparison. Will that inflame passions?
Jaswant Singh: I don't think Gandhi is found wanting. He was a different person. They are two
different personalities, each with their characteristics, why should passions be inflamed? Let a
self-sufficient majority, 60 years down the line of Independence, be able to stand up to what
actually happened pre-47 and in 1947.
Karan Thapar: So what you are saying is that Gandhi and Jinnah were different people, we must
learn to accept that both had good points.
Jaswant Singh: Of course.
Karan Thapar: And both had weaknesses.
Jaswant Singh: Of course. Gandhi himself calls Jinnah a great Indian, why don't we recognise
that? Why did he call him that? He tells Mountbatten "give the Prime Ministership of India to
Jinnah." Mountbatten scoffs at him, "are you joking?" He says, "no I am serious, I will travel India
and convince India and carry this message".
Karan Thapar: So if today's Gandhians, reading the passages where you compare between the
two, come to the conclusion that you are more of praise of Jinnah than of Gandhi.
Jaswant Singh: I don't think I am. I am objective as far as human beings have ability to be
objective. As balanced as an author can be.
Karan Thapar: As balanced as an author can be.
Jaswant Singh: Indeed, indeed. How else can it be?
Karan Thapar: Your party has a Chintan Baithak starting in two days time, does it worry you that
at that occasion some of your colleagues might stand up and say - your views, your comments
about Jinnah, your comments about Gandhi and Nehru have embarrassed the BJP?
Jaswant Singh: I don't think so, I don't think they will. Because in two days time the book would
not have been (read). It's almost a 600-page book. Difficult to read 600 pages in two days.
Karan Thapar: No one will have read the book by the time you go to Simla!
Jaswant Singh: Yes (Laughs).
Karan Thapar: But what about afterwards?
Jaswant Singh: Well, we will deal with the afters when the afters come.
Karan Thapar: Let me raise two issues, that could be a problem for you. First of all, your
sympathetic understanding of Muslims left behind in India. You say they are abandoned, you say
they are bereft, you say they suffer from psychological insecurity. That's not normally a position
leaders of the BJP take.
Jaswant Singh: I think, the BJP is misunderstood also in its attitude towards the minorities. I
don't think it is so. Every Muslim that lives in India is a loyal Indian and we must treat them as so.
Karan Thapar: But you are the first person from the BJP I have ever heard say, "look into the
eyes of Indian Muslims and see the pain." No one has ever spoken in such sensitive terms about
them before.
Jaswant Singh: I am born in a district, that is my home--we adjoin Sind, it was not part of British
India. We have lived with Muslims and Islam for centuries. They are part.... In fact in Jaisalmer, I
don't mind telling you, Muslims don't eat cow and the Rajputs don't eat pig.
Karan Thapar: So your understanding of Indian Muslims and their predicament is uniquely
personal and you would say...
Jaswant Singh: Indeed because I think what has happened is that we try and treat this whole
thing as if it’s an extension of the image of the UP Muslim. Of course the UP (Muslim)
is...Pakistan is a stepchild of UP in a sense.
Karan Thapar: The second issue that your book raises, which could cause problems for you, is
that at least theoretically, at least intellectually, you accept that their could be, although you hope
their won't be, further partitions. Could that embarrass you?
Jaswant Singh: No, I am cautioning. I am cautioning India, Indian leadership. I have said that I
am not going to be a politician all my life, or even a member of Parliament. But I do say this – we
should learn from what we did wrong, or didn't do right, so that we don't repeat the mistakes.
Karan Thapar: In other words this is – how shall I put it, a wake up call?
Jaswant Singh: Wake-up? Shaking....
Karan Thapar: A shake-up call!
Jaswant Singh: Yeah (Smiles)
Karan Thapar: My last question. Critics in your party, allege that you are responsible for the party
losing seats in Rajasthan, they allege that you are responsible for asking questions about the
sanctity of Hindutva. Now, after this book, have you fed your critics more ammunition against
yourself?
Jaswant Singh: Time will tell (Smiles).
Karan Thapar: But does it worry you?
Jaswant Singh: Do I look worried? (Smiles)
Karan Thapar: With that smile on your face Mr. Jaswant Singh. Thank you very much for these
two special interviews.
Jaswant Singh: Thank you very much.