Nehru, Jinnah responsible for Partition: Jaswant

HIS STORY: Jaswant Singh sheds light on the relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

        

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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.

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.