National

Wrong Man With A Wrong Issue At The Wrong Time

In the BJP’s book, what matters is perception, not reality. Jaswant should have known better.

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Wrong Man With A Wrong Issue At The Wrong Time
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Jaswant Singh
in Outlook, March 2, 2009

 “The book (on Jinnah) is ready, but I do not wish to create a controversy before the elections. I will release it after the elections. I have worked for four-and-a-half years on it. It’s a serious work but I feel it won’t be read as such. So when it comes out, I’ll be ready for a controversy. Perhaps we need controversy to educate people. I am still toying with titles. The book is about Jinnah’s journey from being an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity to the Qaid-e-Azam of Pakistan.”

When the NDA was in power, there was a standing joke about Atal Behari Vajpayee’s fondness for Jaswant Singh. Besides the fact that the two often enjoyed a drink together, Vajpayee was said to be very impressed with Jaswant’s English. Adept in Hindi, the former prime minister admired individuals who had good control over language. And Jaswant’s slow baritone has always been quite grand.

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The man also has impeccable taste, furnishing even the room allotted to him in Parliament with high art and high-minded books. Jinnah had been a passion of his for several years now and even six months ago he told this correspondent he expected a controversy when the book was released. Given the Jaswant persona, it is entirely possible that the critique of Sardar Patel is derived from his own memories and understanding of the past. He is after all a feudal from Rajasthan and Patel had coerced innumerable royals into joining the Indian Union. For all the BJP’s fascination with Patel, Jaswant pointedly asks: “What part of the ‘core belief’ has been demolished by my book? What is core about Patel? He was the first leader to ban the rss and imprison its leaders...but he didn’t ban the Muslim League.”

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But Jaswant, as an enthusiastic student of history, must know that the BJP is adept at building false heroes and false histories. The details of what’s written don’t matter; perception does.

This is not the first controversy Jaswant has been at the centre of. Indeed, no other BJP leader has courted so many controversies. The party has never been able to live down the Kandahar hijack when Jaswant as foreign minister accompanied released terrorists to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Then there was the furore and ridicule the party invited when he in his book, A Call to Honour (2006), alleged there was a mole in the office of former PM, P.V. Narasimha Rao. A minor scandal erupted when he was charged with illegal drug possession in October last year when he offered kesar, traditionally an opium-laced drink, to guests at his ancestral home in Rajasthan. This year, two minor little controversies hovered over him. In March, in an interview to this magazine, he’d said, “I would not defend Operation Parakram” and after the Lok Sabha defeat launched an attack on Arun Jaitley. Yet the polo and golf-playing former armyman survived in the BJP because he brought a certain cross-party acceptability. Many were just as impressed with his stance and that baritone.

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