Raw Indian nerves exposed By Santwana Bhattacharya
NEW DELHI - It's not often that history can compete with Harry Potter. But
former Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh, whose slow baritone and prolix
way with words so impressed American foreign policy analyst Strobe Talbott,
among others, has managed it.
His book on the events leading up to India's partition in 1947 - Jinnah:
Partition, India, Independence - is literally flying off the shelf at a
speed you would normally only associate with the J K Rowling series. The word
is that readers in Pakistan and Bangladesh too are showing more than a little
interest.
And this is not just publishing industry news. There's some top-notch politics
to be had here, weaving everyone from India's pantheon of freedom fighters to
its current lineup of politicians and commentators into one tangled web of
discourse. The Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) was not even around in 1947 - it was born 33 years later -
and its genetic precursors kept a respectful distance from the mainstream of
the independence movement, but it's at the center of the present debate.
The BJP has summarily expelled the author, a senior member who has been in the
fold from the salad days of 1980, and also banned the book in its pocket
borough state of Gujarat. On the grounds of libel, blasphemy, whatever. By
doing so, the party has not just handed a sure platinum hit to Jaswant Singh.
It has granted a new lease of (posthumous) life in the country of Jaswant’s
origin to Pakistan's architect, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Both, naturally, despite
its best intentions.
The BJP's knee-jerk reaction has also brought the spotlight on the role played
by the iconic Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, India's first home minister and close
associate of Mahatma Gandhi, in the run-up to the blood-soaked partition and
the creation of Pakistan. For, Jaswant was expelled from his party not for
partly exonerating Jinnah - undoubtedly a taboo subject in India - but for
apportioning some of the blame for the vivisection of India on Patel and
Jawaharlal Nehru, premier from 1947 to 1964.
There's no love lost of course between the Nehru lineage and the rightwing
Hindutva party, but the latter have for long striven to appropriate Patel. He
was the "Iron Man", the "great unifier of India", who managed, sometimes in
that unsubtle manner so beloved of the BJP, to persuade hundreds of princely
states spread across the country to merge with the post-independence republic.
He is virtually seen by them as the creator of the modern Indian state as it
exists now and, though a Congress party leader, they like to think of him as a
sort of proxy spiritual progenitor.
In fact, the BJP patriarch Lal Krisha Advani likes to put himself out as "Loh
Purush", a stilted Hindi version of "Iron Man". Even Gujarat chief minister
Narendra Modi fashions himself as "Chhota Sardar" - both appellations,
virtually, imply that they are the new Sardar Patels.
It is Jaswant's frankness in talking about Patel's acquiescence and acceptance,
at some point, of the "inevitability" of partition that has roiled the BJP and
has been cited as the reason for his expulsion. Coming out of a brainstorming
session, BJP leader Arun Jaitley managed to argue with a straight face that it
was not just right to expel a senior leader for writing a book, but actually
necessary. He claimed that Jaswant has violated the BJP's "core beliefs" and
has crossed all limits by breaking a "national consensus" on the history of
that strife-torn period.
He did not elaborate on how national consensus was violated: whether in taking
a subtler-than-usual, contextualized look at Jinnah or in the attempted
vilification of the "infallible" Patel. But as the cyclonic debate gained
momentum, overwhelming all other concerns, including that of a looming drought
over half the country and a severe crisis in food grain production, the BJP, as
an organization, is not mentioning the name of the "Dark Lord", Jinnah, once.
Instead, it has restricted itself to outrage at Jaswant's audacity in bringing
Patel down from the pedestal.
A combative Jaswant is fighting right back. Poohpoohing the contention that he
has violated the BJP's core ideology, he first shot back, "What core? Which is
the core that I violated?" Patel, he pointed out, was the first to ban the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) after Mahatma Gandhi's assassination in 1948
at the hands of Hindu extremists. The RSS, which fashions itself as a
militaristic social organization, is the BJP's parent body and its Orwellian
Big Brother.
To be sure, there has been a lot of internecine politics within the BJP leading
up to this, especially in the aftermath of its humiliating electoral loss this
summer. Jaswant, not an RSS cadre man himself, was a willing participant in
that phase of mutual recriminations and may have seen no future in the BJP -
neither in terms of career advancement or even maintenance of status. The book
may just have been an alibi - a convenient one for the BJP and a note
high-minded enough for Jaswant to go with it.
Unfortunately, however, neither his critics in the BJP nor those commentating
endlessly on television on his unceremonious expulsion have granted the fact
that Jaswant has, indeed, delivered a relatively nuanced book. And, for a
non-professional scholar, he has managed to pose some pertinent queries on the
nature of history writing in the subcontinent and the broad categories that
inform it. These are strands of reasoning that doubtless stem from within the
domains of scholarship, but what better way to "out" a delicate line of
historical argument than through a blockbuster book by a politician.
Tracing the evolution of the Hindu-Muslim "divide" that finally culminated in
the troubled creation of Pakistan, Jaswant explores an interesting development:
the birth of a modern, self-consciously "Muslim" political community in the
realm of imagination, ascription and nomenclature.
One part he touches on is this: how, in India, hugely divergent classes, castes
and creeds of people, some of whom exhibit very strong regional
ethno-linguistic affinities, came to be clubbed under the umbrella term
"Muslim". This must have entailed bridging social gaps we can scarcely imagine
today. For instance, you have the ashrafs - or the elite. They claim
genealogical links to those who, over the centuries, came from Iraq, Iran,
Turkey, Afghanistan and, of course, the Mongols, either as part of a conquering
army, as refugees, or as freelance professionals looking for employment in the
Mughal court and among smaller Muslim royalty.
The ashrafs always had more in common with India's other ruling castes
than with the atrafs - the indigenous people who converted to Islam,
mostly from the depressed classes, and who form the numerical majority among
South Asia's Muslims by a long country mile. In truth, it is safe to assume a
fair amount of miscegenation on all sides, that is to say, the assimilation of
successive waves of mobile population groups into hundreds of small, local
nooks and horizons in this land over a period of one whole millennium.
It is this settled map from which the grand narrative of modern "political
Islam" - led by an ambitious elite, in the name of the faceless masses - sought
to disembed its subjects. But for this, "Muslim" had to become an a priori
notion.
Jaswant finds the casual and ubiquitous use of the word "Muslim" - in
historiography, as well as popular currency - to be a powerful tool in this.
The tradition in the country, he says, is towards identifying people by their
place of origin rather than their faith. For instance, it's always the Parsis
and the British (and simply never "Zoroastrians" and "Christians"). Indeed, the
"Muslim" in all early literature is the "Turushka" (the "Turk") and even
"Mughal", lest we forget, is an ethnonym, a variant of "Mongol".
He argues that the umbrella type - Muslim above all - was created and adopted
at a much later stage, both within and outside the community. In fact, it is
this naming which effectively created the community, as it were. This was a
slow process of accretion and identity formation that began after the great
revolt of 1857. Gradually, the colloquial references to the other, signifying
the place of origin (as in the term "Kabuliwallah", immortalized in Tagore's
story), disappeared as a political wedge on religious lines was created and a
pressure group emerged out of the consolidation of a heterogeneous population.
This enforced clubbing together, he argues, finally triggered and made possible
the demand for a separate homeland for the "Muslim".
This line of thinking is - or would be, if they had the capacity to think it
out - quite compatible with the BJP's idea of nationalism, nationhood and
state. But it has been largely ignored. The ban on the book in BJP-ruled
Gujarat quotes the same reason as the party does - Jaswant's not-so-charitable
interpretation of the role played by Patel, who belonged to Gujarat. In India,
where everything tends to take on a political color, the local Congress too
threatened to launch rallies in Gujarat to protest the "tarnishing" of Patel's
image.
All this within two days of the book's launch. Historians, of course, are
taking umbrage at the cheap and dramatic divide that has been sought to be
created between the important Congress personages - Patel, they argue, was as
staunchly secular as Nehru. A counter-view has always existed, reading into
Patel's actions a proto-Hindu right-wingism. This is the reason for the BJP's
frank admiration and reverence for him, and their insistence upon a fault line
between Patel and Nehru. Were they not equally opposed to partition? Was Nehru
to blame for all ills that befell India?
Professor Irfan Habib, a noted historian, pointed out, "One must remember that
the priority before them was Independence. The partition was a secondary
concern. They probably felt that once the British were out of the way,
differences could be resolved, that Pakistan would not be a sustainable entity.
There was a bit of misreading of the British imperialist agenda. Also, people
forget that, over the years, the wars and wrangling over Kashmir has re-imposed
the divide rather than dissolve it."
Not quite appreciating Jaswant-the-politician's foray into their discipline,
historians tend to disagree with his reading of Jinnah. His first three decades
are, of course, unimpeachable - he is the liberal "ambassador of Hindu-Muslim
unity". But both Habib and Sucheta Mahajan (a scholar who has written on the
period) assert that Jinnah between 1931 and 1937 and during the pre-partition
days could hardly be called "secular". He could have been irreligious - he
famously never went to mosques and loved his cognac and pork - but he did
increasingly take on an acutely communal line when he started garnering popular
support for the "Muslim question".
He did pass through degrees of negotiability - various forms of federalism and
"separate electorates" - till he reached his final intractable position on
Pakistan, but he showed an unmistakable capacity to sow and harness the popular
will in a threatening and negative way. His vituperative speech in Madras
around that period, trying to incite a Dravidian revolt against Congress
attempts to be representative of all Indians, shows a less-than-honorable
willingness to go down the Balkanization route merely for reasons of vengeance.
Historians and other authors and biographers of that period are also reminding
the twittering generation that it was Jinnah's call for direct action in 1946
that led to massive rioting in Bengal and made the partition well-nigh
inevitable.
The contrast with Babasaheb Ambedkar, the great Dalit leader and author of
India's constitution, could not be sharper. He had a much deeper historical
grievance, a wound festering for much longer, to address - India's gloriously
iniquitous caste system. He chose to address it in a revolutionary manner,
outside of the Gandhian fold, but in a way that combined the hope of genuine
emancipation for his people (tens of thousands of whom quit the Hindu fold to
become Buddhist) with a keen sense of larger balance and harmony.
More than anything else, Jaswant's book seems to have rekindled interest in a
debate mired in the fading Indian memory of that period. That's without
discounting all the petty politics behind his ouster.
Santwana Bhattacharya is a New Delhi-based journalist who writes on
politics, parliament and elections. She is currently working on a book on
electoral reforms and the emergence of regional parties in India.
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