Jaswant Singh Book on Jinnah

[acharya]

Flawed thesis on partition

A Surya Prakash

Although Mohammed Ali Jinnah propounded the pernicious two-nation theory and forced the partition of India on the ground that Muslims constitute a separate nation, he is not wholly to blame. Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and other Congress leaders who failed to stop Jinnah ought to take the rap. In fact, Nehru is the draftsman of India’s partition! Further, even after partition and the emergence of a secular, democratic India, those Muslims who chose to remain in India find themselves abandoned and bereft of “psychological security” and so, by implication, the secular majority must take the rap!

These are some nuggets from Mr Jaswant Singh’s book, Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence, which has resulted in his ouster from the Bharatiya Janata Party. Mr Singh’s sympathetic treatment of Jinnah, the author of that sinister theory that pitted man against man and resulted in the bloodiest exchange of human populations, not only challenges some of the fundamental beliefs of the BJP but of all Indians. Jinnah claimed that Muslims constituted a separate nation and that they cannot co-exist with Hindus. Jinnah said this a thousand times between 1940-47.

Throughout this period, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, Rajagopalachari and many others tried to talk him out of it. All the initiatives taken by these individuals to avert this tragedy are also fully documented (for key excerpts of all the letters and documents exchanged during those days, see Secular Politics, Communal Agenda by Prof Makkhan Lal, one of our leading historians). Eventually, when all else failed and when members of Jinnah’s Muslim League resorted to barbaric massacre of Hindus in Muslim majority areas, Nehru, Sardar Patel and others gave in to Jinnah’s demand in the hope of stopping the slaughter of the innocents.

The partition meant untold suffering for millions. Over 15 million people were uprooted on both sides of Jinnah’s inhuman divide and over half-a-million were butchered in the senseless communal frenzy. This was the largest killing of human beings instigated by a politician in this part of the world. While the killing of Hindus went on unabated,

Mahatma Gandhi and leaders of the Congress, all of whom were sufficiently indoctrinated in the most noble traditions of secularism and peaceful co-existence by the Mahatma, took firm measures to stem the violence against Muslims on the Indian side.

These are historical facts which are well chronicled. Yet, the burden of Mr Singh’s argument is that the leaders of the Congress must take the blame for partition. Secondly, Mr Singh seems to hold the Hindu majority responsible for the secessionist tendencies among Muslims prior to partition. Finally, lo and behold, even after partition, the Hindu majority must take the blame for the maladjustment of Muslims in democratic India!

We are all now sufficiently familiar with what has become of the Islamic state that Jinnah created and the road traversed by secular, democratic and liberal India. Pakistan is an Islamic Republic which constitutionally prohibits non-Muslims from holding certain public offices. The population of the Hindus in Pakistan has crashed from 25 per cent in 1947 to 1.6 per cent in recent times. For much of the last 62 years that have gone by since partition, Pakistan has been under military dictatorship.

Contrast this with India. The Muslim population in India has risen from around 35 million in 1947 to over 150 million. We have a secular, democratic Constitution that ensures equity and equality. Indeed, we are so secular that since 2004, those who call the shots in India (and this includes the Prime Minister) are non-Hindus. Yet, if you go by Mr Singh’s logic, we get no marks at all for our humanistic approach to life and nation-building.

Shockingly, Mr Singh says, “Those Muslims who remained or were left behind in India now find themselves as almost abandoned, bereft of a sense of real kinship of not being ‘one’, in their entirety with the rest. This robs them of the essence of psychological security”. This is not all. Mr Singh fuels the demand for reservations for Muslims when he says “having once accepted this principle of reservations, circa 1909, then of partition, how can we now deny it to others, even such Muslims as have had to or chosen to live in India? Which is why some voices of Muslim protest now go to the extent of speaking of a ‘Third Partition’.”

In short, Mr Singh’s thesis is terribly flawed. He is so enamoured of Jinnah that he even describes Nehru as “one of the principal architects, in reality the draftsman of India’s partition”. He is also contemptuous of leaders like Nehru and Patel when he says he was struck by “the petty preoccupations of most ‘leaders’ of those times”. His misplaced sympathy for Jinnah and antipathy for Nehru, Patel and other Congress leaders does violence to our secular, democratic ideals even as it treats the perpetrators of religion-based hatred with much compassion and understanding. This is a dangerous argument. Every citizen who values secularism and democracy and hopes for the extension of these ideals, specially into non-secular frontiers like Pakistan, must summarily reject Mr Singh’s formulation.

Equally extraordinary is his claim (despite the thousand cuts inflicted on us by Pakistan, including 26/11) that Pakistan is now “somewhat mellowed” and “accommodative”.

Therefore, our secular, democratic enterprise amounts to nothing but the Islamic state that has crushed religious minorities and is now the epicentre of terrorism is “accommodative”.

Finally, a word about the political fallout of this book. While it must be emphasised that no leader of a party has the right to shock and awe his party colleagues and workers, there is nothing in the book to warrant Mr Singh’s summary expulsion from the BJP. Further, there is hardly any ground for banning the book because there are no references to Sardar Patel or Nehru which warrant a ban. Sadly, the expulsion and the ban in Gujarat have given life to a book that would have otherwise gathered dust in the back shelves of book stores.

If the BJP had treated this book with the contempt it deserves, Mr Singh’s Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence, would have been another ‘weighty’ tome that would have been sold by weight by the publishers from their godowns in Daryaganj after a futile wait for customers. The party has, unfortunately for itself and for our country, given currency to a flawed and muddled thesis that glorifies Muslim communalism and separatism and condemns secular, democratic India and its great leaders.

http://dailypioneer.com/198000/Flawed-thes...-partition.html



August 30, 2009

Editorial

No Jinnah for India

In the collective conscience of India, Mohammad Ali Jinnah is a hate figure like Mohammad Ghori, Mohammad Ghaznavi, Babar and Aurangzeb. Jinnah is disliked more because his actions are fresh in memory, and millions of victims of his hate campaign are still alive.

There have been many attempts to whitewash the crimes-rape, rapine, forced conversion, loot and pillage of temples and mass slaughter of Hindus by the invading Muslim marauders-by Marxist historians like Romila Thapar, RS Sharma and Irfan Habib but no historian worth the name in India dared paint Jinnah a paragon. Because it is an impossible, thankless task.

Every nation has its unique ideas of history, sense of fair play and common memories of friends and enemies. So in Britain one cannot think of making a legend of Napoleon or in the US lionising the actions of Jefferson Davis. These things often may not stand academic scrutiny. It is so because trying to overturn these aspects is to insult the mass conscience. What historians and academics can attempt perhaps becomes taboo for politicians. So wise men avoid treading the area where only fools rush in. It is a matter of inference whether at the formative stage of his politics Jinnah was secular or that in one of his speeches after the formation of Pakistan he became generous and extended an olive branch to the beleaguered minorities in that hot bed of fanatic intolerance. After all, a tree is known by the fruit it bears.

Jinnah to a student of history comes out as the person who effectively and forcefully articulated the insidious thesis of two nation and injected the poison of communal canker and riots in India. He destroyed with lavish conspiratorial assistance from the British the long history of Hindu-Muslim unity displayed repeatedly during the country’s First War of Independence in 1857 and during the fight against the Partition of Bengal in 1905. Jinnah became the architect of Partition. Not once but repeatedly he used direct action-a vicious, vituperative call for mass murder-as a weapon of blackmail to get his way. He did this brutally instigating the massacre of millions of innocent Hindus. His devious ploy was to prove that the Hindus and the Muslims cannot live together. In this, he ensured his leadership by becoming a willing stooge of the British. When India fought the British, he sabotaged the movement by trying to keep the Muslims away from the national mainstream. Jinnah’s 1916 Lucknow Pact with the Congress was a communal charter, which formalised the appeasement Congress strategy, which finally made the Indian Muslim a bargaining chip. He conceived the divisive Muslim attitude of special status instead of equal rights for all. Appeasement led to separatism.

Jinnah cruelly and constantly insulted and heaped abuses on Gandhiji, Nehru and other Congress leaders for their correct and nationalist stand of not accepting Muslim League as the sole representative body of the Muslims. The Congress proved in polls after polls before Partition that it enjoyed the support of more Muslims than Jinnah. A frustrated, piqued and egoist Jinnah characterised Congress a Hindu party, Gandhiji, Nehru and other Congress leaders Hindu leaders and the Congress Muslim leaders like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad as slaves of the Hindus. Even if the Congress wanted, the nation would not have accepted Jinnah as the first prime minister of India. Jinnah playing in the hands of the British not only betrayed the freedom movement but hastened and forced the Partition wading over the rivers of blood of innocent women and children and heaps of dead bodies of countless number of Hindus and Muslims. Such a political cynic should be counted among the barbarians history has witnessed. Their names are not celebrated as emancipators of human race.

http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.p...howpage&pid=306

[acharya]

The BJP loses the plot
Jaswant’s expulsion an exercise in thought control
by B.G. Verghese

THE BJP showed uncanny marksmanship in shooting itself in the foot last week over “Jinnah”. It acted foolishly to display small-minded bigotry and then responded incoherently to ensuing criticism from many quarters. Its treatment of Mr Jaswant Singh, a senior party member and author of a book that was no sin to write but raised pertinent issues that need to be frankly debated in order that the country learn from the past to guide its future, was cavalier and ungracious in the extreme. Clearly, none in the BJP leadership had read the book but felt that any seeming sympathy shown to Jinnah or anything remotely critical of Sardar Patel was anti-national and must immediately be put down. Nehru was, however, fair game. The politics is as plain as the folly.

As surprising was Mr Narendra Modi’s prompt announcement of a ban on the sale in or import into Gujarat of “Jinnah” as its publication was supposedly an insult to the Sardar that no Gujarati would tolerate. This is to demean Patel, who does not need to be protected by small men who seek greatness by association. Mr Advani hardly enhanced his stature by pleading that he remained agonisingly silent because Jaswant had gone against the “core ideology” of the party. But his own rebuttal of the charge that it was Patel who banned the RSS after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 was crudely denigrative. He said that Patel had been “pressurised” by Nehru, thus suggesting that the “iron man” was a man of straw.

Mr Jaswant Singh’s expulsion, which he took with dignity, like the ban on his book, is an exercise in thought-control that is the hallmark of those with fascist and authoritarian tendencies. It is shocking that the Gujarat unit of the Congress welcomed the book ban, which only shows the depths to which competitive politics has sunk at the cost of larger values. This is an assault on freedom of expression and must be both condemned and challenged as an infringement of a cherished fundamental right. Any argument that the reading or sale of “Jinnah” in Gujarat could disturb public order would be a travesty.

The right extremist assault on books, art, drama, film and other forms of expression, culture and creativity has continued unabated and, alas, unchallenged in various parts of the country for years. This must end if we are to remain the liberal and open society that we essentially are. Last week too a college principal and AVBP-affiliated union in Bantwal, near Mangalore, told a newly admitted Muslim undergraduate that she could not wear a headscarf in class as it was a religious symbol. Are then turbans, beards, crosses and hair-tufts to be similarly banned by vigilante groups, who have objected to friendly couples getting together and have used violence to break up inter-faith and cross-gender friendships, let alone marriages?

Assume for a moment that Mr Jaswant Singh had, in fact, been harshly critical of Patel. So what? Are our political heroes above criticism and do they demand blind obedience to protect them from objective intellectual scrutiny? This is the way of fascism and implies a total disregard for the country’s plurality and diversity which is what Hindutva, the renewed BJP-RSS credo after the 2009 electoral debacle, is ultimately about. Mr Advani had a taste of that when he described Jinnah’s August 11 address to the Pakistan constituent assembly as the testament of a secularist. That he was. But, having used Muslim communalism as a tactical ploy, Jinnah unleashed a monster that devoured the state he created, much as his successors have done by nurturing the Taliban and jihadi terror.

Few know that Jinnah had become a prisoner of his own rhetoric and in January 1948, hoist with his own petard, pronounced that Pakistan should adopt an Islamic constitution based on the Sharia. Like Jinnah, the BJP, and Mr Advani as its primary spokesman, have become prisoners of a variously defined but toxic and exclusive Hindutva ideology that they simultaneously embrace and reject as convenient. Thus absurd apologias and extenuations for the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the Gujarat carnage, with Mr Advani expressing some kind of sorrow over the first and exerting himself to protect Mr Modi from punishment in the latter instance. And if Jinnah’s two-nation theory was hatefully communal and divisive, why then eulogise that evil doctrine first propounded by Savarkar in 1927 and later embroidered by the RSS chief, Golwalkar, in “We, Our Nation Defined”. The Parivar’s Indian history is layered with humbug.

In seeking to silence Mr Jaswant Singh, the BJP has punished itself. Such credibility as it had has been further eroded and one can see the party fragmenting or splitting over the next few years. Nationalism is a positive virtue up to a point but chauvinism is a clear and present danger, especially when it invades society and culture and becomes the enemy within. The country needs a strong opposition to provide ballast for a healthy democracy. The NDA might have provided that, but the BJP’s backsliding into the Hindutva embrace once again suggests that this is unlikely to happen. The Left, too, is riven with bitter contradictions and has lost any pretensions to holding the moral high ground. That, too, is suffering erosion and could split.

Either way, the country seems poised for some political re-engineering. Fissures in the Left and Right and deadwood in the Congress have laid the basis for a realignment of forces within and between political boundaries. From this churning could well hopefully emerge new and more vibrant and forward-looking political and social formations for the 21st century. A settlement with Pakistan could catalyse such a process. That is why understanding and debating the recent past, as Mr Jaswant Singh has done, is so important.

[dhu]

Jinx of a djinn(ah)
Chandan Mitra

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->There can be no two opinions that Mohammed Ali Jinnah was among the most malevolent figures in contemporary history. It boggles the mind how a normal, well-educated epitome of the Westernised Oriental Gentleman, who never wore religion on his sleeves, could have convinced an entire generation of Indian Muslims that their destiny lay in vivisecting the homeland of their ancestors. In the process, the pork-eating, whisky-sipping, cigar-smoking barrister from Bombay who even married outside his faith; also caused the greatest mass migration in history to take place, a catharsis that left hundreds of thousands dead, brutally injured, raped and homeless. He further left behind a bitter legacy of discord between the country of his birth and that of its creation. The fragility of his two-nation theory was established with gory certitude when East Pakistan successfully seceded and through a bloody war of liberation Bangladesh was born.

But like all malevolent figures in history, from Atilla the Hun to Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin, Jinnah holds the sub-continent in thrall. Probably it is the sheer mystique of his reclusive personality, discomfort with languages other than English, condescension towards his own party colleagues leave alone the ‘great unwashed masses’ whom he roused to a state of mindless frenzy, all of this makes him an object of repeated biographical inquiry and deconstruction. Many scholarly works, such as those by Stanley Wolpert and Ayesha Jalal, have been penned in recent years. But none has succeeded in penetrating his mask. Nor have they been able to conclusively establish how a man so far removed from the heat and dust of Indian politics managed to build a mass movement of gigantic proportions purely by playing upon the insecurities of his co-religionists.

Adding to his mystique is the fact that he knew he was dying of a debilitating disease but disclosed this to nobody till he achieved his goal of carving out a separate “homeland” for Indian Muslims — a homeland that left at least half of them back in India. His rapid physical degeneration and death within a year of Pakistan’s creation has led many to conjecture that if only Congress leaders knew of his ailment, they might have prolonged negotiations with the British and the Muslim League to a point where a post-Jinnah League would have fractured and Pakistan never happened. These are the proverbial ifs and buts of history, which can neither be proved nor disproved, but make for interesting speculation.

There can be another view of Jinnah that confers on him the mantle of a deliverer who only precipitated the inevitable; that Partition would have happened with or without him because after Direct Action Day, August 16, 1946 in Calcutta, there was no way Hindus and Muslims could have continued to cohabit. It is further contended by votaries of this argument that many more fearsome communal riots would have been engineered in the aftermath of that massacre, leading to thousands of deaths and complete anarchy.

So, the Congress leaders displayed maturity by bending on their knees before Jinnah to concede his one-point agenda. While Jinnah remains a villain according to this school of thought for inciting Muslims to take law into their own hands, proponents of this view say that once he had demonstrated his muscle it was better to surrender before him rather than risk prolonged bloodbath bordering on civil war.

Unfortunately, this argument ignores the massive loss of life and property, dislocation of millions and the anarchy that prevailed across undivided Punjab during the fateful months following the Partition, which most of its victims never believed would actually happen.

Notwithstanding the “secular” sermon that Jinnah delivered to the Constituent Assembly of still-to-be-born Pakistan at Karachi on August 11, 1947, the new State showed no willingness to implement that purported dictum, which seems an aberration in his personality anyway. The “deliverer” argument also founders on the fate of East Pakistan, whose Hindu population at the time of Partition was a very substantial 40 per cent. The merciless manner in which they were turfed out over 20 years carries a tale even more tragic than the one-time transfer of population that happened in Punjab. The hypocritical Nehru-Liaqat Pact by which East Pakistan’s minorities were assured a place under the sun started to be violated even before the ink could dry on the agreement.

Nehru had supreme unconcern for the Eastern part of the country (Assam has not forgotten how he readily made a farewell speech at Tezpur while the Chinese invasion was raging in 1962). He left Bengali refugees at the mercy of marauding East Pakistani hordes and an insensitive regime in New Delhi. Come to think of it, Jinnah was a reviled man in his own community in Bengal, with leaders like Fazlul Haq steadfastly refusing to join the Muslim League.

In other words, Jaswant Singh’s belief that MA Jinnah has been demonised in India is an unacceptable contention: Jinnah hasn’t been demonised; he was a demon. It can even be argued that Pakistan was probably no more than an ego trip for the haughty barrister who considered himself intellectually superior to the entire clutch of Congress leaders and was contemptuous of what he regarded as Gandhi’s fads — khadi, austerity, prevention of cow slaughter and so on. It is true as Singh argues Jinnah was a self-made man of enormous confidence and conviction. But surely he was not the only major historical personality to fit into that category.

Once he was convinced that Congress leaders would never concede the status, which he believed he deserved, he went about systematically carving out his own small world where he could be the undisputed monarch.

Democracy was anathema to him for he insisted it was a euphemism for Hindu domination, probably not foreseeing the subsequent reality of Hindus voting along caste and other lines while Muslims vote as a block. Had he anticipated that he might not have embarked on his diabolical mission to dismember the country for in a democratic but undivided India, Muslims would have held all electoral trump cards if they stayed united.

A final myth remains to be demolished — that of Jinnah being an architect of Hindu-Muslim unity till 1935 and deviating from it only on account of the self-serving machinations of “Hindu” Congress leaders. A man who could derisively refer to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad as Congress’s showboy and refuse to parley with the highly respected theologian must not only be criticised for his maniacal ego but also unseemly denigration of another’s intellect. Further, that so-called ambassador of unity meticulously plotted Direct Action Day and despite its grotesque consequences threatened to serially repeat the carnage all over the country if Pakistan was not conceded.

Revisionism is part of history writing and every generation has the right to revisit the “facts” of history handed down by their predecessors. But there are certain realities that do not merit a sympathetic re-look. The persona of Mohammed Ali Jinnah is one of them.
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[dhu]

<b>Cong threatens protests against attack on Nehru (TOI)</b>

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->NEW DELHI: Jolted by relentless sniping by the BJP-RSS combine at Jawaharlal Nehru, Congress on Wednesday threatened a countrywide movement against attempts to debunk the first PM and “put history in the correct perspective”. Worried over the fallout of the ‘demolish Nehru’ campaign beginning with ousted BJP leader Jaswant Singh’s book, the party said it was planning protests around the country to defend Nehru.

“We have no choice but to hit the road to protect the legacy of the independence movement,” party spokesman Manish Tiwari said.

The sudden rise in the Congress decibel level was prompted by former RSS chief K S Sudarshan’s statement calling Jinnah secular.

“Over the past 10 days the successors of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassins have been trying to distort history,” Tiwari said. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

<b>Jinnah and RSS two sides of the same coin: Cong</b> (TOI)

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->NEW DELHI: Congress on Wednesday advertised its discomfort over the reopening of the debate on Partition, even as it came down hard on former RSS chief K S Sudarshan for describing Pakistan founder M A Jinnah as a “nationalist”.

With expelled BJP leader Jaswant Singh’s book on Jinnah leading to a re-examination of Partition history, including the role of Congress stalwarts such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel in the events leading up to the division of united India, Congress iterated that “if someone was responsible for Partition of the country, it was Jinnah and British colonialism.”

<b>Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari criticised BJP for “trying to become secular by proxy by terming Jinnah as secular.” </b>The party sought to paint BJP-RSS and Jinnah as “communal,” describing them as “two sides of the same coin”.

Congress’ main plank of secularism derives its identity from attacking BJP for being anti-Muslim and by the legacy of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and several other prominent Congress leaders whose role in the freedom movement it highlights from time to time. The crisis within BJP, which has deepened with the publication of Jaswant Singh’s book, is not all good news for Congress either.

Party leaders suggested that the withering of BJP would give fresh impetus to the rise of regional players.<b> Also “secularisation of the BJP” does not really suit Congress, as its claim to be the custodian of secularism would seem hollow without a worthy opponent.</b>

Mr Tewari told reporters that over the last 10 days,<b> those responsible for the killing of Mahatma Gandhi and their ideological followers were once again trying to teach a distorted version of history. </b>“This has not happened for the first time. In the last 62 years, they have tried to twist history time and again. <b>They are the people who had no role in the freedom struggle,” the spokesperson said.</b>

The Congress leader said Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad, Kidwai etc had prevented the Balkanisation of India. Asked about Jinnah’s speech to Pakistan constituent assembly on August 11, 1947, calling for a secular Pakistan, Mr Tewari said it was “hypocrisy”. “It was absolute hypocrisy...It came a year after the Direct Action Plan in which thousands of innocents were killed in Calcutta and Bengal,” he said.

Congress’ impatience with the revisiting, of what a Congress leader described as the “settled” and “canonised” version of history, was also apparent when Mr Tewari, while replying to a question on the drought from the media, prefaced his reply by noting that<b> “modern India” was not preoccupied with “history.”</b>
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To be charitable, Jaswant may be trying to change the meaning of "secular', almost like saying that Nazis are Christian. Shourie refuted Jaswant Singh's claims about Jinnah recently, I cannot find the article.

[Husky]

<!--QuoteBegin-dhu+Aug 27 2009, 12:55 PM-->QUOTE(dhu @ Aug 27 2009, 12:55 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Shourie refuted Jaswant Singh's claims about Jinnah recently, I cannot find the article.[right][snapback]100712[/snapback][/right]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->This one?
www.indianexpress.com/news/a-few-extracts-from-the-book/506752/0
"A few extracts from the book"
(via http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/08/sho...-one-will.html )

Still on Arun Shourie, here's another

[dhu]

Husky, that is the one by Shourie. Thanks

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/a-few-ex...e-book/506752/0

[Bodhi]

email

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Modi government's ban on Jaswant Singh's Jinnah book is one sign too many of the Hindutva predisposition to solving debates by means of muzzling. But it was right to disapprove of the book's misrepresentation of history, and this not only regarding the role of Gujarat's hero Sardar Patel.

On one point, Jaswant is right: Jinnah was truly a great man. But for the opposite reason than the one he gives: not for being a "secular" guardian of Muslim interest (note the Nahruvian-secularist contradiction in terms: a guardian of one community's interests is by definition communalist, even if he does so by peaceful means and cooperation, as Jinnah did in the 1916 Lucknow Pact), but for achieving the territorial relaization of Muslim communalism, viz. Partition. Jinnah was a man of impressive strength, for he forced a political arrangement on an unwilling majority, on the colonial overlords and even on a large part of his own community.

Contrary to what Congress secularists and Hindu nationalists claim, the British did not engineer nor even favour partition. India's numerous white-supremacists, of both the secular and the Hindutva variety, refuse to concede agency to mere natives and insist that anything of consequence must have a white hand behind it, i.c. British machinations behind the Partition. But in reality, Jinnah was very much his own man, pursuing the non-white agenda of Islam, not at all a British stooge. Viceroys Linlithgow and Wavell told Jinnah they would never countenance the division of their neat and well-integrated empire, and Mountbatten only gave in under Jinnah's forceful pressure, which made Partition seem inevitable. Additionnally, the changing world situation after WW2 with the incipient Cold War made the British government see emerging opportunities in a partitioned India (viz. to enlist Pak in the Western alliance), so they reconciled themselves to it. But all through, the initiative for Partition was with Jinnah.

In comparison, Gandhi and the Congress leaders were small men, or at any rate very ineffective strategists. They had the majority with them, the British and a section of the Muslims, yet they failed to achieve their objective of keeping India united. One of their main weaknesses was the one still afflicting Jaswant Singh, Advani and most Sangh people: a complete failure (or refusal) to understand Islam. With that mindset, they had no chance of defeating a determined Islamic attack.

Of course there is a difference between a failure to outwit Jinnah so as to prevent Partition, of which failure the Congress leaders were indeed guilty, and a deliberate complicity in the Partition, of which Jaswant Singh (along with Nathuram Godse) accuses them. They opposed Partition but grudgingly buckled under Muslim pressure.

As for the massive bloodshed accompanying Partition, here guilt is a bit more evenly divided. At the time, Dr. Ambedkar had floated the suggestion of a complete exchange of population, making India as Muslim-free as Pakistan would (eventually) becomre Hindu-free. Jinnah was willing to consider this, along with Rajaji, Patel, Morarji Desai and others, and Nehru whose focus then was on securing his own PM ambitions would have gone along, but the man who put his foot down against this lives-saving proposal was Gandhi. Much as I respect Shourie and his veneration for Gandhi, my study of the events only tells me that Gandhi bears an enormous guilt for making the Partition, once accepted, far bloodier than it need have been. Moreover, the non-exchange of population has led to the continuation of Hindu-Muslim violence long after Partition, including the Hindu genocide of 1971 in East Bengal, and we haven't seen the end of it yet. Gandhiji has a sea of blood on his hands. The Congress leaders are indirectly guilty in that they kept on defering to him and didn't show him his place on the dungheap of history.

Except for Ambedkar, few people at the time reasoned: "We'd be better off without the Muslims." Hindus including the Hindu Mahasabha were too multicultural ("secular") for that. Pakistan, by contrast, was built on the Muslim rejection of multicultural coexistence. Imagine what India could have been today for Hindus if the exchange had taken place. No Babri Masjid complications, Hindu sacred places would of course have been under Hindu control. Sanskrit could have taken its rightful place. One modern civil code for all. Bollywood cinema would have been far more Indian, Hindu films would have been not Urdu but Hindi. Issues could have been debated and policies decided on their own merits without always having to be sidetracked by communal considerations.

Girilal Jain is of course right to say that Partition gave Hindu society another lease of life, which Muslims in a united India would never have conceded to them. But tghat window of opportunity doesn't last forever. If they allow power equations to develop similar to those of the 1940s, the outcome may be similar to Jinnah's victory 14 August 1947. This is all the more likely if Hindu leaders cultivate the same babes-in-the-wood approach of their 1940s predecessors. Of that mentality, Jaswant Singh's book, like Advani's earlier Jinnah comments, is a sad example. Not because he extols Jinnah and depreciates Nehru and Patel, but because his analysis is informed by a total ignorance of Islamic politics.

Even sadder is that in all the reactions to his books, this same ignorance and incomprehension of (or at least indifference to) Islamic politics remains in evidence. On this topic, the whole of India seems to be in the dark. Not even "groping in the dark", for someone who is groping at least understands that he lacks something and needs to find it. Most Indians in this debate seem perfectly satisfied with their ignorance.

Kind regards,
KE
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[Guest]

Some of the reactions to JS's 'research' are just too wild - wildest being JS's own reactions. The two reactions that have stood out in my mind have been

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/21615/...res-bjp-ku.html

Here JS, a former foreign minister , supposedly a deep-research-type, also supposedly familiar with diplomatese, goes on to compare BJP with KKK. So what is KKK known for ? Having chintan-baithak and expelling people from political parties ? This stmt is like saying my-dad-is-like-hitler. Most people around the world think hitler was a jew-hater while people in India think hitler was a strict disciplinarian.

Such stmts from normal folks is ok but when it comes from JS, with the host of senior positions he has held in the past - i dont know. To me it seems like he has gone senile.

=============

The other wild reaction that is probably the most hilarious is when people accuse JS-expulsion as "anti democratic". I seriously do not understand what is so anti-democratic about this ? The man has gone senile - he likes to throw nataks on national TV - the hell with the party and you want the party to have a scholarly debate with him ? There is something totally wrong with this picture.

[Guest]

Gootyji,

Jaswnt should have been asked to explain or retract his statement so he will have an opportunity to stay with the party or desert it.

That opportunity was denied. That was dictatorial.

As things unfold, Advani is getting cornered. He was party to the shameful barter with the terrorists and he had lied about it. Would you agree that his decision to sticking to the leadership is doing greater damage? We will know from the state elections that are to follow shortly.

RSS is damn useless. Perhaps it was guilty of the rot.

[acharya]

Advani, Jaswant should explain Jinnah glorification: Congress
PTI
New Delhi, August 27, 2009

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has said attempts were being made to vilify Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in the wake of expelled BJP leader Jaswant Singh's book on Mohammad Ali Jinnah and said it was a malicious campaign to distort history for narrow partisan interests.

He also attacked attempts to make out that Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, the leader of the Hindu Mahasabha, the progenitor of the latter day Jana Sangh and BJP, and Jinnah had no role in partition.

Mukherjee made sarcastic references to senior BJP leader L.K. Advani's controversial visit to Pakistan in 2005 and Jaswant Singh's book on Jinnah and said they should explain the psychology behind glorifying Jinnah.

"BJP leaders should explain. When Advani will go to Pakistan, he will discover that Jinnah is secular. Jaswant Singh suddenly discovered that he was not responsible (for partition). He wanted a united India. These are not historically correct," he said in the first high-level reaction from Congress to Singh's book.

"This is mudslinging and vilification. An attempt is being made to vilify Jawaharlal Nehru by accusing him of being responsible for the partition of India. This is a malicious campaign completely ignoring the facts pertaining to the partition and an attempt to distort history for narrow partisan interest," Mukherjee said.

Mukherjee said his point was that Nehru's evaluation would be done by history.

"He has left behind a strong, vibrant, functional parliamentary democracy and a well laid-out Constitution which is regarded as the Magna Carta of the socio-economic transformation," he said.

The minister said all the effective institutions to support democracy like an independent election commission, free media, independent judiciary and all the institutional arrangements were made by Nehru.

"So he has left a legacy of democracy, liberalism. In international politics he has given the Non-Alignment Movement," he said.

Asked why Jinnah was being glorified periodically by BJP leaders, he said, "I am not going to analyse it but they should not do it. Every individual is free to express his opinion even in writing by writings books. But you cannot denigrate somebody which is not historically correct and factually acceptable."

To a query whether history was being made to suit domestic political ends, he said, after all these types of observations, Advani ultimately had to back out or at least he left them aside. He did not go further but he had to face criticism in his party, he said.

Mukherjee said it was a well-known fact that Jinnah's two-nation theory, vigorously propagated by Muslim League with the support of the then ruling colonial power, ultimately resulted in partition of India and creation of two countries - India and Pakistan.

"From the late 30s, Jinnah and Muslim League persistently pressurised the British government to concede to their demands to establish Pakistan," he said.

The minister said after the general elections to provincial assemblies in 1946 when Muslim League got absolute majority in undivided Bengal and Sindh Legislative Assemblies and fell short of majority in Punjab, the Muslim League stepped up their demand for Pakistan and declared that August 16 be observed as 'Direct Action Day' all over India for establishment of Pakistan.

On August 16, fierce communal riots broke out in Kolkata and continued for several days. This triggered off the worst communal riots in Bihar, Noakhali (Bengal), Punjab and many other parts of the country.

In that context, the Cabinet Mission appointed by the then British government along with Lord Mountbatten, Governor General of India, presented the plan of partition of India into two countries.

This was ultimately accepted by the political leadership including Congress, Muslim League, Hindu Mahasabha and others, he said.

[acharya]

<!--QuoteBegin-"shravan"+-->QUOTE("shravan")<!--QuoteEBegin-->==========================

http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/p...9-wm-45-9-9.pdf
Printed for the War Cabinet. January 1945.

That evening a press report had been received from which it
appeared that Mr. Jinnah declined all responsibility for whatever
talks there might have been between Liaqat Ali Khan and Desai.
Liaqat Ali Khan had also made a speech reiterating the demands
put forward on behalf of the Muslim League by Mr. Jinnah in the
autumn of 194Q.

http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/p...9-wm-45-9-9.pdf

==========================

http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/p...cm-46-76-14.pdf
Mr. Jinnah's non-co-operation to hold up progress with the forma­
tion of an Interim Government. The telegram had proposed that
the next step should be for the Viceroy to see Mr. Jinnah and
endeavour to persuade him, even now, to allow members of the
Muslim League to enter the proposed Interim Government. The
Secretary of State for India now proposed that a further telegram
(Annex II I to C P . (46) 315) should be sent to the Viceroy I
indicating the policy which he should adopt if Mr. Jinnah was
unwilling to co-operate in the formation of an Interim Government.
The Secretary of State for India reported that since C P . (46)
315 had been circulated a telegram had been received from the
Viceroy to the effect that he was sure it would not be advisable for
him to see Mr. Jinnah immediately. The Viceroy wished to put
on Congress the responsibility for any attempt to satisfy the League.

http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/p...cm-46-76-14.pdf

==========================

http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/p...wp-42-271-1.pdf
June 27, 1942.
POLIC Y TO BE ADOPTE D TOWARD S MR . GANDHI .

http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/p...wp-42-271-1.pdf

==========================

http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/p...-cm-47-50-1.pdf
May 1 9 4 7

While Mr. Jinnah had always claimed that Pakistan would wish to remain within the British Commonwealth, it had been the policy of the Congress Party that India should be a sovereign independent republic and they had seamed a resolution to that effect in the Constituent Assembly.

http://filestore.nationalarchives.gov.uk/p...-cm-47-50-1.pdf

==========================<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[acharya]

However, I dislike the partition of India, I feel whatever happened was for good. My assessment is that Hindus were week at the time of partition (being out of power for 1,000 years) and Muslims would have dominated them. Moreover liberal out look of Hindus would have resulted in more appeasement of Muslims making the United India ungovernable. I would call it a good riddance.

Division of India has resulted in division of Muslims into three different entities and they have grown week. It is the muslims who have suffered in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh in last 60 years and whereas Hindus have prospered during this time. Hindus have now started to think freely and I feel in time to come will dominate Muslims more.

Muslims have now become rudderless – they are confused lot. In India they dont know whom to support – their own Muslim brothers who are Jihadist or secular people (who are kafirs). I can vouch that on outside most support the secularist but deep inside they all have sympathies for Jihadist. In Pakistan – the situation is worst they dont like USA but are completely dependent on it. Even the bread they eat is courtsey USA. So they are against the one who feeds them. It is a pathetic situation to be in. For Bangladesh – less said the better.

I feel it that theory of Karma that is taking place – Muslims had bad intension and have committed grave sins and are suffering because of it and i dont see any hope of them coming out of it. I hope they keep on this downward swirl till Islam is extricated from the face of earth.

Faithfreedom – keep up the good work, Thanks for all the knowledge made available by you.

[acharya]

<b>Nehru or Jinnah: Who Divided India?</b>
http://www.faithfreedom.org/2009/08/27/neh...-divided-india/

Posted by M A Khan on 8/27/09 • Categorized as Op-Ed

‘We shall have India divided or we shall have India destroyed.’

This is what Jinnah said in the course of India’s independence. And it indeed became a reality.

There was uproar in Indian on Thursday, August 19, over former Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh’s expulsion from the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, because his new book holds Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister and freedom struggle icon, responsible for India’s partition in 1947, while praising Jinnah on the issue.

While Singh’s sacking is a different matter, but Jinnah’s above statement, which turned the reality, simply means that Singh shifted the blame for the partition from Jinnah’s shoulder to Nehru’s.
<b>
The partition of India had been decided at least in 1930, when Muhammad Iqbal, Pakistan’s spiritual and ideological father, zealously preached in his Presidential Address at the All India Muslim League Meet in Allahabad that ‘The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other’, and then went on two propose the Two Nation theory: ‘I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state… the formation of a consolidated Northwest Indian Muslim state appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of Northwest India.’ And of course, with the Muslim League’s adoption of ‘Pakistan Resolution’ at Lahore in 1940, it had been sealed; it was only about time.</b>

Any further attempts to keep India united by Hindus and a handful of nationalist Muslim leaders (Abul Kalam Azad and Fazlul Haq etc.) were destined to failure.

Singh’s thesis is based on the argument of Maulana Azad, India’s first Education Minister, who, in his book, “India Wins Freedom”, argued that the partition could have been avoided had Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel shown some flexibility over the Cabinet Mission plan.

According to Singh, ‘Nehru believed in a highly centralised polity. That’s what he wanted India to be. Jinnah wanted a federal polity. That even Gandhi accepted. Nehru didn’t. Consistently, he stood in the way of a federal India until 1947 when it became a partitioned India.’

Jinnah was leading the separatist movement as early as 1937, when Iqbal wrote to him: ‘Why should not the Muslims of North-West India and Bengal be considered as nations entitled to self-determination just as other nations in India and outside India are.’ This, according to Iqbal, was need for saving ‘Muslims from the domination of Non-Muslims’.

Just before his death in 1938, Iqbal urged that ‘Muslims should strengthen Jinnah’s hands’ for achieving Pakistan, adding: ‘People say our demands smack of communalism. This is sheer propaganda. These demands relate to the defence of our national existence.’

Efforts to keep India united, continued nonetheless. The 1946 British Cabinet Mission to India released a plan on May 16, calling for a united India, comprising considerably autonomous provinces, formed on the basis of religion. The Congress initially rejected the plan, and the British Mission to release a second plan on June 16, calling for the Partition along religious lines. Jinnah, hoping that power would go only to the party that supported the plan, gave the League’s assent to both plans. But the Congress, eventually, accepted the May 16 proposal, rejecting the other, thus, spoiling Jinnah’s hope of grabbing all the power.
Disappointed for failing to grab all power, Jinnah reluctantly negotiated the formation of an interim government for federalist India. Advised by Jinnah, the British Mission first proposed formation of an interim government having equal number of Hindu and Muslim representatives. Muslims, being only about 20% of the population to 75% Hindus, the Congress objected to this arrangement, but agreed to a 12-member cabinet having 6 Hindu, 5 Muslim and another representative from remaining religious groups. However undemocratic, this was a jolly-good deal of Muslims, but Jinnah, who had hoped for all power, would not accede to anything less than 50% Muslim representation, which fitted well with Muslim League’s propaganda that ‘One Muslim should get the right of five Hindus’.

As the new proposal was supported by the British as well, Jinnah condemned the British negotiators of treachery, and quickly washed his hands off further negotiations. He called a Muslim League meet in Bombay on 29 July 1946. Its resolution said, ‘It has become abundantly clear that the Muslims of India would not rest with anything less than the immediate establishment of an independent and full sovereign State of Pakistan’ and urged upon the Muslim masses to undertake ‘Direct Action to achieve Pakistan and get rid of the present slavery under the British and contemplated future caste Hindu domination.’

When Jinnah was pressed on whether the Direct Action would be violent, he ominously replied: ‘I am not going to discuss ethics. We have a pistol and are in a position to use it.’ On his violent instigation, UK’s News Chronicle wrote: ‘…there can be no excuse for the wild language and abandonment of negotiations… Mr. Jinnah is totally wedded to complete intransigence, if, as now seems the case, he is really thirsting for a holy war.’

News Chronicle was prophetic concerning Jinnha’s thirst for “holy war”. There started the Direct Action on 16 August 1946 in Calcutta, the capital of Muslim-majority Bengal (53.4% Muslim), having a Muslim League government. Direct Action was a Jihad for Jinnah and his Muslim League, in the likeness of Prophet Muhammad’s stunning victory at Badr against a much stronger Meccan force; and Jinnah chose the date for Direct Action, coinciding with the day of Badr Jihad, 18th of Ramadan. A Muslim League propaganda pamphlet, read out in mosque sermons, said:

Muslims must remember that it was in Ramzam that the Quran was revealed. It was in Ramzan that the permission for Jehad was granted. It was in Ramzam that the battle of Badr, the first open conflict between Islam and Heathenism [i.e., idolatry, which equates Hinduism] was fought and won by 313 Muslims; and again it was in Ramzan that 10,000 under the Holy Prophet conquered Mecca and established the kingdom of Heaven and the commonwealth of Islam in Arabia. Muslim League is fortunate that it is starting its action in this holy month.

By the grace of God, we are ten cores [100 millions] in India but through our bad luck we have become slaves of the Hindus and the British. We are starting a Jehad in Your Name in this very month of Ramzan. Pray make us strong in body and mind—give Your helping hand in all out actions—make us victorious over the Kafers…

And the rest is history. Excited by inflammatory speeches of Muslim League leaders, the Muslim mob, after the rally, attacked the innocent Hindus and other non-Muslims of Calcutta, unleashing horrible slaughter, rape and arson for one-and-a-half days, before the Hindus and Sikhs (two-third of the population in Calcutta) hit back in like manners. Some 5,000 were dead with ~43% Muslim victims in one count—not as pretty a success as Prophet Muhammad achieved at Badr.

Nonetheless, this set off chain-reaction of violence from East Bengal to West Punjab leading to eventual partition in August 14-15, 1947. And until July 1947, violence was committed almost exclusively by Muslims, except in Bihar (Oct. 1946), where Hindus retaliated against Muslims, reacting to local Muslim instigations, and to their attacks and massacres of Hindus in Calcutta and East Bengal.

Thereafter, the Sikhs and Hindus hit back in East Punjab, as the partition was eventually agreed upon. The rest we all know: massacre of up to two million (evenly divided between Muslims and non-Muslims), rapes of hundreds of thousands (mostly Hindu & Sikh women), forced conversion of millions of non-Muslims and displacement of some 20 million across the border.

Concerning, who was responsible for the partition, enough evidence is presented above. Sri Aurobindo said, ‘The idea of two nationalities in India is only a new-fangled notion invented by Jinnah for his purposes and contrary to the facts’. Hindu Mahasabha leader, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, told the United Provinces Hindu Conference on October 8, 1944: ‘The sooner Mr. Jinnah understands that Pakistan in any form or shape will be resisted by Hindus and many others with the last drop of blood, the better for him…’

Nehru, for himself, was staunchly opposed to the partition, and blamed in his writings, wrongly and unequivocally, the British for forcing the partition upon the harmonious brotherhood (which never existed) of Hindus and Muslims. We have seen too many evidences of Jinnah’s campaign for the partition, but not a single statement, opposing it.

As concerns Nehru’s lack of flexibility in forming the Interim Cabinet, it is absurd on the part of Azad and Singh to suggest that Nehru showed no flexibility. He had flexibility way to much by allowing 5 Muslim representatives in a cabinet of 12, when they deserved only 2. What Nehru didn’t do is to be ridiculously flexible.

Even if Nehru did that, it was not going to be sustainable in popular democracy that India had proudly emerged as. The result would have been a recipe probably for greater horror, at a later.

—

Fore more information on this issue, consult Justice GD Khosla’s “Stern Warning” and my “Islamic Jihad”.

[Guest]

More senile stmts from JS.

http://news.rediff.com/report/2009/aug/28/...ays-jaswant.htm

Advani at the centre of cash-for-vote drama: Jaswant

[acharya]

Partition, Aurobindo, and the truth
Claude Arpi
2009-08-28 19:57:32
Last Updated: 2009-08-28 21:26:31

"To find out where the truth lies, you should not depend on certain things: the first is tradition. Also do not depend on hearsay, on the scriptures, on rumours. Do not decide on the good and bad only on the good reputation of a teacher, or on the appearances of things. Remember also that you do not have the means to know all the facts of truth; therefore, you should not come to the conclusion, 'My conclusion is the only true one, everything else is false'. You would become dogmatic."

Thus spoke Gautama Buddha more than 2,500 years ago.

"As the wise test gold by burning, cutting and rubbing it (on a piece of touchstone), so are you to accept my words only after examining them and not merely out of regard for me," he added.

Who remembers this today?

For some, history has only to fit around tradition or ideology. Unfortunately for these new proponents of 'historical' orthodoxy, life or individuals are not just black or white. Some actors may have larger dark spots, others more white ones, but all have shades of grey.

It is not my purpose here to go into the rights or wrongs of Jaswant Singh's book on Mohammed Ali Jinnah (which I have not yet read), but the Enlightened One's words, "we have no means to know the entire truth" are probably true for the history of the Partition.

India's Hindu party expels leader in new Partition row

Though we can get several glimpses, it is practically impossible to pass a final judgement on who were the "guilty men of the Partition". The truth of one sympathiser of Mountbatten will be different than one of Jinnah, Nehru or Patel.

But to ban a book because it does not paint the baddies black and the good guys white and therefore does not fit the Party line may be acceptable in a totalitarian China, but certainly not in the largest democracy of the world.

In the Partition tragedy, all actors have played their role. The cast was probably not good, but who could change it? The 'entire' truth which led to the final disaster is probably an addition of several smaller truths. One of the truths which is often forgotten is the strategic importance of Pakistan for the British.

London needed airbases in Pakistan (and would have been delighted to have some in Kashmir) to control the Soviet advances in Afghanistan and Central Asia; further an Islamic State as ally of London was useful for the British dealings in the Middle East.

Another interesting fact was expressed by Jawaharlal Nehru himself in 1956.

Speaking about the acceptance of the Partition by the Congress, he told his biographer Michael Brecher: "Well, I suppose it was the compulsion of events and the feeling that we wouldn't get out of that deadlock or morass by pursuing the way we had done; it became worse and worse. Further a feeling that even if we got freedom for India with that background, it would be very weak India, that is a federal India with far too much power in the federating units."

"The truth is that we were tired men and we were getting on in years too," he told Leonard Mosley in 1960. "Few of us could stand the prospect of going to prison again and if we had stood out for a united India as we wished it, prison obviously awaited us. We saw the fires burning in the Punjab and heard every day of the killings. The plan for partition offered a way out and we took it."

Gujarat bans Jaswant's book

Yet another important angle of the Partition saga which is omitted from history books but is vital to understand this puzzle, is the intervention of Sri Aurobindo, the great Indian rishi living in Pondicherry.
As he stated himself, he "always stood for India's complete independence…. [I] was the first to advocate [it] publicly and without compromise as the only ideal worthy of a self-respecting nation” in the early years of the 20th century.

In 1910, he had predicted that "after a long period of wars, world-wide upheavals and revolutions beginning after four years [1914], India would achieve her freedom". In the forties, he saw that "freedom was coming soon and nothing could prevent it ... [and he had] always foreseen that eventually Britain would approach India for an amicable agreement conceding her freedom."

Though Sri Aurobindo had retired from active political life after April 1910, in 1920 he was asked to rejoin the national movement and play a role in Indian politics. He refused, preferring to concentrate his energies on his integral sadhana.

But in 1940, when the entire humanity was faced with the grave danger of subjugation by the Nazi regime, he took a strong political stand by sending 10,000 francs to the French Caisse de Defense Nationale and Rs. 1000 to the Viceroy's War Fund. He explained: "[his] entire support for the British people and the Empire in their struggle against the aggressions of the Nazi Reich and our complete sympathy with the cause for which they are fighting. We feel that not only is this a battle waged in just self-defence and in defence of the nations threatened with the world-domination of Germany and the Nazi system of life, but that it is a defence of civilisation and its highest attained social, cultural and spiritual values and of the whole future of humanity."

Two years later, the war took another turn with the Japanese entry into the war on the side of Nazis. Singapore fell in February 1942; Malaya was overrun and the Japanese troops soon entered Burma, closing in on India's borders. "For it was quite clear that the Japanese intended to invade India from the east through Burma and Manipur," wrote historian RC Majumdar. "No doubt was left on this point by the propaganda through radio that the Japanese were coming to deliver India from the yoke of the British."

The Indian leaders were in a dilemma: they knew how Japan had treated China and its Army was not welcome, but India wanted also to see the British out of the subcontinent.

It was in these circumstances that on March 23, 1942, Sir Stafford Cripps, a member of the War Cabinet, arrived in India with a proposal from the British government which was made public on March 30. As he put it, to achieve “the earliest possible realisation of self-Government in India, the British Government propose that steps should be taken to create a new Indian Union which will have the full status of a Dominion."

Key excerpts from Jaswant Singh's book

Many believed that the despatch of the Cripps Mission was mainly due to the pressure of the US President, Roosevelt. A US Senate had stated: "The American people would expect this Government to do everything within its power to obtain military participation by India... even though we had to go to the extent of dictating to England what she should do with regard to India ..."

Sri Aurobindo immediately saw that it was the opportunity for India to remain united and that if the proposals were not accepted, grave consequences would follow. On March 31, he sent a telegram to Cripps offering his 'public adhesion' to the proposal: "I welcome it as an opportunity given to India to determine for herself and organise in all liberty of choice her freedom and unity and take an effective place among the world's free nations. I hope that it will be accepted and the right use made of it putting aside all discords and divisions." Discords and divisions would only get worse with the years.

The next day, Sri Aurobindo sent his disciple, S. Duraiswami, a prominent Chennai lawyer, as his personal representative to Delhi to speak to members of the Congress Working Committee. Duraiswami was also to meet Dr. BS Moonje, Sri Aurobindo's former colleague and a leader of the Hindu Mahasabha.

The next day, Cripps cabled back Sri Aurobindo that he was "most touched and gratified by your kind message allowing me to inform India that you, who occupy unique position in imagination of Indian youth, are convinced that declaration of his Majesty's Government substantially confers that freedom for which Indian nationalism has so long struggled."

Despite Cripps' best efforts (as well as those of Colonel Johnson, the Special Envoy of Roosevelt), the proposal was rejected by the Congress. Duraiswami was received with disparaging remarks. Probably the only chance to keep the subcontinent united was lost by human intransigence. Fate had to follow its course.

Nirodbaran, one of Sri Aurobindo's attendants later wrote; "His seer-vision saw that the Proposals had come on a wave of divine inspiration. The scene is still fresh in our memory. It was the evening hour. Sri Aurobindo was sitting on the edge of his bed just before his daily walking exercise."

Nirodbaran added: "Duraiswamy went with India's soul in his 'frail' hands and brought it back, downhearted, rewarded with ungracious remarks for the gratuitous advice."

Another disciple, Indra Sen, accompanying Duraiswami wrote: "We met the members individually and the sense of the reactions were more or less to this effect: Sri Aurobindo has created difficulties for us by his message to Cripps. He doesn't know the actual situation, we are in it, we know better... and so on."

This episode is perhaps not the entire truth about the Partition, but the Cripps' Mission and its refusal has certainly been a critical turning point.

When the rejection was officially announced, Sri Aurobindo quietly said: "I knew it would fail."

Nirodbaran wrote: "We [the close disciples] at once pounced on it and asked him, 'Why did you then send Duraiswami at all?' 'For a bit of niskama karma,' was his calm reply, without any bitterness or resentment."

Yogis are not attached to the fruit of their actions, even if they have to perform them.

It is clear that India missed the boat in 1942. Later, bitterness increased and positions hardened, but unfortunately when Sri Aurobindo had pointed out the golden opportunity, Gandhi, Nehru and other great Congress (as well as the Hindu Mahasabha) leaders were not ready to listen.

India is still paying for the short-sightedness of its leaders.

And of course, Jinnah was the most intransigent of all of them.


Born in Angouleme, France, Claude Arpi's real quest began 36 years ago with a journey to the Himalayas. Since then he has been an enthusiastic student of the history of Tibet, China and the subcontinent. He is the author of numerous English and French books including. His book, Tibet: the lost Frontier (Lancers Publishers) was released recently.

[Guest]

More nonsense. Like clockwork.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/P...how/4949079.cms

One has to understand Jinnah to know Pakistan: Jaswant

---------

and to top it all...

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->"T<b>he original title of my book was very long, 'Mohammed Ali Jinnah: Journey from an Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity in India to Quaid-e-Azam in Pakistan'. My American publishers did not like it.</b> They are ignorant about Jinnah or India's partition. They don't understand Indian history unless you compare it with the American civil war," Singh maintained. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS/In...how/4951489.cms
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Maintaining he had no plans to join another political party <b>for the moment</b>

....

"A soldier disagrees, a soldier does not mutiny... unless the provocation is extreme. Mutiny is not part of psyche," he replied, when asked why he did not go public earlier with the allegation. "Lots of people have told me that <b>I am not really a politician</b> and still imbued by the value systems of the soldier. I have not been able to become <b>a politician that exploits a situation or backstabs.</b>"

Jaswant Singh also held that the BJP's challenge was to redefine itself if it has to attract youth and project a 21st century image.

"<b>The BJP should </b>not come across as a 19th century organisation raising obsolete issues. <b>In politics,</b> perceptions are just as important if not more important than reality. Ram Setu and Babri Masjid are non-issues for people now."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS/In...how/4951489.cms

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Maintaining he had no plans to join another political party <b>for the moment</b>

....

"A soldier disagrees, a soldier does not mutiny... unless the provocation is extreme. Mutiny is not part of psyche," he replied, when asked why he did not go public earlier with the allegation. "Lots of people have told me that <b>I am not really a politician</b> and still imbued by the value systems of the soldier. I have not been able to become <b>a politician that exploits a situation or backstabs.</b>"

Jaswant Singh also held that the BJP's challenge was to redefine itself if it has to attract youth and project a 21st century image.

"<b>The BJP should </b>not come across as a 19th century organisation raising obsolete issues. <b>In politics,</b> perceptions are just as important if not more important than reality. <b>Ram Setu and Babri Masjid are non-issues</b> for people now."<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

BJP's response should have been.. Sure, Jinnah is secular, Secular means anti-hindu. Nehru is also secular. But they have still not figured out what is "secular" and "liberal". It is simply another stick to beat the heathen.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I am not really a politician and still imbued by the value systems of the soldier. I have not been able to become a politician that exploits a situation or backstabs." <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Of course, he is not a politican. He is a Rajya Sabha member, nominated by BJP!!!

[Guest]

<b>Jinnah and Secularism: Crime of Jinnah </b>
By: Dr.Dipak Basu
Aug-24-2009
http://www.blogs.ivarta.com/Jinnah-Secular...ah/blog-301.htm