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ShareMumbai: Was Mohammad Ali Jinnah a scheming, communal nation-divider? Or was he a tipple-loving, horse-race aficionado, who was thrilled to bag a part in a Shakespearean play in London?
At the Mumbai launch of Jaswant Singh's much-publicised book, Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence, on Tuesday, commentators and political historians tried to dissect the real Jinnah. And they ended up analysing the real Jaswant too.
Is Jaswant a villain-glorifying betrayer of national pride, or is he a mature historian holding a mirror up to the Indians when he says that Partition is a shared guilt, so why blame only the Indian Muslims for it? Since the speakers were all friends of Jaswant, there were only eulogies for him.
MJ Akbar, journalist and chairman of Covert, took the myth-busting route to Jinnah, with an engaging, anecdotes-peppered talk about how he loved his drink, often forgot about Ramzan and became communal only when he began aligning himself with the politics of north India.
Sunil Khilnani, a political historian and director of South Asia studies at Johns Hopkins University in the US, chose to focus on the Partition in the context of the rapidly-changing world of the 1930s and 40s. "Jinnah is someone we know very little about," he said."For 13 months, he was an important figure in Indian history. He was not someone para-dropped to apparently hijack India from its supposedly destined path. [Jaswant] Singh is the first member of the political establishment to ask some bold questions."
Mahesh Bhatt talked about how in history, there have "always been attempts to muzzle the storyteller". In doing so, he touched briefly on something that was on everyone's mind: Jaswant's axe from the BJP.
The event, well attended by the 'erudite' Page 3 regulars of the city, there was no Bollywood star, TV actor, model, or restaurateur within miles, was waiting for Jaswant to come up with yet another juicy quote about his recent humiliation. Was he all talked out, or would he throw in another rich analogy from the epics to describe his situation? Would this session turn into a tell-all? The audience waited with bated breath, but Jaswant disappointingly made no reference to it... almost.
Just as the evening seemed to be headed towards a tepid end, the former BJP leader dropped the bombshell. "I'm glad that I was expelled from the party, because that has made people examine issues and question many things," he said.
From one misunderstood politician to another, if Jinnah was around, he too might have said the same about Jaswant's bio of him.
