The rise, fall and rise of Jaswant Singh

The official website of the Bharatiya Janata Party has no record of any leader named Jaswant Singh who was till the other day one of its most senior and respected members.
Though the search for his name throws up 108 references, only one — a three para press release announcing he has been expelled — actually refers to him. The rest are irrelevant.

This is reminiscent of hardcore Stalinist parties, where a person becomes a "non-person" once he falls out of favour. Official records expunge his names and even his face is airbrushed out of old photographs. Verily it is said that the right and left parties have more in common with each other than they realise.

But of course we live in a noisy democracy and you cannot wish Jaswant Singh away. The media will take care of that. Post his dismissal, Jaswant Singh is more in the news than he ever was and is gradually emerging as a kind of folk hero, the misunderstood and injured man who paid a heavy price for just writing a book.

What should have been hailed as an example of scholarship and inquiry for other BJP members to follow instead turned into an act of villainy and betrayal. The BJP has an uncomfortable relationship with history; only received wisdom and sanctioned versions will do.

These are based on easily digestible mini-bites rather than serious research: Nehru, bad, Sardar Patel, good, Jinnah, evil incarnate, etc. Too much digging becomes uncomfortable — it was not Jinnah who proposed the two-nation theory first, it was Veer Savarkar, or that Patel was no Muslim-baiter and had actually banned the RSS.

Jaswant Singh's crime was going beyond these caricatures and clichés. Perhaps his publisher's decision to release all the sensationalist bits to boost sales also rebounded.
All kinds of conspiracy theories have been suggested about why Jaswant chose to write this book, but we get a hint in an interview he gave to a Pakistani journalist Anjum Niaz a couple of years ago.

"I was unable to convince myself that Mohammad Ali Jinnah was a demon (as some Indians believe). I was also unable to convince myself of the ideography of Jinnah as some in Pakistan believe. He was neither. He was a man of flesh and blood," Singh is quoted as saying. No doubt Singh was fascinated by his fellow Anglophile and the fact that his party colleagues hated Jinnah wouldn't have mattered to him.

Singh has always been a bit of an oddball. Not much is known of Singh's early life except that he went straight from school into the army. After he retired he is said to have represented some foreign companies in India.

Though not an academic, Singh has always thought of himself as a bit of an intellectual —he likes to read a lot and was also a columnist for a business magazine for a long time. He has also developed a persona of being a "burra sahib" in a party of desi/swadesi types, Anglisised and a man of refinement, far above the rest of the BJP types. A diplomat who worked with Singh when he was minister of external affairs recalls going into his office and being told, "I am the only minister who listens to Mozart at work."

Though Singh was part of the original founders of the BJP in 1980, he was not in the forefront as a politician for a long time. Part of the so-called Vajpayee camp, he was a liberal in the BJP framework.

When the ill-fated 16-day government was formed in 1996, he was made the finance minister but two years later could not get the same post, reportedly because the RSS stalled it. Instead, he was given the external affairs ministry.

That was a blessing in disguise for Jaswant Singh. Travelling the world and hobnobbing with diplomats was just up his street. After the Americans got upset at India's nuclear explosion it fell upon Singh to re-establish ties and he was in his element, meeting Strobe Talbott in third country capitals over oysters and single-malt whiskies. To his credit he did a good job but in December 1999, after he escorted terrorists to Kandahar his stock fell drastically.

Politically too, though he was a senior member of the party, he lost much of his clout after Vajpayee faded out of the scene. Rajnath Singh decided not to make him leader of the party in the Rajya Sabha, favouring the much younger Arun Jaitley and it was only after much protest that Singh was given a parliamentary assignment that gave him a front bench seat in the house. Much before he was thrown out his irrelevance in the party had become clear.

What now? It must be humiliating to be sacked like this on the phone and be reduced to being an independent MP. It cannot be edifying to be removed from the institutional memory of a party you helped found, to find your peers and colleagues refusing to acknowledge you. But Singh is no fool.

He will see possibilities of personal glory in this situation. For one thing, it lets him speak his mind freely which he has already started by claiming LK Advani knew of the Kandahar decision. He can also now push for the cause of Gorkhaland — something the BJP is hesitating to do — which will make him a hero in Darjeeling. The media, always looking for the "underdog" story will keep him alive. The old soldier will not fade away, he will fight to the last. Far from being down and out, this is going to be Jaswant's second coming.