Jaswant’s swan song

Whatever else you do, you can’t accuse Jaswant Singh of naïvete. His years in the army, in the BJP, in Parliament and in government must have given him the kind of maturity you can actually see etched on his face. Yet, if you go by the lament coming from him on a daily basis, it is easy to wonder whether he is indeed so naïve that he did not anticipate and prepare for the onslaught from his party.

Without formally accusing him of sedition, the message that the BJP leadership is putting out is that Singh transgressed the limits of tolerance. As far as his own current plight is concerned, he certainly would have known that. After all, even Advani nearly lost his job following his benign remarks on Jinnah. If he got away with that it was only because he was indispensable to the BJP.

Not so Jaswant Singh, no matter how highly you rate him for his civility, his depth of knowledge of issues he handled and for being reasonable. On that score alone, one feels sorry that there is no place for gentlemen in politics.

But whatever be his admirable qualities, the fact is that for the BJP he was not indispensable even if he was useful all along. Probably he was not even useful any longer. If that were not the case, he would not have been forced to seek election from Darjeeling instead of his home state Rajasthan. His position within the party was becoming increasingly untenable after the Lok Sabha election and his book was probably more of a convenient excuse than the proverbial last straw for the party to show him the door.

Given his own position in the party hierarchy, his current position as a member of Parliament and his long service to the party, there was not even the courtesy of a show cause notice or a suspension to start with. It was expulsion straight away. Even the Congress, which is often accused of being undemocratic, rarely adopts such summary measures in dealing with recalcitrant elements. It pretends to follow laid down rules.

Jaswant Singh cannot win votes for the BJP. It is as simple as that. So what he wrote in his latest book about Nehru, Patel and Jinnah does not really matter in the end. If it were not for the book, the current leadership, which was finding him and a few others inconvenient, would have found some other device sooner than later to make him irrelevant.

On this count alone, it would be a waste of time trying to look at the other, more important, issue of an individual’s right of expression within the limits prescribed by the laws of the state. It is nobody’s case, at least till now, that Singh had defamed either a present or a past leader. He seems to have examined their role in a given political context and drawn his own conclusions. Narendra Modi, however thought such views were dangerous to the wellbeing of Gujaratis, so the book is proscribed in that state.

So, just as you can drink to your gills and go to Gujarat or buy the illicit stuff there, you can read what Jaswant Singh has written about Sardar Patel but not read it in Ahmedabad or Baroda. A bit of a farce, you may say. That is not how the BJP sees it. So far as it is concerned, Jaswant Singh crossed the line.

Shocking as it may seem to those who value freedom of expression and respect for creativity even when you completely disagree with a  view, Indians will continue to see many such instances in the future as well. If, in the beginning, most books that were proscribed were on account of the perception that they affected religious sensitivities — Satanic Verses was the last such example perhaps — political sensitivities now guide state governments in dealing with such issues.

In Karnataka, a book on Deve Gowda, obviously negative in tone and content because a critic of his wrote it, was banned. That ban still stays perhaps. Authors of some other works that were less than flattering to iconic figures of the past have had a tough time too.
That brings us to the question of intolerance in society. Artists, writers, musicians can express their creative urges in any manner they like. But if it involves public display of the same, they better be careful.

It is not just a Jaswant Singh or an MF Hussain. Some artists in Udupi were reportedly dissuaded from holding a show of paintings of Ganesha simply because the paintings did not conform to the standards the religious/moral police had set. The coastal districts in Karnataka are becoming the pilot project where the limits of tolerance for individuals on the basis of caste and religion are being defined by the Sangh Parivar.

It may soon reach a stage where a Hindu talking to a Muslim may be objectionable. It already is, if it involves a boy and a girl. That is more worrisome in the long run than what the BJP did to a veteran in the party.