Speaking The Truth And Its Consequences

Speaking the truth never did anyone good. Look at the piquant situation L K Advani is in for calling Jinnah secular and for saying December 6 was the saddest day in his life.

For Jinnah was secular if one understands secular to mean that the state should not be concerned with religion. He could not be otherwise as this excerpt from the book Making Peace with Partition. The author is discussing why Jinnah and Nehru failed to anticipate the violence that accompanied partition :

Jinnah's city was the polyglot Bombay of Parsis, Europeans, Maharashtrians and Gujaritis; of mercantile, industrial and legal success, and of big anti-caste and labour movements, where everyone lived together separately. In such an environment it was not difficult for him to believe, as most cosmopolitans do, that communal vioence was a politically instigated occurrence rather than a deeply rooted historical accretion, even though Bombay, like many other developing world cities, had seen countless communcal riots since the 1920s.

Indeed, Jinnah appears to have been unable to even conceive that the Pakistan movement might end in an Islamic state rather than a republic based on citizenship and human rights...

...Jinnah's vision of a democratic and secular Muslim state has been one of the tools that Pakistani civil society has against the army's Islamization of the country.

But what about his insistence on partition? His fight apparently was for self-determination for the Muslim people. Unfortunately, as the above author of the book says, while partition was viewed by Muslims as a gain of self, Hindus experienced it as a loss of it.

L K Advani also chose the Pakistan trip to say that the demolition day was the saddest of his life. It must be true since he says it and he should know. However, the truth has been conceded so belatedly that it seems almost meaningless. And very few would disagree that partition is an "unalterable" reality of history. Reunification seems improbable, to put it mildly.

In the same report, DH report hints that the VHP may be thinking of floating a political party, though I seem to recollect reading/hearing somewhere that they are not thinking of any such thing. However, if it is true, then the scenario looks intriguing. The VHP floats its own political party. Come election time, the Hindutva followers who are far gone to the right vote en masse for it and it gets a significant chunk of seats. The rest of the BJP constituency give the BJP a good number of seats too. But the BJP, which is now shorn of strident Hindutva, gets the support of many currently non-BJP voters, who then give it a better tally than at present. And then? The BJP and the VHP-Political will coalesce at the centre if the numbers warrant it. Another way to the same end - power.

Will there be a new president? I don't think so. The BJP leadership is backing him. The problem is mainly with the rest of the family and such quarrels happen in families and can be worked out.