Politics in the country touched a new low after the unseemly row over Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s portrait at Aligarh Muslim University. Activists of the Hindu Yuva Vahini, a fringe political group, entered the AMU campus to remove Jinnah’s portrait. Predictably this led to violence between the activists and AMU students and also a war of words. Lyricist and poet Javed Akhtar, too, waded into the controversy by saying that not only Jinnah but also the temples built for Godse must be condemned.
Just when one thought things couldn’t plummet further, there were reports of Jinnah’s picture being plastered in public toilets across Aligarh by students of a particular college. The college authorities thankfully acted swiftly in removing them on their premises but not before the Hindu Yuva Vahini activists proudly acknowledged it was their handiwork.
Interestingly it is not just the much-derided “Left-Liberal” intellectuals who consider Jinnah a tall leader in India’s independence movement before he espoused the cause of Pakistan. Senior BJP LK Advani, who was the Deputy Prime Minister in the Vajpayee government, visited Jinnah’s mausoleum in Karachi in 2005 and called him “a great secular leader and an Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”. This was the first time a senior BJP leader had openly praised Jinnah and predictably it led to a lot of hand-wringing within the Sangh Parivar which, ultimately distanced itself from Advani’s comments.
Jaswant Singh, who held the External Affairs and Finance portfolios in the Vajpayee government, was another senior BJP leader who praised Jinnah in a book he wrote in 2009 titled ‘Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence’. Singh said Jinnah was needlessly demonised in India and controversially said that Nehru, in his quest for a strong, centralised union government, acquiesced to the partition of India — a view shared by historian Sugata Bose. Singh’s comments attracted criticism both from the BJP and Congress and the BJP even expelled him from the party.
So, before things escalate any further, it’s time the hot-heads in the Hindu fringe groups paid attention to these BJP leaders’ views on Jinnah and reflect on them.
B BaskarDeputy Editor