SOROOR AHMED analyses the Jinnah storm in the shattered cup of BJP and says that the party has two different yardsticks to punish or reward its leaders.
The importance of the original sin can never be under-estimated or overlooked. But in the case of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a party with a difference – or differences, the original sinner is always let off easily and efforts are repeatedly made to erase his/her sin. Four summers back Lal Krishna Advani stunned the world, when of all the persons, he showered praise on the founder of Pakistan Mohammad Ali Jinnah. While visiting that country in June 2005 he called Jinnah a secular person. Apparently there was nothing wrong in the statement, but none expected Advani to utter it as his whole politics revolved around Hindutva. The word secular never exists in his dictionary; instead he always uses the expression pseudo-secular.
The remark created storm in the country, both outside and within the BJP, as it was considered unwarranted. He took the moral responsibility and resigned from the presidentship of the party, but he was not expelled. Within a few days the whole drama, initiated at the behest of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), subsided. Among the few in the BJP, who did side with Advani then, was the same Jaswant Singh, who four years later was unceremoniously kicked out by the party for simply paraphrasing the words which Advani used for Jinnah. Had Advani not called Jinnah a secular man, Jaswant Singh might never have dared to tread this path. He certainly got encouragement from his boss. Yet the former foreign and finance minister of the country had to pay the heavy price.
While Jaswant got boot, Advani, sometime after the remark, was projected as the prime ministerial candidate of the party. Now none in the party tries to discuss what happened in June 2005. It seems that Advani had committed no ‘crime’.
Advani’s statement was not just an off-the-cuff remark made in haste but consisted of consciously spoken words. During his stay in Pakistan, the land of his birth, he was not the same person at all. Not only he eulogised Jinnah once, but on other occasions too, he spoke a language quite different from what he used to speak about the founding father of Pakistan here in India.
Advani in Pakistan, it seems, got a bit carried away by nostalgia. But even in that, he was conscious enough to use his remark on Jinnah in such a way that it hurts the arch rival in India, the Indian National Congress and its then leadership, especially Jawaharlal Nehru. Jaswant just went a step ahead and dragged the name of the then home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, whom the BJP always considers more a Sangh Parivar man than a Congressman. So it was rabid anti-Nehruism, which prompted Advani to make his (in)famous statement in Pakistan. Jaswant did almost the same but was more balanced and analytical in putting the blame of partition. He was honest enough to hold Vallabhbhai Patel also responsible. How can this happen in the BJP where Patel is an ideal for Lal Krishna Advani and many others.
The BJP adopted two different yardsticks for Advani and Jaswant simply because the party has a tradition of exonerating, in fact, admiring and extolling, the original sinner(s). Here Jaswant Singh made a cardinal error. Though he had been in the party ever since its birth in 1980 and has been too close to Vajpayee, he failed to grasp as to what fascism really stands for.
Jaswant failed to learn from the past betrayals. As a former army officer, he appears to be too straight to understand the crooked friends within the party. Jaswant is always blamed for the release of Maulana Masood Azhar and others jailed in Indian prisons in December 1999. This was done for the safe release of passengers of the hijacked plane. After a high-level discussion he was entrusted with the responsibility to court these terrorists to Kandhar, where the Indian Airlines plane was actually taken by the hijackers. So whenever Jaswant is targeted for what he did as India’s external affairs minister, he is left high and dry by his own party – as if he did all this on his own without the consent of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his deputy, Lal Krishna Advani.
And when the issue cropped up once again in July 2006 after Jaswant wrote an earlier book A Call to Honour: In Service of Emergent India? Lal Krishna Advani made a memorable statement, to wash his hands off, from whatever happened in the cabinet meeting, where the decision regarding the release of the terrorists was taken. It was left up to Jaswant to bore the brunt of criticism from all sides. As mentioned, the original sinners were the then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was the team leader and his deputy, Lal Krishna Advani, who was the home minister.
In fact Advani, as Jaswant now says, was directly responsible for allowing the plane to leave Amritsar airport. It needs to be mentioned that the plane was hijacked on December 25, 1999 when Prime Minister Vajpayee was still in the air, flying back from Patna to New Delhi. The plane landed in Amritsar airport and remained parked there for 45 minutes. It got refuelled and left the country. As the minister looking after the internal security of the country, the original sinner was none else but Lal Krishna Advani. None dared to question him.
The story of original sinners going off freely does not stop here. When the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance lost the 2004 parliamentary elections Jaswant Singh was largely held responsible because, according to the party sources, it was he who coined the slogan of Shining India and Feel Good. But may one ask what Vajpayee and Advani were doing. Isn’t it the fact that they adopted these slogans and uttered them thousands of times during the campaign?
When the then BJP president Bangaru Laxman was, in a sting operation, caught on camera accepting money from a fictitious arms dealer in March 2001, he was immediately sacked and dismissed from the party. God knows how a party president can be sacked by ordinary members. The original sinners, Vajpayee and Advani, were not at all questioned by anyone within the party when the truth is that Laxman did what was prevalent in the party.
The jinn of Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, continues to wreak havoc in the rank and file of the BJP. The truth is that today after the second successive defeat the BJP wanted to cover all the loopholes and needed a person to be crucified for the defeat. Jaswant, certainly not a mass-based leader, was the best suited for this purpose.