By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jun 7 2005 (IPS)

If a single book can ever lay claim to having positively changed the tortuous course of Indo-Pakistan relations it would be the tome ‘Jinnah – A Corrective Reading of Indian History’ by Prof Asiananda (who uses one name only).

There is no dearth of celebrated books dealing with the events that led up to the traumatic 1947 partition of the Indian sub-continent, such as ‘Freedom at Midnight’ by Dominic Lapierrre and Larry Collins or even ‘Midnight’s Children’ by Salman Rushdie.

Asiananda, who teaches philosophy at the Inter-Cultural Open University in the Netherlands may not match the literary genius of a Rushdie but his book has a mission – to correct the image of Mohammed Ali Jinnah as the man widely held responsible for tearing asunder an entire civilization – and it has had remarkable success in achieving its plainly stated aim.

Released in India on Apr. 16 (after a first launch Mar 3. at the House of Lords in London) the book scored in a matter of weeks going by the dramatic change of heart in one of its readers, Lal Krishna Advani, pro-Hindu hawk and chief accused in a case still pending in a Pakistani court for conspiring to assassinate Jinnah more than half a century ago.

Like Jinnah, Advani, now 78, was born in the bustling port city of Karachi but ended up being one of the several million people who were uprooted from hearth and home by the partition and transplanted among alien corn in distant cities – all in the name of religion.

Jinnah stayed on in Karachi but the heart of this brilliant lawyer and founder of Pakistan lay further down the coast of the Arabian sea in the twin Indian city of Bombay (now called Mumbai) where he built a lavish mansion and where his descendants live today.

And now in the grimmest of ironies, Advani, who built up a brilliant political career in India by opposing everything the partition stood for, found it in him to return to Karachi and pay homage to Jinnah at his mausoleum – even going so far as to call him "secular" and a "creator of history".

Advani, who returned to India on Monday after that monumental ‘volte face’ must, at the moment, be hated even more than Jinnah by the storm troopers of the pro-Hindu, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of which he is president and its fascist affiliate, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

An editorial in the ‘Times of India’ on Tuesday characterised Advani’s calling Jinnah secular "an act of blasphemous revisionism that turns the sangh (BJP and its affiliates) historiography on its head". At midday Advani submitted his resignation as BJP president, but it was not formally accepted.

Even political leaders at the left end of the political spectrum were outraged.

"What is he (Advani) talking about? Does he have any right to praise Jinnah?" was the reaction of Jyoti Basu, India’s best-known Marxist leader and, for a quarter of a century, chief minister of West Bengal state, which still has a geographical indication attached to its name because that is what remained after the partition.

Basu may personally be excused the harshness. He and his family became refugees when more than half of Bengal morphed into East Pakistan and then, in 1971, into Bangladesh, when religion proved an insufficient glue to keep it within the nation that Jinnah built.

Politically, Basu is one of the architects of the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) which brought together the ideological dissimilar Congress party and the Marxists with the express purpose of keeping the BJP out of power – in the process thwarting Advani’s claim to be prime minister.

It fell to another prominent Bengali politician, Indian Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee, to release Asiananda’s book in the Indian capital and hail its revolutionary vision of Jinnah as a secular leader no less than Gandhi.

"The book deserves to be taken note of by the country no matter that it challenges some of our established beliefs and demands of us to undertake a corrective reading of Indian history," Mukherjee declared.

Speaking to IPS after the launch Asiananda said, "that was a lot coming from a top Congress leader considering that I had in my book showed that it was Gandhi’s moral dictatorship which really fathered the partition and thus denied Jinnah the chance to become independent India’s first prime minister."

In Asiananda’s view the sub-continent can find its place only after it has "regained its pre-1947 paramount status and the partition wound has healed and there is real space for India and Pakistan and other South Asian countries in an Indic sub-continent that geopolitically balances the Sinic North Asia and the Arab-Islamic West Asia, and for that a real understanding of Jinnah is the real key."

Yet another cabinet minister and votary of improved Indo-Pak relations, Mani Shankar Aiyar (currently in Pakistan tying up a gas pipeline deal) said at the release it is time that relations between the South Asian neighbours cease to be seen as a ‘Hindu-Muslim’ issue. "India is not a Hindu state. Pakistan is an Islamic state, but it is not representative of the Muslim voice of India.”

Aiyar echoed the theme of Asiananda’s book by saying the two countries could never have peace betwixt them as long as Jinnah and Mahatma Gandhi continued to be demonised in India and Pakistan respectively.

"Both (Jinnah and Gandhi) were great leaders,” he said, congratulating Asiananda for exploring a topic that "many of us would not have dared to touch in India”.

But these are times when even Advani, the high priest of India’s fundamentalist wave and personally charged with vandalism in razing the mediaeval Babri Masjid mosque as a symbol of Islamic ascendancy over the sub-continent, dares to praise Jinnah – after making his own ‘corrective reading’.

(*Adds news of Advani resignation).

Excerpt: