Smitten by western ways, some Indians too seem to have started digging the graves just for the fun of writing books and minting money. They have come to know what sells. Therefore, they would not mind painting a saint a sinner and vice versa to make a quick buck. Fortunately, for them, making easy money by profiteering, hoarding and black-marketing may be crime, but doing so through denigrating a gentleman and eulogizing a rogue is not.

And then it also gives the person the aura of being a liberal, broad-minded and secular if he sings praises of the butcher dictators, communalists and anti-nationals. If somebody, after a great research, comes out with details of the cruelties of persons like Emperor Aurangzeb, he is dubbed as a vile person trying to spread disharmony by inflaming passions with unsubstantiated facts. But if you write that the great Mughal emperor was a kind hearted ruler, a great secular who had many Hindus in his horde of advisers, you get instant recognition and decorated as a great scholar with secular credentials. We then forget that whether it was the invading rulers Mughals or British, they had to depend upon local talent and intellect to rule the country. They could not succeed without associating Indians because they needed those who understood the native psyche, were aware of the local geography and the population. If any of the Muslim or a British dictator wed a Hindu woman - though infatuated by her beauty - it was taken as his love for India, a sign of his broad-mindedness and secularism. Then our writers tried to give lie to the general perception that a particular Muslim, Mughal or British ruler was as great a king as were our legendary Maharajas. 

The way our great writers are researching their subjects, it would be no wonder if some of them may not come out with their thesis that the villain of Jallianwala massacre General Dyer or other invader was a very benevolent individual and that the killings was the handiwork of some so-called freedom fighters out to defame the compassionate British rulers. We need not forget that the renowned Booker award winner Indian writer Ms Arundhati Roy has already declared Indian Parliament attack mastermind Afzal Guru as innocent although he has been sentenced to death by the highest court of the country, the Supreme Court of India. She continues to think that her individual opinion is superior to the considered verdict of the court.

Exactly this has been done by the veteran Bharatiya Janata Party leader Jaswant Singh in his book Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence. If Jinnah was a diehard secular who believed in Hindu-Muslim unity, why did he propound the two-nation theory that Hindus and Muslims constitute two different nations and they could not live together under one ruler? Why did he stress that Muslim majority States and districts should form the Pakistan and got it? Which Hindu majority area did he want to be included in Pakistan? Pakistan did commit aggression in Kashmir to forcibly annex it but he never wanted the Hindu-majority Jammu and Buddhist-majority Laddakh. He was instrumental in wanting the far away province of Hyderabad and Junagarh because both had Muslim rulers. The much hyped Jinnah's address to the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947 was an instance of his helpless eloquence. With the British having as yet not granted Independence to India and Pakistan had as yet to come into being on August 14, he could not risk to have, even if he wanted in his heart, to ask the minority communities of Hindus, Sikhs and Christians to leave the country. So trying hard to interpret it as his change of heart into a great secular soul is just like trying to make out the British leaving India as independent as a gesture of benevolence and not their failure to continue to dig their feet in India. Had Jinnah given a call to minorities to leave the areas proposed to be included in Pakistan, the British could still hold back both the creation of Pakistan and independence to the truncated India.

Last update : 24-08-2009 20:09

Keywords : Irony of Fate, Amba Charan Vashishtha

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