Key Excerpts from Interview

of Jaswant Singh and his Book..

"Jinnah: India-Partition-
Independence"
(C O LL EC TI O N of More tha n 4 0 Q uota ti ons ta ke n from
J asw ant’ s I nte rvi ew s an d Hi s B ook )

Here are Few Key Excerpts from the Interview and the Book
"Jinnah: IndiaPartition-Independence" by Jaswant Singh, the
veteran Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader who was expelled
from the party on praising Jinnah (Founder of Pakistan) and
calling him Great Indian Leader:

 `He single-handedly stood against the might of the Congress

Party and against the British who didn't really like him ...
Gandhi himself called Jinnah a great Indian. Why don't we
recognise that? Why don't we see (and try to understand)
why he called him that?'
 "If I were not drawn to the personality I wouldn't have
written the book. It's an intricate, complex personality, of
great character, determination"
 "It was historically not tenable to see Mr Jinnah as the villain
of 1947, It is not borne out of the facts... we need to correct
it... Muslims saw that unless they had a voice in their own
economic, political and social destiny they will be
obliterated."

 "Mr Jinnah was a great man because he created something

out of nothing"

 "Jinnah's Muslim League wins all the Muslim seats and yet
they don't have sufficient numbers to be in office because
the Congress Party has, without even a single Muslim,
enough to form a government and they are outside of the
government. So it was realised that simply contesting
elections was not enough... All of this was a search for some
kind of autonomy of decision making in their own social and
economy destiny".

 "He fought the British for an independent India but also

fought resolutely and relentlessly for the interest of the
Muslims of India ... the acme of his nationalistic achievement
was the 1916 Lucknow Pact of Hindu-Muslim unity".

 "He was a self-made man. Mahatma Gandhi was the son of a

Diwan. All these (people) -- Nehru and others -- were born to
wealth and position. Jinnah created for himself a position. He
carved in Bombay, a metropolitan city, a position for himself.
`He was so poor he had to walk to work ... he told one of his
biographers there was always room at the top but there's no
lift. And he never sought a lift."

 "He single-handedly stood against the might of the Congress

Party and against the British who didn't really like him ...
Gandhi himself called Jinnah a great Indian. Why don't we
 recognize that? Why don't we see (and try to understand)
why he called him that?"

 "The basic and structural fault in Jinnah's notion remains a

rejection of his origins; of being an Indian, having been
shaped by the soil of India, tempered in the heat of Indian
experience. Muslims in India were no doubt subscribers to a
different faith but that is all; they were not any different
stock or of alien origin."

 "The basic and structural fault in Jinnah's notion remains a

rejection of his origins; of being an Indian, having been
shaped by the soil of India, tempered in the heat of Indian
experience. Muslims in India were no doubt subscribers to a
different faith but that is all; they were not any different
stock or of alien origin."

 "It is in this, a false 'minority syndrome' that the dry rot of

partition first set in, and then unstoppably it afflicted the
entire structure, the magnificent edifice of an united India.
The answer (cure?), Jinnah asserted, lay only in parting, and
Nehru and Patel and others of the Congress also finally
agreed. Thus was born Pakistan".

 "His opposition was not against the Hindus or Hinduism, it

was the Congress that he considered as the true political
rival of the Muslim League, and the League he considered as
being just an 'extension of himself'. He, of course, made
much of the Hindu-Muslim riots (1946; Bengal, Bihar, etc.) to
'prove the incapacity of Congress Governments to protect
Muslims; and also expressed fear of "Hindu raj" to frighten
Muslims into joining the League, but during innumerable
conversations with him I can rarely recall him attacking
Hindus or Hinduism as such. His opposition, which later
developed into almost hatred, remained focused upon the
Congress leadership' (M.R.A. Baig, Jinnah's secretary)."

 "Religion in all this was entirely incidental; Pakistan alone

gave him all that his personality and character demanded. If
 Mr. Jinnah was necessary for achieving Pakistan, Pakistan,
too was necessary for the fulfilment of Mr. Jinnah."

 "However, it has to be said, and with great sadness, that

despite some early indications to the contrary, the leaders of
the Indian National Congress, in the period between the
outbreak of war in 1939 and the country's partition in 1947,
showed in general, a sad lack of realism, of foresight, of
purpose and of will."

 "As (Maulana Azad) wrote in his memoirs, he had come to

the conclusion that Indian federation should deal with just
three subjects: defence, foreign affairs and communications;
thus granting the maximum possible autonomy to the
provinces. According to the Maulana, Gandhi accepted this
suggestion, while Sardar Patel did not."

 "For, along with several other there is one central difficult

that India, Pakistan, Bangladesh face: our 'past' has, in
reality never gone into the 'past', it continues to reinvent
itself, constantly becoming our 'present', thus preventing us
from escaping the imprisonment of memories. To this we
have to find an answer, who else can or will?"

 "It is in this, a false 'minority syndrome' that the dry rot of

partition first set in, and then unstoppably it afflicted the
entire structure, the magnificent edifice of an united India.
The answer (cure?), Jinnah asserted, lay only in parting, and
Nehru and Patel and others of the Congress also finally
agreed. Thus was born Pakistan".

 "His opposition was not against the Hindus or Hinduism, it

was the Congress that he considered as the true political
rival of the Muslim League, and the League he considered as
being just an 'extension of himself'. He, of course, made
much of the Hindu-Muslim riots (1946; Bengal, Bihar, etc.) to
 'prove the incapacity of Congress Governments to protect
Muslims; and also expressed fear of "Hindu raj" to frighten
Muslims into joining the League, but during innumerable
conversations with him I can rarely recall him attacking
Hindus or Hinduism as such. His opposition, which later
developed into almost hatred, remained focused upon the
Congress leadership' (M.R.A. Baig, Jinnah's secretary)."

 "Religion in all this was entirely incidental; Pakistan alone

gave him all that his personality and character demanded. If
Mr. Jinnah was necessary for achieving Pakistan, Pakistan,
too was necessary for the fulfillment of Mr. Jinnah."

 "However, it has to be said, and with great sadness, that

despite some early indications to the contrary, the leaders of
the Indian National Congress, in the period between the
outbreak of war in 1939 and the country's partition in 1947,
showed in general, a sad lack of realism, of foresight, of
purpose and of will."

 "As (Maulana Azad) wrote in his memoirs, he had come to

the conclusion that Indian federation should deal with just
three subjects: defence, foreign affairs and communications;
thus granting the maximum possible autonomy to the
provinces. According to the Maulana, Gandhi accepted this
suggestion, while Sardar Patel did not."

 "For, along with several other there is one central difficult

that India, Pakistan, Bangladesh face: our 'past' has, in
reality never gone into the 'past', it continues to reinvent
itself, constantly becoming our 'present', thus preventing us
from escaping the imprisonment of memories. To this we
have to find an answer, who else can or will?"

Rate it.. Leave Comments..