Children can be frightened by tales of ghosts. Young nations need simple fairy tales of perfect heroes and dastardly villains. It is essential for a nation to have an unsullied birth. If the birth is traumatic then those memories have to be exorcised. Later, when the children grow up, the fairy tales are forgotten. Ghosts are just creatures of a frightened mind.

I had thought India had grown to teenage years with its angst and aggro. But the Jaswant Singh episode tells me that childhood is still continuing. Many want to believe that their founding fathers were perfect human beings and the villain at the birth of the nation, Jinnah, was a pure horror with no redeeming features. When I was a child, I was told the story—Gandhi, Nehru and Patel fought hard for India’s freedom; the fiendish British divided and ruled; Jinnah was a stooge of the British and full of venom if not envy and hatred; he divided India single-handedly.

Fifty years back, Maulana Azad exploded this fairy tale in his India Wins Freedom. He recounted in detail the course of events in the two years preceding the Partition. Most of Jaswant Singh’s account of those two years is in consonance with Maulana’s account. Ram Manohar Lohia’s memoirs about the meeting on June 14-15, 1947, when the Congress considered the Partition, are in the public domain. Gandhi sat silent. Maulana smoked quietly and Nehru and Patel carried the argument for the Partition while the young-bloods Jaya Prakash and Lohia openly spoke against it.

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