Having just completed a near non-stop reading of Jaswant Singh’s magnum opus on Mohammed Ali Jinnah for two days, cover to cover and scribbling comments on almost every page of it, more than on any other book I have ever read, I cannot but exclaim: “Stupendous achievement, Jaswantji!” I cannot think of any other political biography authored by a practising politician that is so exhaustive, erudite, penetrating and well-written.

If admiration for Jaswant Singh is one thought that fills my mind, the other is utter stupefaction at his unceremonious expulsion from the BJP, a party that he served for three decades, serving as a close colleague of its two tallest leaders, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, within two days of the release of the book.

The expulsion is as graceless as it is baseless.

Anyone who reads the entire book with an unprejudiced mind will conclude that the charge that he went against the BJP’s “core ideology” is bunkum, perhaps a smokescreen for extraneous reasons for the unprecedented action against him. Actually, it adds ballast to many of the underpinnings of the party’s nationalist ideology: its total rejection of the Two-Nation theory, its rejection of “minorityism”, its concept of genuine secularism. The book has many nuggets about Jinnah that the RSS would be happy about: for example, his July 1947 appeal, “in no uncertain terms”, to Muslims who remained in India “that they should be loyal to India, and that they should not seek to ride two horses”. Isn’t this what Guruji Golwalkar used to say to Indian Muslims?

... contd.