Autumn reading, as readers well know, can be particularly compelling. And it is intriguing that Shivraj Patil is applying the finishing touches to his autobiography while shuffling through Jaswant Singh’s latest book. May this be a foreboding of things — or publications — to come? As Union home minister during most of the first UPA government, Patil was careful not to give away too much of the internal debate in his ministry and his party on the great security issues of those days. This tendency to discretion had made him a popular speaker of the Lok Sabha, but in North Block this fearfulness of anything controversial brought upon him charges of non-seriousness. So, how may it go with the autobiography? Will these be pages of thoughtfully diplomatic recollections? Or will this reading of Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah appraisal be a timely alert to the uses of controversy?

Recall Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence for more than the internal contradictions of the BJP it revealed. Recall it instead for the flurry of print runs its publishers unexpectedly — and happily — found themselves forced into. Singh, who had been quietly writing books at a rather fast clip till this summer, had till the Jinnah book revealed little appetite for a rousing political controversy. Whether he knew of its inevitability with the Jinnah book or not — and he certainly could not have anticipated the extreme reaction his party would surrender to — he’s been up to the aftermath and now appears determined to be a biographer to the men and women who saw in the freedom of 1947.

... contd.