The BJP’s self-inflicted wound following the publication of Jaswant Singh’s recently released book on Mohammed Ali Jinnah has caused pain to all the members and well-wishers of the party. But feeling sad and concerned does not heal the wound. It is necessary to know why the party hurt itself so badly in the first place. And this is not the first time it has done so.

In 2005, in the aftermath of L.K. Advani’s visit to Pakistan and his utterances of qualified praise for Jinnah, the BJP chose to cut its own limb by asking its president, who was its tallest leader after Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to resign. This was done because the party and the Sangh Parivar felt that Advani was guilty of blaspheming the BJP’s ideology by saying some positive things about the founder of Pakistan, and that too on Pakistan’s soil. The refrain was: “How can Jinnah, the villain of India’s partition, deserve even a single word of praise?”

At the root of the folly committed by the BJP, both in 2005 and in 2009, is the absence of rigorous debate on what its true ideology is. Both the BJP and the larger Sangh Parivar suffer from fear of confronting India’s past, including many aspects of their own past, with honesty and an open mind.

In the process, the legitimate diversity of viewpoints within the party and the parivar are papered over, to pave the way for ignorance and prejudices to assert themselves. How else can one explain the fact that a well-researched two-sided assessment of Jinnah (taking note of both his secular-nationalist approach until the mid-1930s and his subsequent murderous role in India’s vivisection) in the book The Tragic Story of Partition written by the late H.V. Seshadri, a widely respected RSS leader, is not dissimilar to that contained in Jaswant Singh’s book?

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