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?

It does not behove a mature political party to allow half-baked knowledge and prejudices about historical personalities to get entrenched in its collective mindset. For when that happens, the very same prejudices, compounded by personal rivalries, prod the party to act irrationally and self-destructively, as evidenced by the bizarre manner of Jaswant Singh’s expulsion from the party.

The decline of ideological debate within the BJP can be illustrated by another startling example. The recent display of irrationality and intolerance stands in sharp contrast to the fine tradition of open mindedness represented by Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya, who was the ideological guru of the Jana Sangh until his assassination in 1968. There was nothing dogmatic about his thinking or conduct. For instance, although he was himself an RSS pracharak, one of his closest allies in the political field was the great socialist leader, Dr Rammanohar Lohia, who had never hidden his critical views about the RSS. Lohia often equated RSS ideology with Hindu fanaticism. He was a strong critic of the manner in which the RSS and the Jana Sangh advocated the concept of ‘Akhand Bharat’ from a Hindu-only perspective.

In his classic book, Guilty Men of India’s Partition, Lohia enumerates eight causes for India’s blood-soaked division: “British chicanery; declining years of Congress leadership (he critiques the role of Nehru, Patel, Azad and other “tired” Congress leaders); objective condition of Hindu-Muslim rioting; lack of grit and stamina among the people; Gandhiji’s non-violence; Muslim League’s separatism; inability of the freedom movement to seize opportunities (to prevent partition) as they came; and Hindu hauteur.”

Lohia elaborates the last point in these trenchant words: “The opposition of fanatical Hinduism to partition did not and could not make any sense, for one of the forces that partitioned the country was precisely this Hindu fanaticism. It was like the murderer recoiling from his crime, after it had been done. Let there be no doubt about it. Those who have shouted loudest about Akhand Bharat, the present Jana Sangh and its predecessors of the curiously un-Hindu spirit of Hinduism, have helped Britain and the Muslim League partition the country. They did nothing whatsoever to bring the Muslim close to the Hindu within a single nation. They did almost everything to estrange them from each other. Such estrangement is the root cause of partition. To espouse the philosophy of estrangement and, at the same time, the concept of Akhand Bharat is an act of grievous self-deception, only if we assume that those who do so are honest men.”

Lohia goes on to slam the fanatical Hindu mentality in even stronger words, calling it “rot immersed in the gross vice of hypocrisy.”

Lohia wrote Guilty Men of India’s Partition in 1960. But this book did not come in the way of a close association, based on mutual trust and respect, between him and Upadhyaya. Indeed, only four years later, on April 12, 1964, the two leaders issued a historic joint declaration mooting the concept of India-Pakistan Confederation. Their friendship had become stronger after the Chinese aggression in 1962, and both had come to the conclusion that India and Pakistan needed to leave past hostilities behind to start a new era of cooperation. However, Lohia was aware that the Jana Sangh’s advocacy of Akhand Bharat had created apprehensions in the minds of Pakistanis. He told Upadhyaya, “Many Pakistanis believe that if the Jana Sangh came to power in New Delhi, it would forcibly re-unify Pakistan with India.” Upadhyaya replied: “We have no such intentions. And we are willing to put to rest Pakistani people’s concerns on this score.”

Endorsing this idea of India-Pakistan Confederation, Advani, who was mentored in the Jana Sangh by Updhyaya, writes in his autobiography: “This dialogue between Deendayalji and Lohia, and its outcome, is one of the finest examples in India’s political history of cooperation and consensus-building between two leaders with divergent ideologies, but common commitment to national interest.”

If Deendayal Upadhyaya could have dialogue and cooperation with a known critic of his party like Lohia, what prevented the BJP from talking to Jaswant Singh, who was a party man since its inception thirty years ago?

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