In a political climate where everything was seemingly hurtling towards an ‘SMS your vote’ discourse and snappy ‘in-30-seconds’ politics, devoid of any context — historians must feel exhilarated that history is back with a bang. Jaswant Singh and his book on Jinnah has stirred the pot, and with a lot more drama than Advani’s words of praise at the Qaid-e-Azam’s grave in Pakistan.

History, the world over, continues to direct contemporary political debate. An argument has started on the Allies’ role in World War II and further, the erstwhile USSR’s role in battling Nazism. Quentin Tarantino in his latest movie, Inglourious Basterds has angered people over what is seen as reducing Nazi violence to a joke. The Spectator has reviewers concerned that this is “part of a dangerous trend in which the great evils of history become show business.”

So if history refuses to go away, why should the invocation of Jinnah incense the BJP so much?

The BJP has been no stranger to history. A lot about what the BJP was about and why it grew when it did, in the late Eighties and Nineties, had to do with its idea of medieval India and a sense of injury and hate it cashed in on — Babri Masjid — a 15th century symbol was picked, myth and history mixed and usefully turned into a concoction that resulted in a large political ‘movement’ — mass mobilisation, riots, hate and political mileage.

If the NDA years meant a Mandir slowdown, a more assimilative phase and the era post-Vajpayee seemed bereft of a central theme binding the party. The idea of contesting the election as a presidential one may have been a bad copy of the US election campaign, but it was also a good one to try and circumvent the entire problem of stating clearly what the BJP stood for, as its planks of ‘internal security’ and ‘pride in India’ seemed to have been effectively hijacked by the ruling party. In an era when the Congress seems to have monopolised the middle-class vote, the emerging India pride plank, it was perhaps inevitable that to be a struggle within the party for the ideas the BJP promotes. And History, not of the kind the BJP would want to pick, has come to haunt it.

... contd.