Editorial: One can’t help but wonder, looking from this side of the Pak-India divide especially, what the region would have been like if men of stature like the late Jaswant Singh had advanced in the hierarchy of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) instead of right-wing extremists like Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah. The veteran Indian politician and former union minister, who passed away in New Delhi aged 82 years which included many long years of service to the Indian nation, was a founding member of BJP and would surely have disagreed vehemently with the direction that the party has taken under Modi. In fact, if he hadn’t unfortunately been in a coma for the last six years after suffering a serious head injury from a fall in his bathroom, you can bet that he would have let everybody know just how he felt regardless of the certainty of the backlash that he would have had to face. He belonged to a time when the BJP, under the then PM, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was cementing its position as a very serious player in Indian politics and made attempts to appear inclusive and even secular. That is why senior leaders like Vajpayee and LK Advani respected him even when he disagreed with the party line.
Judging from his record it is clear that he let his work do the talking and it was, far more often than not, of the quality that earned him the respect of his peers. And it is no surprise that he held three of the most coveted portfolios in cabinet – finance, external affairs and defence. Yet sadly, all those achievements were put aside when he courted controversy and wrote a book, Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence, in which he blamed not Jinnah but the Congress Party’s obsession with a strong central leadership for partition. Attempting to counter the widely held belief in India that Jinnah was the only villain of the events leading to partition was not new, but for some reason his party just couldn’t digest his words of praise for the Quaid e Azam and he was duly shown the door. It must have hurt him at that point that he was so unceremoniously cast aside despite an impeccable record and none of the party bigwigs stood by him. The silence of LK Advani especially, whose perfectly reasonable remarks about Jinnah Singh had defended from similar attacks not much earlier, would have stood out.
Pakistanis will remember him as one of those few politicians who pushed for peace between the two countries. Indeed, he was crucial to all the efforts that brought Islamabad and New Delhi so close to a peace deal over Kashmir during the ultimately failed Agra Summit between President Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee. In fact, even when a Pakistani news outlet asked about what possessed him to write the book on Jinnah, he just said that he wanted to work for peace between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, since they were “born from the same womb”. He believed, like so many people on both sides, that a beginning could be made towards a workable solution by first turning the Line of Control (LoC) into a soft border and then working from there, and worked with the Pakistani side to shape the final draft of a possible agreement at Agra. But he was disappointed that General Musharraf refused to include terrorism as a factor, and held this decision responsible for the collapse of the summit. He still believed that the “caravan of peace to Pakistan which began from Lahore will continue its journey despite the Agra setback and dogs of war will not be able to deviate it from its path.” Such optimism about the future of bilateral relations and indeed the prevailing atmosphere in the entire region is a world apart from the present mood in New Delhi, even though the same party holds power.
It is unfortunate that there’s nobody like him anymore in Indian politics. With Vajpayee and Singh leaving this world one after the other the Indian establishment is left without a moral compass at a particularly dangerous and flammable time in Indo-Pak history. It is a very dangerous sign that New Delhi is putting so much time and money into upgrading its military hardware when India is overwhelmed by all the damage caused by the coronavirus and its economy contracted more than 20 percent last quarter. It is in such times that the loss of a voice for peace is felt the strongest.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2020
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