India's opposition Hindu fundamentalists expelled senior figure Jaswant Singh Wednesday over his book praising Pakistan's founding father Mohammed Ali Jinnah who is widely blamed in India for the 1947 partition. Singh is a founding member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which completely dissociated itself from the book “Jinnah-India, Partition, Independence,”and expelled him unceremoniously through a telephone call. The book portrays the Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader – as Jinnah is remembered in Pakistan) as a “great personality” and holds India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress party responsible for the partition of India. In it Singh says Jinnah has been “demonized in India.” In a television interview aired over the weekend, the 71-year-old party veteran, a former foreign minister and member of parliament, said he had chosen the controversial leader as his subject because Jinnah had “an intricate, complex personality of great character, determination.” Singh, a former Indian Army major who had voluntarily retired without pension to work for the BJP over the past 30 years, also rejected the popularly-held view that Jinnah was “a Hindu basher” and solely responsible for the “dismemberment” of undivided India. “I don't think it was dismemberment. He wanted space for the Muslims,” he told the CNN-IBN channel. “Nehru believed in a highly centralized polity,” Singh has been quoted as saying. “That's what he wanted India to be. Jinnah wanted a federal polity.” BJP president Rajnath Singh announced Singh's expulsion to reporters in the northern hill resort of Shimla where the party was meeting for a brainstorming session in the wake of its drubbing in the national elections earlier this year. None of the BJP party leaders attended the launch of the book in New Delhi Monday evening. Reacting to his expulsion, Singh said he was “saddened immensely” that his ouster was triggered by the fact that he had written a book. “You can dispute what I write, but the day you start questioning thought, start questioning reading, writing, publishing you are entering a very dark alley,” he warned. “I am convinced in my mind I have committed no sin.” The furor over the book goes to the heart of a debate in India about blame for partition of the British-ruled subcontinent into Pakistan and India which sparked communal riots that left up to a million dead. Hindu-majority India and Muslim Pakistan have fought three wars and been at loggerheads since their emergence as independent states. The subject of Jinnah has always ruffled feathers in the BJP and the current head of the party, Lal Krishan Advani, offered to resign after he sparked controversy by lauding Jinnah as a “great man” and a secular leader in 2005. Advani was sent a copy Jaswant Singh revealed Wednesday that he had sent advance copies of his controversial book – both in Hindi and English – to Advani and Rajnath Singh. The ousted leader said there was no reaction or hint of things to come, which made his expulsion even more “painful and shocking.” Analysts say that with Singh's mentor former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee fading out and Advani himself weakened by political defeat and party infighting, Singh could be trying to position himself as a liberal neo-centrist politician while taking a potentially crippling shot at the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty-ruled Congress by holding it responsible for the partition.
