Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru may all be figures linked to Independence and Partition but have been dragged into the very contemporary crisis of the BJP. And the latest sorry spectacle the party presents is really a story about a diminished group of individuals clutching on to the tattered remains of a shrunk empire. It is about men and women who strut about as leaders, but are inherently insecure, terrified of their own shadow, in this case, the RSS. Jaswant Singh, who came out with his long-in-the-works tome on Jinnah last week, was clearly the wrong man raising the wrong issue at the wrong time. Something had to give. In the surreal world of Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice in Wonderland, the Queen of Hearts would holler “off with his head”. In the paranoid, dog-eat-dog world of the BJP, it meant the expulsion of the 71-year-old Jaswant, who had been with the party since its inception, without even the civility of a hand-shake.
To Cleanse The DNA Of Its Djinns
Self-introspection it was meant to be, but the BJP could have shot itself in the foot with l’affaire Jaswant
Jitender Gupta
