Mr. Advani's Resignation and L' affaire Jinnah

Shri L.K Advani has been a politician who has commanded my respect and admiration for long. His erudition, scholarship, communication and organization skills are exlempary. He is not a victim of the Foot in the Mouth disease- a disease that has affected most politicians of his ilk. Yet, a seemingly innocous entry in the visitor's entry book in the Jinnah Masoleum by him created much controversy for the BJP- a party that has seen Lady Luck desert ever since last May. What went wrong? Was Advani having a strategy in place? or was it the exhubarance of being in his hometown that overwhelmed him? For answers to questions such as that, we have to ask Mr. LKA. For our part as writers, we can only conjecture with as best of the evidence available to us.

I think Mr. Advani was making a subtle point to his hosts- Pakistani govt about the vision of the Quad-E-Azam. In other words, he was saying that the current Pakistan, a state run by military and mullah was not the one of envisioned by the founder. A state in which minorities-both ethnic and religious have been succesfully diminished in number was not in the vision of Jinnah. He would have not apporved of the state turning into an extended Saudi Arabia.

The second target is the Congress and more specifically- Nehru and his family. Intransigence of Nehru was one reason Jinnah was pushed to the wall to press for Pakistan. Power hungry nature of Nehru did minimise the possibility of a compromise. A reassessment of the Nehru-Jinnah power struggle may lead to fresh insights about partition.

A figure such as Jinnah has been assessed only in Black( as in India) and in white( In Pakistan). I think a man who was responsible for creation of 2 (and later 3) countries in the subcontinent is far more complex with definite shades of grey. A reassessment of Jinnah's role in the Indian freedom struggle may be in order.