What was Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s role in the Partition of India?
The jury is still out on that one. The Quaid-e-Azam, however, is playing a crucial posthumous role in splitting the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), the political front of the Parivar (India’s Far Right “family”). Former External Affairs (or Finance or Defence) Minister Jaswant Singh is now also a former BJP leader and member. The party has thrown him out for writing a biography of Jinnah and releasing it on the eve of a “brainstorming session” of the leadership on the BJP’s reverses in the recent general election. As widely reported, the book titled “Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence” absolves Jinnah of all blame for the bloody event of 1947 and attributing responsibility for it instead to India’s Congress party and government leaders Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel. This, of course, is not the first time Pakistan’s founder has caused a furore in the BJP and the Parivar. As widely recalled again, a tribute on Pakistani soil by former Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani t
