World After The Fall Of Berlin Wall

(Courtesy : Dawn)

BERLIN: The United States should cede some of its powers to international organisations to create a ‘world order’, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday in an unusually sharp criticism of Washington before she led world leaders through the Brandenburg Gate — the climax of ceremonies marking 20 years since the Berlin Wall came crashing down in 1989.

‘We Europeans are used to this…. We have voluntarily given up many of our powers to Brussels and to the European Union,’ said the German chancellor.

‘But our American partners find it much more difficult to hand over powers to the International Monetary Fund or to any other international organisation,’ she said.Within the EU, Germany has become used to accepting the will of the majority, even if it does not agree, but this has not yet lodged itself in the American psyche, she added.‘What we need today is a much more multi-polar vision than that to which we have become accustomed,’ the chancellor said.’ This world will only be a peaceful and good world if we have more of a world order and more multilateral cooperation,’ she said.

On a recent trip to Washington, Angela Merkel received one of her greatest honours and biggest embarrassments in the space of a few hours.

She was the first German leader to address a joint session of Congress but, soon afterwards, she learned of an abrupt about-turn by car maker General Motors which was supposed to sell Germany’s Opel to her preferred bidder but decided to keep it instead.
Washington said the White House had played no part in the decision, but the German press described it as a bitter slap in the face for the chancellor.

Fall remembered

Ms Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany, marched through the historic Brandenburg Gate with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Dmitry Medvedev of Russia, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and representatives from across the European Union.

The leaders joined more than 100,000 revellers who thronged the monument despite a steady cold drizzle.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and ex-Polish president Lech Walesa also appeared at the landmark, which now stands as the symbol of German unity.

‘It is not only a day of celebration for Germans,’ Ms Merkel said of the anniversary. ‘It is a day of celebration for the whole of Europe.’
In a surprise video address beamed into the ceremonies, US President Barack Obama said he still took inspiration from the courage of East Germans who stood up against their oppressive regime.

‘Few would have foreseen … that a united Germany would be led by a woman from (the east German state) Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent,’ he said.‘But human destiny is what human beings make of it.’

But Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sounded a sour note, saying the end of the Cold War did not justify any nation’s global dominance, in a clear swipe at the United States.‘The transition to a new multipolar world is today very important for most countries, for all the countries in Europe and the world,’ he said.

Medvedev said Russia had often felt on the back foot since the Wall fell, despite assurances at the time that NATO would not expand eastward, as it since has.

‘We were hoping the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact would be accompanied by a different degree of Russia’s integration into common European space,’ he added.‘What have we received as a result? Nato is still a bloc whose rockets are targeting the Russian territory.’

British prime Minister Gordon Brown called the unity of Berlin, Germany and Europe ‘majestic’ achievements.

The Wall ‘was swept away by the greatest force of all — the unbreakable spirit of men and women who dared to dream in the darkness,’ he said.

French President Nikolas Sarkozy said the global community still needed to live up to the promise of that euphoric night.

‘The fall of the Berlin Wall is an appeal, an appeal to all to vanquish oppression, to knock down the walls that throughout the world still divide towns, territories, peoples,’ he said.

Crowds surged to hear Berlin’s renowned State Opera orchestra play strains of Beethoven and Wagner and cheered the symbolic toppling of 1,000 giant styrofoam dominoes along two kilometres of the Wall’s former course, where border guards once had shoot-to-kill orders.

At least 136 people who tried to cross it were killed during the 28 years it stood. The Wall was raised in Aug 1961by the erstwhile East German government in an attempt to stop immigration to the West.

Following weeks of protests against the regime, East German authorities suddenly allowed people to travel to the West on the now epochal night of Nov 9, 1989.

After almost three decades as prisoners in their own country, stunned East Germans streamed to checkpoints and rushed past bewildered guards, many falling tearfully into the arms of West Germans on the other side.

Easterner Christel Schneider, now a 62-year-old bank employee, said the mood that night was electrifying.

‘I crossed the border into the West — it was madness,’ she said, still breathless from the memories. ‘There were so many people that we were driving at a snail’s pace.’

Eleven months later, in Oct 1990, East and West Germany unified.—Agencies

Iqbal : Everyone has his Own

By Aliarqam

Today when we are facing a devide at almost every aspect on almost everything from religious interpretations to political ideas, from personalities to  their concepts and thoughts, from hisrory to its interpretations and from educational policy to foriegn policy and from national issues to the Wars at our doorsteps.This devide is most of the times having extremes on every sides.

In our society  Qur’anic Ayaats, Ahadiths of the Prophet(saaw) and Iqbal verses are used as conclusive remarks most of the time crushing difference of opinion in every debates. When News Channels were condemning Jehadis and terrorists they were using Qura’nic Ayaats of  La Tufsidoo dil Arz  and a few days earlier At Talaat Husain Show Dr. Safdar(PML-N) was using Hadith in favour of his opinion and on objection from the host he said, “Musalman Ki tou siasat shuru hi Masjid se hoti hai”(politics of muslims start from the mosque) and in the same way  when the Nation was preached that Foriegn aid is a curse for them, famous Iqbal Verse are used “A Tair Lahotee Us Rizq Se Maut Achee Jis Rizq se Aati Ho Parvaz mey Kotahi”

Unfortunately as in Pakistan everyone has the right to quote and interpret Qura’n O Ahadiths for their own means and under their own slogan, in the same way whether its an honour or not but Iqbal Verse has the same status.

Interstingly Qazi Husain in every speech of him and every article appearing at the Newspapers has Verses of Iqbal Urdu and Persian quoted and interpreted and last week Hillary Clinton also praised Iqbal and visited his Tomb.

When we We as a nation has made everything disputed.In the same way personalities though respected but everyone has his own Context.

 

OIC : 40th Anniversary

10:0522/09/2009

Sergei Demidenko, an expert on Arab affairs at the Institute of Strategic Assessments and Analysis

(Courtesy ; Ria Novosti)

Question: What could you say about the work of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) 40 years after its inception?

Answer: I cannot say that the work done by OIC has been effective. Unfortunately, the Organization comprises countries with various political, cultural and economic interests. In effect, the OIC is a kind of discussion club, which does not adopt any decisions but creates a necessary platform and facilitates long-term decisions. On the whole, the OIC is more of a discussion club.

Q.: What, in your opinion, has the OIC accomplished in the past 40 years?

A.: The OIC is probably one of the few discussion platforms in the world that enables Islamic countries to discuss various important regional and civilizational issues now of concern to the Arab world and the Islamic world. We should keep in mind that the OIC is one of the few organizations dominated by former Third World countries. This is very important because it is probably the only platform where they can discuss their problems without the great powers, the United States, the European Union and their pressure, and tackle various issues together.

Q.: Do you think these countries and the world as a whole would not fare better without the OIC?

A.: It is not completely correct to pose the question this way. I believe this organization should be viewed in the long-term context. The OIC can play a constructive role in the future. But, in my opinion, this will happen after most Islamic countries achieve success, primarily in the economic and political spheres. Consequently, such countries will gain a voice among industrial states. Quite possibly, the OIC will then be able to draft more or less important decisions.

At present, the OIC is just a conglomerate of states that are multidirectional in all respects.

Q.: What could you say about specific contacts and cooperation between the OIC and Russia?

A.: Russia has observer status with the OIC and must retain its presence in this organization. Whether we like it or not, Russia is also part of the Islamic world because many of its citizens preach Islam. Russia must keep its eyes open and follow various political and economic trends in the Islamic world because this directly affects us.

Q.: What should the OIC do in order to increase its influence in the solution of regional and global problems?

A.: OIC leaders are unable to change anything in this respect. An evolutionary process is a top priority. The organization will change, depending on changes in the Islamic world’s socio-political situation. Its role will also change as a result.

Honour killing in Sindh

PPP and MQM Coalition Govt. should take Notice of the issue.

40 women killed during May

HYDERABAD, SINDH: [SindhWeek.Com Report] Abbas Kassar, Coordinator of Peace and Human Rights Trust, Sindh, have issued an alarming reports on situation of women in Sindh, province of Pakistan. The report says that in month of May 2009, in Sindh province, 40 women were killed under honor killing, 20 women were gang raped, 43 women were kidnapped and 3 women were buried without coffin. The report elaborates that 175 men were also killed including killed in honor. The PHRT is a London based human right organization have chapters in Pakistan to watch human right situation.

Mr Kassar, a senior journalist and Coordinator of PHRT term this report “The human rights situation in Sindh is very alarming. Peace and Human Rights Trust has made a report for the month of May while reports of June and July is also ready to release” This is meant to open the eyes of rulers that they have failed to protect human rights of people especially of women.

Pakistan Steel Mill : PM earned Kudos

The Steel Mills case

By Ayesha Siddiqa

(Courtesy Daily Dawn)

Interestingly, Moeen Aftab Sheikh was removed even before an inquiry was instituted or a report submitted about his supposed wrongdoings.

Legally, this hurried action would be considered mala fide since no charge-sheet was brought against the gentleman and the decision was taken before the inquiry report. The case raises two fundamental questions: first, does the decision indicate the government’s concern for accountability, or does it indicate its inability to run a business and appreciate the problems caused by economic recession?

Or perhaps the objective was merely to get rid of the chairman, an officer with an unblemished career in government for 35 years. Second, was the media fair in embarking upon a witch-hunt without ascertaining the facts of the case?

The government still does not know the exact losses, as there are varied figures. It’s the PSM management which estimated the concern’s losses at Rs21bn. However, the estimate given in the special report of the auditor-general gives a lower figure of Rs9bn. Also, why did Mr Gilani not wait for the report from the PSM’s auditors?

This was the prime minister’s opportunity to earn kudos from the public for taking someone out without taking the trouble to explain to the media that the huge loss was not caused by individual corruption but was a result of global economic recession.

This is not the first time that PSM has incurred huge losses. The organisation had run an accumulated loss of over Rs20bn for the period 1985-90 and 1993-99, which could have been paid off when the mill started making money from 2001-02 to 2008. Unfortunately, PSM fell on bad times again due to a slump in the international market after April 2008.

Another misfortune was the absence of a national steel policy, which meant that there was no plan to bail out the national steel-making concern. The government did not make any effort to stop the customs department from allowing private importers from importing secondary steel at the lower import price meant for primary steel. This scam meant that the private sector could undercut the PSM as they managed to import and sell low-grade steel at around Rs40,000 per tonne compared to the PSM’s Rs42,000 per tonne, thus earning a mark-up of at least Rs10,000-12,000.

An additional problem was caused by the dumping of 0.5 million tonnes of steel by the ship-breakers and electricity loadshedding, which forced numerous downstream industries dependent on PSM to close down. So, orders for about 300,000 tonnes of steel were cancelled. The Steel Mills’ management was stuck with an inventory of Rs9bn, which it tried to dispose of by altering the marketing strategy.

The decision was taken during a meeting attended by the chairman and members of the finance and accounts, commercial and marketing departments, the minutes of which were duly recorded. Instead of selling according to a quota system, a policy of open sales was introduced. This meant that major investors could pick up large quantities of steel and help PSM stay afloat.

The main beneficiaries of the new policy were five different concerns: Metropolitan, Amreli, Abbas Engineering, Al-Abbas Steel and Abbas Steel. Contrary to the belief that the lowering of prices was meant to benefit one of President Zardari’s close friends, there were a total of 232 beneficiaries. Interestingly, the friend (Riaz Lalji) continues to be a significant buyer even after Aftab Sheikh’s sacking due to his greater production capacity rather than anything else.

The decision to lower prices was meant to save the mill. Industrial experts are of the view that shutting PSM is not a possibility because restarting it would not only be technologically difficult but also cost approximately Rs20bn. Meanwhile, the government would have to foot the bill for PSM’s 17,000 employees, which stands at about Rs600m per month.

In any case, the open sale policy was meant to solve the liquidity problem for which the management also used workers’ gratuity. This is not odd since all public and private sector firms do so. The Karachi shipyard under the navy’s management had also done the same in the mid-1990s to stay afloat. Using funds like gratuity or the contractor’s seed money is a done thing for a business concern, especially for the PSM, which badly needs funds for its modernisation.

The Steel Mills is 25 years old with a limited production capacity of a million tonnes. Its British consultant Corus had advised its increasing capacity to about three million tonnes for the concern to become profitable. Resultantly, the management signed an MoU with the Chinese firm MCC which would not become binding unless approved by the ministry of industries and production. It is a misplaced accusation that the government was being forced to incur a debt of Rs2.2bn since no final agreement was signed and there was nothing binding on the government until MCC produced a feasibility study. Had the media seen the MoU, they would have found that the document was not binding on the government until certain conditions were met. In any case, investment for development purposes is not money lost.

Equally baseless is the accusation about the management making money from a contract with the Railways since nothing was signed.

There is also no evidence of corruption since all procurement was done in accordance with the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) regulations and implemented by the committee formed by the government. The accusation of higher prices being paid for raw material and freight is a fallacy since the price of coal, iron ore and coke varies in the international market and the management had to adapt to the changes, which it could not do all the time being a public-sector organisation.

Perhaps what is needed is an inquiry into what the government achieved with its sudden and artificial show of justice. More importantly, is the media above board and should it be allowed to lynch people without a proper hearing which is the norm in civilised societies?

The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst.

Terrorism : Deoband Stance

I have taken it from “Monthly Rahimia”.The Magazine Sep ‘09 issue can be downloaded from

http://www.rahimia.org/

Hating PPP : Revisiting Mehrangate

The national media is revisiting Mehrangate, involving bribes paid by the ISI under the then army chief, General Aslam Beg, in 1990 for the creation of the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) to foreclose the possibility of the PPP again coming to power after its dismissal by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan.

What has triggered this new media interest in Mehrangate is the latest statement by the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Justice (Retd) Saeeduzzaman Siddiqi that no one among the recipient politicians had denied receiving the bribe. The debate has also been given a fillip by revelations made by the ex-ISI officer and ex-IB chief, Imtiaz Ahmad, about how the army had interfered in, and damaged, the democratic process in Pakistan. The whole affair started when the PPP’s General (Retd) Naseerullah Babar told the National Assembly in 1994 how the ISI had disbursed funds among politicians to manipulate the 1990 elections, form the IJI, and bring about the defeat of the PPP. At the summit of power, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan was providing the legal cover. It is his name which was mentioned at the Supreme Court as the Chief Executive who ordered the disbursement. In 1996, Air Marshal Asghar Khan petitioned the Supreme Court against ex-army chief General Mirza Aslam Beg, ex-ISI chief Lt General Asad Durrani, and Younus Habib of Habib Bank and then Mehran Bank, concerning “the criminal distribution of the people’s money for political purposes”. When the Supreme Court proceeded with the case General Asad Durrani submitted the famous affidavit containing names of the “recipients”. That list is now being brandished on TV channels. From the “best prime minister”, the “best leader of a religious party” to the “most popular political leader in the country”, everyone figures on it.

In some cases the sums are so small that it seems ridiculous that our politicians can sell themselves so cheaply. Why should the generals stay put if the lure of “interference” is uncontested by any social and moral restraint? The generals already had power and made money; the politicians wanted power to make money.

Writing in Daily Times (January 22, 2006) columnist Ardeshir Cowasjee revealed a large number of disbursements made from Mehran Bank to General Aslam Beg and his organisation FRIENDS. This was actually a bank account sheet provided to the Court during its initial hearings by General Naseerullah Babar. It also included the fee General Beg had to pay to the lawyer who defended him in a case of contempt against the Supreme Court earlier. Brigadier (Retd) Imtiaz Ahmad has confessed on a TV channel to having hated the PPP on the basis of his institution’s sense of “national security”. Ms Benazir Bhutto has already revealed in her memoirs how she was not allowed to rule under the Constitution and how General Beg had warned her away from Afghanistan and India policies handled by the army through the ISI. (Extrapolating from the de facto situation, Justice (Retd) Siddiqi was compelled to say on Wednesday that the ISI was a military organisation which should be separated from the civilian government.)

The Mehrangate case is still pending at the Supreme Court. The revelations are tonic for us today as we confront the task of understanding what Pakistan has become over the years. But the TV channels too must draw correct lessons from the information being regurgitated. Is the PPP still a “hated” party?

Political accountability is an imperative that the PPP must submit to at all times, but “hatred” of the PPP is not a fair emotion on the basis of which to judge an elected government.

Aslam Beg is still good for sound bytes if the PPP has to be pilloried for being an American or Indian “lackey”. Quoted in Nawa-e-Waqt (August 24, 2009) Gen Aslam Beg said that America used Gen Musharraf against the Taliban, later it bought Baitullah Mehsud, Sufi Muhammad and Ajmal Kasab to fulfil its designs in the region. Is this a fair comment to publish?

During a discussion on a TV channel about his handling of Pakistan’s nuclear programme, he defiantly advocated the policy of “outsourcing” the programme. With the passage of time, this mismatch between the thinking of our retired top brass and the survival of the state is becoming clear. We should be careful what lessons we draw from the Mehrangate scandal.

Swat : Extrajudicial killings Of Taliban

On Sunday (2 August 2009 ) morning, a body, hands bound with rope and shot in the back of the head, lay on the sidewalk of a main road. A note pinned to the shirt and written in Urdu gave the victim’s, Gul Khitab, and said he was from Matta, one of the remaining Taliban strongholds. “Enemy of Swat,” it read.

Now it has become routine for many Swat residents to see unclaimed bodies dumped in agricultural fields, by the roadside or on the banks of Swat River. Like the Taliban before them, the executioners had left handwritten messages with the bodies warning that this would be the fate of militants. In their heyday, the Swat Taliban did exactly the same things, executing, and sometimes beheading their rivals, soldiers and policemen in their custody.

According to details, 22 dead bodies were found on Monday evening and Tuesday. How these people, yet to be recognized, were killed and who were the assassins, continued to be a mystery. During the last couple of months up to 120 dead bodies were found in Swat but no one has accepted the responsibility of killings as yet.

While the security forces have been insisting that a majority of the dead bodies belonged to fleeing terrorists who were killed by the enraged locals, sources said the bodies recovered on Monday and Tuesday were mostly found from the areas where the security forces are conducting operation for the last thee days. This is also giving rise to the speculations of the Swatis about the extra judicial killings in the region.

The commissioner Malakand while reiterating his previous stance that the security forces had nothing to do with the mysterious killings, said he had no knowledge of the fresh killings saying he was away from the headquarters. However, the government is yet to come up with a clear stance in this regard. The commissioner said he had recommended to provincial government to conduct inquiry about these killings.

Witnesses said most of the victims had been shot, some several times. They were blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs, and dumped in fields or alleys.

“Previously we were afraid of the Taliban. Now, we’re afraid of the army,” one man told the Associated Press news agency.

Military officials have confirmed that the army has been conducting operations in areas where the bodies have been found.

Jaswant Jinnah : In Search Of An Anti-Nehru

ASHOK MALIK
Senior Journalist

IN LITERATURE, myth, politics and perception, the principal faultlines of Partition have always been the ones that divided Punjab and Bengal. It is easy to forget that the Great Separation of 1947 also split Sindh from Kutch and contemporary Rajasthan, drawing, almost literally, a line in the sand.

The BJP descended from a party founded by a Bengali and initially dropped anchor among Punjabi refugee communities in Delhi. It is some irony then that the two BJP veterans who have produced revisionist accounts of Partition in recent years speak from (or for) either side of the Sindh- Rajputana/Kutch frontier.

LK Advani’s June 2005 family visit to Karachi is famous. Accompanied by a team of selected journalists, advised by three adventurous confidants and disregarding the counsel of at least two senior diplomats, Advani travelled to Pakistan, to the Jinnah Memorial and to his childhood. He was so emotionally influenced as to throw off his sobriety and enter into a Sindhi folk dance routine wearing a flamboyant red cap. It was a captivating journey, but one that crippled Advani politically.

Jaswant Singh’s remembrance of Partition came in a different form. In the evocative opening chapter of his memoir, A Call to Honour (2006), he wrote movingly of his maternal grandfather, Thakur Mool Singhji of Khuri – “a tall, imposing presence, big of bone, full beard, gruff voice, an example of desert manhood, epitomising the values of this harsh, hard, desiccated, incomparably beautiful land,” patriarch of a Hindu-Muslim community that stretched well into Sindh.

Then came Partition: “What in living memory or history (for even the topography of the land was not different) had not been alien territory suddenly got labelled so. We were divided by time, by circumstance and by events and forces way beyond my grandfather’s world.” Both experiences are touching. It can be argued, of course, that a million refugee or Partition- affected families can recount two million such stories, many more tragic and emotionally wrenching.

Also, despite the melodrama, the fact is Advani and Jaswant were among the luckier ones. The refugee from Karachi came to India on a BOAC flight, not, like countless others, on foot, on a cart or on the roof of an overcrowded train. The grandson of Khuri was at Mayo College on August 15, 1947, living as sheltered a life as could be. Whether it is the relative detachment of the hour or the distance of time, Advani and Jaswant have both sought to re- imagine Partition using the same prism: the life and words of Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
Whose hero? Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammed Ali Jinnah

Advani’s Jinnah and Jaswant’s Jinnah are equally unacceptable to the BJP – and to a the larger body of public opinion in India, irrespective of voting preference. Yet, it is crucial to recognise the two Jinnahs are not always identical.

Advani’s Jinnah was born of a twisted reading of Indian politics. As far back as the 2004 election campaign, Advani had begun to believe – or had been so convinced by some intellectual weathercocks – that Muslim voters were flocking to the BJP. That they would not make the same mistake they did in the 1940s when they deserted the “Hindu” Congress for the Muslim League. As the inheritor of the Congress’ pan-nationalist robustness, the BJP would now win the trust of the Muslim electorate. It was engaging nonsense, good enough for the odd op-ed article but clearly far from real-life politics. The point is, Advani bought the line. A mix of political desperation, individual ambition and the addled nostalgia that inevitably accompanies anecdotage confused him.

Advani was convinced that an India-Pakistan rapprochement was essential for resolving Hindu-Muslim tensions in India and for making the BJP more acceptable to electorally hostile segments as well as reinventing himself as a moderate, Vajpayee-style leader acceptable to a broader constituency. This was not hard politics; it was a soft head at work.

The mechanism Advani chose to fulfil his complex aspiration was appropriating Jinnah. In presenting him as the mascot of Hindu-Muslim unity – which he was in the first quarter of the 20th century – and cheering his speech to the Pakistani Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, in which Jinnah foresaw a Muslim nation but a secular state, with freedom of worship for minorities, Advani felt he could use the Quaid-e-Azam’s words to persuade one section and his religious identity to court another.

As a political gambit, it was always a non-starter.

How would one classify Jaswant’s Jinnah, the subject of a new biography subtitled “India-Partition Independence”? Is this an Advani me-too? Is it contrariaism for the sake of contrarianism, an uncritical absorption of the ideas of Ayesha Jalal or the unquenched desire to be recognised as the thinking man’s politician? These elements play a part but, above all, Jaswant’s Jinnah is personal. In his book, he paints his hero as a wronged, misunderstood patrician. Is that Jaswant’s self-image?

At the height of his “nationalist” phase, Jinnah was an auxiliary of Bombay’s westernised public intellectuals – Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the Congress Moderates and the Parsi constitutionalists. These groups, along with the Banglo-Indians in Calcutta, comprised the early, pre-Gandhi Indian elites.

The Mahatma’s mass politics, his shifting of the locus of the Congress from the lawyers’ chambers of Bombay to the heat and dust of rural Gujarat, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, unnerved these elites. They lost control of the Congress and moved in other directions. Some ended up as Communists, some in the Hindu Mahasabha; Jinnah ended up with Pakistan.

Despite his long innings, Jaswant has had a similarly alien relationship with the BJP’s mobilisation techniques. As he puts it in the book: “His whole persona was of a self-contained reserved man who worked on reason, clarity of thought, and by the incisiveness of his expression. As long as politics was consultative, his position was not to be questioned. With increasing politicisation, democratisation and the trend becoming more participatory… Jinnah lost his inclusive, all-India platform.”

This left Jaswant’s protagonist with a compelling dilemma: “How to straddle the national scene without there being any province wholly behind him?” The MP from Darjeeling is writing of Jinnah; he may as well have been talking of himself.

In the end, however, Jaswant’s Jinnah and Advani’s Jinnah are united by one quest: the search for the anti-Nehru. Neither BJP senior citizen has the courage to say it trenchantly but their exploration of a non-Nehruvian source of the idea of Indian nationhood was what drove them to Jinnah.

WHO WERE THE other candidates? A Savarkar or a Golwalkar would appeal only to the initiated. A Rajaji, a constitutional conservative who advocated a free market, had his limitations for two men not intrinsically comfortable with economic policy and not seeing it as central to their identity. Patel had his uses but these were limited to attempts at borrowing his “Iron Man” armour and no-nonsense approach to internal security.
None of these was useful to win incremental supporters or applause from liberal intellectuals. That would come only from painting Jinnah in sympathetic colours and the Muslim as Partition’s victim rather than its anti-hero.

When historical interpretation is reduced to such exigencies, the upshot is downright bizarre. In his Jinnah biography, Jaswant quotes American academic Lloyd Rudolph as telling him: “A multinational state… shares sovereignty among a variety of actors. India’s federal system, particularly its linguistic states, is a manifestation of a multinational state that shares and bargains about sovereignty. Similarly, reservations for SCs, STs and even for OBCs, as well as the 73rd amendment’s creation of third tier of local government [panchayati raj] are [all] manifestations of sharing and bargaining about sovereignty in a multinational state. These developments are consistent with the kind of bargaining strategy that Jinnah adopted.”

Jaswant expects us to believe this was the sort of harmless, textbook federalism Nehru and Patel denied poor Jinnah and forced him into demanding a separate nation. Indians may buy his book, but not too many will buy Jaswant’s thesis. His Jinnah, like Advani’s, is fantasy.

Article 6 ; High Treason…

6. High treason. (1) Any person who abrogates or attempts or conspires to abrogate, subverts or attempts or conspires to subvert the Constitution by use of force or show of force or by other unconstitutional means shall be guilty of high treason.
(2) Any person aiding or abetting the acts mentioned in clause (1) shall likewise be guilty of high treason.
(3) [5] [Majlis-e-Shoora (Parliament)] shall by law provide for the punishment of persons found guilty of high treason.