Bunty aur Babli: The latest RSS-BJP tango

A beautiful piece of writing. It contains good and insightful political analysis. Political game is much too crooked and complex to be comprehended by those who are standing outside.Give some more time to Mr. Advani to show his true colors. If he indeed showed he is for burying the hatchet, he should then be applauded.
Whatever the truth, it was a great step on his part to say what he said in Pakistan. Let us hope he sticks to it by his actions. Regards,
Mohammad Gill

Farzana,

``Of course. The situation as it stands today is the RSS is now praising Vajpayee for his stand against the UPA government, the same Vajpayee who has stood behind Advani. Got it?``

In your own words: ``Wake up.`` India is moving to ``issue-based`` politics from ``party-based`. You can praise what you like and condemn what you don`t like about something or someone. The world isn`t black-and-white you see.

Perhaps, there is a thing like social color blindness or even myopia. A new type of ``Ishihara test`` is needed.

As for the tango, its fun, and very sensual. You should try it more often if you already do.

Let`s leave the ``dirty dancing`` to politicians. Wait, that`s even more fun .....

For the rest of your article: sadly, reflects of ``Bollywood`` designs: Vajapayee/BJP bad, Advani/RSS very bad. Both lost brothers to be united.

Satire

//...There has been a tacit understanding: Use Jinnah who they say fractured the country along communal lines to justify and legitimise your own communalism...//

FV got this one right. Advani has figured that best way to legitimize his communalism is to legitimize the most communal politician that ever existed - MA Jinnah.

And it seems to working, at least in pakiland. Pakis are head over heels on advani for his ``change of heart``. Congress, commies are up in arms because advani seeks to re-dfine the whole [fake]secularism game these freaks have been playing for last 6 decades.

The wily fox had redefined Indian politics once - he is trying to do it again. Very Interesting indeed!!

Dear Farzana,

Regardless of what Advani`s motives were... he has managed to reopen the debate on important part of South Asian History ... if indeed his idea was to justify his own communalism... I am afraid that will backfire... as India reads more about Jinnah... it will learn of how Jinnah, the staunchest Indian nationalist for 30 years, the most non-communal politician produced by South Asia and a thorough secularist who saw himself as an Indian first second and last, was pushed, humiliated and shoved into so called communalism ...

If anything... by opening the debate on ``official Muslim demon`` of Indian history... which will lead to only one conclusion... that Jinnah bent over backwards to save Indian Unity... the next conclusion is obvious ``Muslims were unwilling party to partition`` which means that the Muslims of India can be as patriotic as any other community.

So either way... it is a win win situation.

Dear Farzana:

I said some of the same things you have said in this article on the Beena board. What I had said was that:
-Advani was staging a tamasha
-He has not changed his colours
-That Pakistan should have used a Pakistani Hindu for Temple restoration.

But I have a different take on the RSS-Advani thing, which I am trying to put into an article. In my opinion, Advani is an ambitious politician who used the Hindu card successfully once and he will discard it if he thinks it would bring him to power. If he had remained in Karachi, he would perhaps have recited Kalima long ago to become a popular Pakistani polititician.

This is very interesting way to see it. I being a Pakistani just couldn`t see what maybe an astute Indian would. But now after reading this article I will go back and watch the DVD again.

Re: # 7

Dear Ana,

I protest... It is not blind... it is based on historical facts... facts which have once again come out to prove me right... to venture forth a hint... to quote Jinnah himself ``when one asks for 16 anas there is always room for negotiation``...

As for ``admiration``... while I value you as a fellow Pakistani, I am no Gandhian ... like the man I admire, I take positions based on what I see as right or wrong... and not what would get me the most brownie points.

For the record... I knew exactly why Mohar11 put his superlative there... and I was mindful of my superlative.

-YLH


PS: I present to you DT`s editorial :

EDITORIAL: Mr Jinnah’s credentials

It is unfortunate that the secular credentials of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah have been called into question by vested interests in Pakistan and in India. While liberal circles in Pakistan have always maintained that Mr Jinnah believed in a secular state, and substantiate that claim by citing, among other things, his speech to the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, the centrists and mullahs in this country twist the ‘Two-Nation’ theory on the basis of which this country was begotten by saying that it was based on the unbridgeable differences between the Muslim-ness or Islam of Muslims and the Hindu-ness or Hinduism of Hindus. Ironically, across the border, the secular Congress and the left-leaning parties have presented Mr Jinnah in the same manner as our centrists and mullahs, for much the same reason. The former want to exploit him to foster anti-India feelings in Pakistan and the latter want to foster anti-Pakistan sentiment in India. Both do it in order to claim some legitimacy for their respective political ideologies.

The state of Pakistan is also to blame for glossing over Mr Jinnah’s secular credentials and focusing instead on Hindu-Muslim differences to provide the meta-narrative for Pakistan and its identity. Historian Ayesha Jalal has brilliantly analysed the heady days before Partition and in the run-up to it and proved that exclusionary discourses on both sides of the divide were primarily political strategies and that the ‘communalist’ Mr Jinnah was more secular than the ‘secular’ Mahatma Gandhi.

The Congress president, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, in India Wins Freedom blames Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru for pushing the League down the road to Pakistan by throwing a spanner in the works of the Cabinet Mission Plan. We now refer to the Lahore Resolution of 1940 as the Pakistan Resolution, but the fact is that the League’s acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan as late as 1946 shows that Mr Jinnah was primarily interested not in a separate state but in ensuring a mechanism through which the rights of the Mussalmans of India could be secured.

Given the recent controversy in India regarding Mr Jinnah’s secular credentials, amid a similar debate in Pakistan as the centre-right and liberal camps lock horns, the Indian newspaper, The Hindu, may have done all of us much good by reporting on what eminent Indian poet Jagan Nath Azad had to say a year prior to his death. According to the late Mr Azad, who was based in Lahore in 1947, he was asked by Mr Jinnah to write the national anthem for the new state of Pakistan. This is how Mr Azad described it: “On the morning of August 9, 1947, there was a message from Pakistan’s first governor-general, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. It was through a friend working in Radio Lahore who called me to his office. He told me ‘Quaid-e-Azam wants you to write a national anthem for Pakistan.’ I told them it would be difficult to pen it in five days and my friend pleaded that as the request had come from the tallest leader of Pakistan, I should consider his request. On much persistence, I agreed.”

Why would Mr Jinnah get an Urdu-speaking Hindu poet to write the national anthem? Mr Azad’s response to that question was that “I believe Jinnah Sahib wanted to sow the roots of secularism in a Pakistan where intolerance had no place.”

We find it interesting that this fact has so far remained little known, indeed almost unknown. Why should that be? Could it be that there has been a conscious effort to bury it? The other interesting part of this story is that after Mr Jinnah’s death, at some point, the anthem written by Mr Azad and used for over a year was dropped and Hafeez Jallundhry, himself an eminent poet, was tasked to write Pakistan’s national anthem. What need was there to do that and who ordered that the anthem be changed? None of this is recorded in our history textbooks, which is understandable because these textbooks have been written with the express purpose of distorting facts or, as Prof KK Aziz wrote, to “murder history”. During General Zia ul Haq’s time the state even took the ‘Two-Nation’ theory back to the time when Mohammad Bin Qasim landed in Sindh on a military expedition. But while the praetorian state may have its reasons for bludgeoning facts for political reasons, we would strongly urge the independent historians of Pakistan to look into what Mr Azad revealed before his death and bring it out of obscurity because it lends weight to Mr Jinnah’s secular credentials. This shouldn’t be too difficult especially if the anthem written by Mr Azad was actually used for more than a year. It certainly seems to us that the League which later decided to trash the legacy of Mr Jinnah’s August 11 speech must have done away with the anthem written by Mr Azad for the same reason. *

manto,

your blind admiration for Jinnah is, gawd, it is blinding. i wish i could say it is equally admirable. but for now, your biased use of ``the most non-communal politician produced by south asia`` has in its superlativeness completely blinded me. i can`t say anything else.

as always, regards. :)

Advani messed up Agra;


Once against FV swallows the Paki line...What was messed up in Agra? What`s wrong in getting the military ruler Pakistan to acknowledge the terrorist activities that end up killing citizens of your(?) country?

India, under a secular government, still maintains the same line...no cross border terrorism...and no transfer of land...so how is the congress position any different from the position that supposedly messed up agra?

Re: # 9 ana
//...mohar`s use of the superlative is equally blinding...//

Actually my ``superlative`` on jinnah has spurred YLH to come up with his counter-superlative :). You know, it`s a challenge-response prank on YLH.....Kind of silly, but kills the boredom.

Just to carry the silliness a little further - who would you think is the ``most communal`` politician of the century??

The choices are:
a. Jinnah
b. Adavani
c. Gandhi
d. name your own.

oh, i should add, since i`ve now read all the responses so far to this article, that mohar`s use of the superlative is equally blinding.

it is really amazing that you all can see just one tree, and not the forest itself.

khair. . . enough said. i saw the direction this board would move in even before the first response, and so far i have not been disappointed. (or should i say i am?)

adios

Re: # 10

arjunm

``Its frikkin` anal``

Does it you hurt bad?

#7 by ana on June 20, 2005 11:08am PT


your blind admiration for Jinnah is, gawd, it is blinding.


you mean it`s frikking anal....

“What Advani did by rattling Jinnah’s skeleton was to in fact draw attention to the two-nation theory.”
“Use Jinnah who they say fractured the country along communal lines to justify and legitimise your own communalism.”

Very good observations; Still, the communalism was legitimized in India long before the current Advani bhashan in Pakistan. BJP won in 1998 based on its communal card and communal politics. What is the need to re-legitimize it? Advani is not looking to “fracture” the country that he will seek inspiration from Jinnah. IMO, changing the BJP image is more likely the cause of all the brouhaha.

Most of what advani said in Pakistan was addressed to his Indian audience. Pakistan provided him the platform that he needed to say those things. His talk about Jinnah in India would have meant nothing or RSS would have ignored it as a “dewaane ki barr” as they often ignore ABV too, but saying that in Pakistan, changed the whole context. I think one also needs to look at this in the current improvement in relations in between the two countries.

You are right about asking why Pakistan provided him the Platform and especially a mandir is extremely important in this analysis. Incidentally, the three Newspapers Jang, Daily times and Dawn that you quoted (you actually read them? What’s wrong w/Indians!) are very close to the Pakistani establishment and their inspiration may have come from the above too.

A third possibility that should also be explored is the changing US stance on the extremist political parties especially in the areas of its immediate interest. We know that new thrust of the US foreign policy would be to sideline or completely alienate extremists. The new double edged US foreign policy is to promote democracy and remove extremist elements from the political scene. The first sign of that came when the US disallowed visa to extremist Modi, and at the same time, Maulana SamiUlhaq of Pakistan was not allowed entry in Belgium, which is an important NATO country.

In view of the US policy,-which I believe, has already been diplomatically communicated to most of the countries where US influence plays an important role-, Advani and the BJP will have to redefine their image from an extremist political party to a moderate party, which is above communalism, and stands for better relations with Pakistan.

I think the next logical step for BJP and Advani would be to distance from their strong Hindutva platform to a softer platform, which may attempt to include Muslims in India as well as show a strong desire to have better relationship with Pakistan by dismantling BJP or even Advani’s Akhand Bharat dream completely.

Manto`s drama of Jinnah worshiping surpasses Advani`s tamasha......give it up.......none is questioning the validity of your Paki/Sunni patriotism.

it is sounding fake and scripted now - nauseaus.

Re: # 16 ana
//...use that so-called analytical mind of yours for good, and respond out of more than just killing boredom. ...//

Come on - don`t be so uptight :) I mean, this Chowk for crying out loud ...... Use my ``analytical mind`` to beat up on YLH? Sure - I do that but not all the time.

Actually, that`s the problem with YLH too - the guy is always taught like a string. If he loosens up a bit once in a while - he can get a better perspectives on things - instead of going ``jinnah, jinnah, jinnha`` all the time :)