Indo-Pak relations are a maze replete with false turnings, dead ends, and no perceptible way out. It has been designed by the two governments to keep their diplomats occupied.
No one understood its vexatious challenges better than Khushwant Singh. An adult thirty-two year old when his beloved Punjab was partitioned in August 1947, Khushwant witnessed horrors he would not have wished on his enemy, except in this case, overnight, the enemy he was told to hate were persons he had loved as kin. Muslims (now Pakistanis) whom he had grown up with, whom he saw as human beings, not adversaries, were separated from him by an implacable white line.
Although he never enjoyed the power to change governments or to reverse their decisions, he conducted his own one-pen crusade, advocating tolerance, co-existence and religious forbearance. Because of his access to persons in authority, he could insinuate his humanism into their thinking and occasionally temper their chauvinistic excesses. Most Indian leaders humoured him by accepting his self-appointed avuncular role. Most of them in any case were younger than he was: Mrs Indira Gandhi by 2 years, I.K. Gujral by 4 years, Atal Behari Vajpayee by 9 years, L.K. Advani by 12 years, Jaswant Singh by 23 years, and Mani Shankar Aiyar by 26 years.
After 1971, Khushwant Singh thought he could use his proximity to Mrs Gandhi to plead for the return of Pakistani POWs and CUPCs (civilians under protective custody). He disclosed in an interview: ‘I took the stand that we have nowhere to hold them and now that we have won the war, let them go back home now. And Mrs Gandhi got very gussa. She called me to Delhi – she was very soft with me, of course, until Maneka fouled our relationship.
“You know nothing about politics.”
I said: “I know nothing about politics but I know about morality. What is morally wrong cannot be politically right.”
She looked me up and down and said: “Thank you for lecturing me”.’[1]
Her withering retort did not prevent him from meeting Pakistani POWs and conveying messages from them to their families. One of them, wounded, was visited by Khushwant Singh in a Calcutta hospital. The POW recalled: “You gave me Bengali rasgullas and told me stories of my birthplace Multan and of Lahore, and of your time in Pakistan. The visit lasted about an hour. The Indian officer was getting impatient to send me back to my cell. Before leaving, you gave me a hug and your signed book Train to Pakistan, and said “Rab Rakha.” Later, I would find out that you wrote a letter to my mother telling her how you had met me.”[2]
Khushwant Singh was the first and oldest of a trinity of Indian intellectuals - the other two being Kuldip Nayar and now Mani Shankar Aiyar - who have tried to sway Indian public opinion towards Indo-Pak amity. Each has had to pay a price for his advocacy. They would have found comfort in the observation: ‘We are more inclined to hate one another for points on which we differ, than to love one another for points on which we agree.’[3]
This trio of reason incarnate has been more fortunate than that other trio which fell casualty to Indo-Pak (or to be more specific) to Hindu-Muslim antagonism. The first was of course M. K. Gandhi, shot in 1948 by Nathuram Godse for being ‘unfairly favourable towards the Muslims.’ The second victim – BJP leader L.K. Advani – made the mistake of inscribing in the visitor’s book at the mausoleum of Quaid–e-Azam M. A. Jinnah: ‘There are many people who leave an irreversible stamp on history. But there are few who actually create history. Qaed-e-Azam [sic] Mohammed Ali Jinnah was one such rare individual. In his early years, leading luminary of freedom struggle Sarojini Naidu described Jinnah as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. His address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947 is really a classic and a forceful espousal of a secular state in which every citizen would be free to follow his own religion. The State shall make no distinction between the citizens on the grounds of faith. My respectful homage to this great man.’
And Jaswant Singh’s reams of contribution to India as its Union Minister for External Affairs, for Defence, and later Finance stood vitiated, wiped out by one single volume – his biography of Jinnah.[4] He tried to defend himself by maintaining that he had been ‘objective’ in his narrative. He knew the punishment: ‘Now, I am ready for the noose.’ Pinioned on either side by the BJP and by Congress, he was led to the scaffold. The BJP castigated him for praising Jinnah; Congress flailed him for blaming Pandit Nehru for the division in 1947.
A reporter Jawed Naqvi asked Jaswant Singh: Did he believe the common Indian lore that Jinnah hated Hindus? Jaswant Singh replied: ‘Wrong. Totally wrong. That certainly he was not … his principal disagreement was with the Congress Party. He had no problems whatsoever with Hindus. I think we have misunderstood him because we needed to create a demon … we needed a demon because in the 20th century the most telling event in the subcontinent was the partition of the country.’[5]
Khushwant Singh had no room for any false demons in his Sujan Singh Park home. He left it to politicians to keep them company.
At the Khushwant Singh Litfest in Kasauli, I read a poem I had written in August 2003. Two stanzas I know would have appealed to Khushwant:
Surely we can touch palms again
without losing caste,
hold fast in an embrace
that will keep us face to face
as future friends, not yester-foes.
Surely we can offer a common prayer
in our separate dialects
to our separate equal Gods.
Have we not proof enough
that my God is no stronger than yours,
nor yours any stronger than mine.
© F. S. AIJAZUDDIN
[Published in ‘Fresh Springs of Himalayan Thought’, Khushwant Singh Litfest Kasauli 2015, 9-11 Oct. 2015, pp.85-87.
[1] KS interview with Sheila Reddy, Outlook, 17 October2005.
[2] Facebook message, Shujaat Khan, 23 March 2014.
[3] C. C Colton, Lacon (1825), 2.127.
[4] Jaswant Singh, Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence (New Delhi, 2009).
[5] Interview, 17 August 2009. |
