Barkha did an interview with Jaswant Singh after he was expelled from BJP. She has wrote an article in Hindustan times which is really interesting. Her views on the recent take by BJP on Jaswant Singh, Indian history.
If Varun Gandhi had not erupted and polarised the Muslim vote, the BJP was actually trying to fight the 2009 elections on issues of development, governance and internal security. You hardly heard about “Hindutva”, for example, in any of the campaigns. It’s true that after the poll defeat, Jaswant Singh, along with Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie, made up a trio of public dissidents. But if the BJP was punishing dissidents, why didn’t it sack Jaswant Singh when he demanded to know what the “meaning of the word Hindutva is”, or when he pointed out that it was much too recent an entry in the BJP’s own lexicon? Why sack him for Jinnah and Patel and people of the past, instead of throwing him out for openly disagreeing with a contemporary political belief?
The BJP today has two problems. It is ideologically adrift and it doesn’t have a leader who can steer it towards clarity or consensus. When it tries to be different from the centrist politics of the Congress, it finds itself trapped by demons of the past. When it tries to be a more modern variation of itself, the party finds that it probably sounds too much like everyone else.
In the end, apart from looking intellectually intolerant, booting out Jaswant Singh hasn’t achieved much. It may have terminated Singh’s political career, but it won’t kickstart the flagging spirit of the BJP.
Barkha has come up with her views after her interview with Jaswant Singh which I watched and her conclusions are the facts.
