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NEW DELHI, India; The wounds of partition festered again this week in India, resulting in the banning of a book and the expulsion of a respected politician. Protesters burn an effigy of Jaswant Singh over his book; the former foreign minister was ousted from his party. The home state of the father of Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi, forbade the sale and circulation of a new book it says spews revisionist history about the birth of secular but predominantly Hindu India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
Written by Jaswant Singh, a former federal minister and senior member of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the book calls Mohammed Ali Jinnah, considered by Indians the architect of the partition, a great man who is wrongly demonized. Jinnah went on to become the first governor general of Pakistan.
In "Jinnah: India, Partition and Independence," Singh absolves the Pakistani leader as the man responsible for dividing the subcontinent, suggesting instead that it was another beloved independence leader, Sardar Patel, who played a major role. "The book wrongfully portrays the fateful partition of our nation," the Gujarat state government said in a statement. " Such a brainchild has no historic background at all. In the larger interest of society, the state government has decided to impose a ban on the book." The BJP accused Singh of deviating from the party's "core ideology".
"We always respect freedom of expression but can never compromise our ideology," Sidharth Nath Singh, a party spokesman, told CNN. "You just can't eulogize Jinnah and accuse Sardar Patel instead." Singh, a widely respected politician known for his moderate views within the ranks of a conservative party, found it appalling that freedom of expression was threatened in the world's largest democracy.
"The day we start banning books, we are banning thinking," Singh told reporters.
He defended his work and said he did not understand the objection to his writings about Patel, who, as India's first home minister, banned the Hindu revivalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the mother organization of the BJP, after the assassination of Gandhi in 1948.
"I don't know which part of the core belief I have demolished," Singh said. source: cnn.com