:: Kishwar Desai

Waiting for real, human leaders

Kishwar Desai

Augest.22 : Competitive heroism is nothing new. As children we are all programmed to prefer our daddies to be the strongest, and our moms to be the most beautiful. In case we have parents who don’t quite provide the ideal role model — we can always go out there and pick out an icon whom we can worship. For the post-Partition generation in India Jawaharlal Nehru has been the hero of choice — an intellectual Prime Minister, someone with very human failings and emotions. Besides which, he was also good-looking and even his romantic pursuits have been forgiven since we acknowledge that, apart from an ill wife, he had spent most of his best years in jail. It has also helped that the Congress Party whose patronage is key for many "historians" has been a dominant force — and therefore for the generation which grew up during Partition and after — he has been an icon who, even after his death, has remained in our consciousness much more than any living Prime Minister.

Nehru has been discussed and analysed — but there are always unwritten lines that most people would not dare to cross — as there are too many out there who take it as a personal affront if anything really "remiss" were to be said about Nehru. For many he is genuinely part of their political and social consciousness. For instance, when I was researching my book , Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, I was very moved by Sunil Dutt’s personal memory of Nehru — a man he met perhaps only a handful of times in his entire life. Yet those encounters shaped him and his idealism. Dutt’s father had died when he was very young — and when he saw a photograph of Nehru in a newspaper (pre-Partition) he ran excitedly to his mother and asked if that was his father. Even when he began his charitable activities — the highlight was being able to present a cheque to Nehru, personally. Dutt was not alone as many people like him were brought into politics by Nehru’s personal charisma.

The tragedy is that we still don’t have anybody else who can match up to that stature — apart from Mohandas Gandhi. We definitely need to look at that pantheon of great men and women who led to us to Independence and examine each one of them once more. Which is why I have to say that I was thrilled to be at Jaswant Singh’s book launch on Jinnah: India, Partition, and Independence — and to note the passion with which speaker after speaker (barring a few who took the same old ghisa pita Congress Party line) was able to bring to the subject. For the first time, after 62 years of a supreme academic silence — it was exciting to rediscover a major player who has been either written out of Indian history or has been junked as the "bad boy", the spoiler. The same fervour that I remember in Sunil Dutt’s voice when he narrated his passion for Nehru was audible in Hamid Haroon’s voice when he spoke of Jinnah. And why not? Haroon is the editor/publisher of the Dawn group of newspapers and a Pakistani. He pointed out the excitement in Pakistan over the publication of this book, and the fact that the younger generation in Pakistan has begun to discover the "real" Jinnah. This is not the deified Jinnah that the fundamentalists would like us to know about — but the very human and complex individual that he was.

Of course, the irony was that the book launch was at the Nehru Memorial Library — with a large portrait of Nehru staring at us across the room, while Jinnah’s portrait was on stage. Even after 62 years post-Independence the two men remained the adversaries that they must have been in real life. Both were good-looking, sophisticated, secular — and either could have become the Prime Minister of India. In fact, as someone (a Muslim) pointed out, after the event — the real underlying issue, the real problem was the almost-sibling rivalry between the two. It may not have helped that both Motilal Nehru and Gandhi were also fond of Jinnah. It was another amazing thought — that we had come so very close to getting a Muslim Prime Minister — an impossibility given the current climate we live in!

From the excitement of that book launch — to the cold political reality only goes to show that while India is growing up — our politicians remain immature and child-like. They still want to hang on to their childhood heroes refusing to acknowledge that we live in a world which prefers Sach Ka Saamna. That we prefer our heroes to be real and human — with foibles and secrets — just like us. That we would now, please, like some real hard honesty from our historians and we deserve to know the truth about Partition. And yes, we will not fall apart if we our heroes turn out to have feet of clay.

As Sir Mark Tully remarked during the book launch the disturbing aspect is not that the book has been written — but the negative, almost fascist reaction to the book from both sides of the political divide. The fact that Mr Singh has been expelled and that the book has been banned in Gujarat is totally shocking — but at the same time — we all know that it will be very good for book sales. If Salman Rushdie did not have fatwa issued against him — he would perhaps never have reached the near sainthood he managed to achieve and the phenomenal sympathy he received from liberals all over the world.

By his sheer act of rebellion, by choosing a proscribed subject, Mr Singh has actually risen in stature from being a mere Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politician. In an Internet age banning books makes absolutely no sense. Besides, by denouncing the book both the Congress Party and the BJP have actually achieved the opposite of what they had set out to do — Jinnah has emerged as an intriguing, interesting subject. And it is even more intriguing that it has taken a former BJP politician to allow a very interesting and dominant but long-dead politician — to take centrestage once more.

Kishwar Desai’s novel Witness the Night, to be published in January 2010, is on the longlist for the Man Asian Literary Prize, 2009. She can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.com