Politics isn't my cup of tea; though I couldn't have missed an opportunity to write my first post on the Indian Politics regarding whatever happened last week, all because of a book... a controversial one: "Jinnah, Partition and Independence".
Jaswant Singh ate the forbidden apple and paid the price for it. His unceremonious expulsion from the BJP, a party that he served for three decades, without even being shown the normal courtesy of a show-cause notice was disgraceful. And moreover, the funny part of the story I read is that most of the BJP parliamentary board members who expelled Jaswant Singh haven't read the book!
One may not agree with every argument of Jaswant Singh but as a mature democracy, we should accept different points of view even on contentious issues such as the division of our country. History should be open to reinterpretation and our historians should take a new look at things that happened more than six decades ago. Leaders who create history have positives and negatives both. We then cannot refuse to see the 'bright side' of Jinnah (I understand that this was the cause for the furore). A few years ago L. K. Advani had praised Jinnah as a secular person. After a few protests everything was forgotten and forgiven. Jaswant Singh perhaps thought that he too could get away and dared to analyse the founder of Pakistan. All this reminded me of a joke which I'd heard a long time ago -
A gentleman was on a flight with a parrot on the seat next to him. Every time the air hostess walked past, the parrot whistled. The air hostess gave the parrot a dirty look and walked away. After this happened a couple of times she was nipped by the bird while passing by. She became really angry and complained about the shameless passenger. The captain couldn't do much and asked her to put up with the bird till they touched ground. This emboldened the gentleman sitting next to the parrot and he pinched the air hostess when she walked past. She lost her patience and threatened to resign if the captain took no action...
"Throw them both out of the plane", the captain said.
As the two of them were falling, the parrot asked the gentleman, "Can you fly?".
The frightened man said, "No".
The bird opened its wings and asked, "Why did you take a 'punga' with the air hostess when you can't fly?".
