Jaswant Singh and M A Jinnah

There has been an enormous kerfuffle in India over the new book by Jaswant Singh on the life of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, and sometime barrister, man of the world and supreme constitutionalist. The book alleges that Patel and Nehru are equally - if not more - to blame for Partition in 1947 which created the states of India and Pakistan, and laid the foundations for Bangladesh, out of British India. Jaswant Singh has been expelled from the Hindu nationalist BJP. His book has been banned in Gujarat - I have no polite words for Narendra Modi and his administration - and a few other states are planning to follow suit.

Jaswant’s thesis is not new, neither do I think he is a great historian. However, he does deserve kudos for daring to speak against received wisdom in India. In historical circles, the role of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Jinnah in India’s partition is very well known and well documented. I would ask you to read Stanley Wolpert’s “Shameful Flight”. The title of the book comes from a speech by Churchill in Parliament in March 1947. By then in opposition, this was a phrase he used in an emotional speech decrying the haste with which the Mountbatten plan required the British to partition India and leave. Even as an unreconstructed Empire-apologist and a near-racist, he was accurate in predicting the bloodbath and the chaos that would follow. But I digress. Wolpert traces the evolution of the Partition plan. Once the 1946 Interim Government was in place, Patel and Nehru had a taste of what power felt like. They were not willing to delay Independence, perhaps conscious of their own mortality. So was Jinnah. On the other hand, Gandhi proposed the Confederacy with Jinnah as Prime Minister, which was rejected outright by Nehru. Gandhi’s view was that Jinnah’s extremism would be tempered once he had the reins of administration in his hands. He may well have been right. But he proposed this structure knowing fully well that Partition meant a bloodbath, a sore that would fester for years and years. As it indeed has done, with frequent wars between India and Pakistan, the rise of Islamic terrorism in India, the emergence of a virulent Hindu nationalism in India, the nuclear weapon, and so on.

Gandhi is a cliche in India - however I would recommend very highly Rajmohan Gandhi’s biography of his grandfather to help the modern Indian understand who we are talking about when they see his smiling visage on a 500 Rupee currency note. The book is very honest and it is by no means a hagiography of a famous man. Gandhi's many failings as a human being are faithfully exposed. However, the detailed account of the way the Patition Plan was accepted by Patel and Nehru makes for very sad reading. Rajmohan pieces together events over a couple of days in June 1947, in sequence, from various sources, such as the diaries of Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the diaries of Maulana Azad, the memoirs of Leo Amery, etc. In that short period, everything was done and agreed, starting with an encounter in a car at Gol Market reminiscent of a John Le Carre thriller. And then when the Mahatma comes to the Working Committee meeting to talk again about the confederacy idea, he realises that a deal has been done. Azad then asks, “Is it necessary to detain the Mahatma any more?”. No answer from Patel or Nehru. Gandhiji gets up and walks off, knowing that India has been split. An extremely poignant recounting.

Both books moved me. I remember reading the last 100 pages of Wolpert flying from Delhi to Madras in February 2008. And when I put down the book on Gandhi I had tears in my eyes. Now, whenever I listen to “Vaishnav Jan To” – indeed when I write the name of this song – I have strong feelings rise in me. What a great life, what a great soul. With all his imperfections and quirks and idiosyncrasies, he lived a great life of conviction and courage. We as Indians should be doubly proud.

Which brings me back to Jaswant. While I have a lot of appreciation for his formidable strengths as a human being and as a politician, it is a bit rich, for someone who flirted with Hindutva and was silent during the Godhra/Gujarat incidents to now talk about Mahatma Gandhi or Nehru or Patel. He does not have half the courage of a Gandhi or a Nehru. Now that he is in the evening of his political life, may be this is a confession of sorts. I don’t know. Epiphanies are always welcome whenever they arrive. So one should be grateful, I suppose

The Worli Sea Link

I am in Mumbai, and I had an opportunity to travel on the new Worli Sea Link that connects the Bandra coast to Haji Ali (apologies to those not familiar with Mumbai). It is a remarkable piece of engineering, with a beautiful suspension bridge right in the middle. If ever any one wants to see the power of thought and the rule of physical law (that is mathematics and physics) you have to see a suspension bridge. The entire section of road is held by metal stays that are suspended from two or more concrete supports at each end. This is the stuff of real life that changes lives. Recently, driving back from Normandy to Calais from Carentan, I took the A13 which crosses the Pont du Normandie - another magnificent piece of work. Also a suspension bridge, and also a solution to what could have been - literally - an insurmountable engineering problem. The Pont du Gard at Nimes should be in this list. It crosses the river Rhone, and is an aqueduct built by the Romans around the 1st century AD. They built well. A few years ago there were severe floods in the region, and the Pont du Gard was one of the few structures to stay intact.

We in India need to learn the art of building once and building well. A project like the Sea Link defines the ambitions of a nation. Do we want to be a civilisation that shapes the earth for the good of those who live on it today and for eternity. And I do not mean yet another shopping mall. Do we believe in the future? When we build without engineering foresight and proper planning, we are telling our children that we did not believe that they would come to exist. It states that we do not believe in posterity. That our generation lacked ambition. We did not believe in ourselves enough to think that we would be capable of handing down a patrimony. I could show all the projects that we have undertaken that have not stood the test of time. The Mandovi bridge. The Bhakra Nangal dam that develops cracks. The thousands of miles of shoddy roads. Ask these planners to take a trip to Volubilis in Morocco or to Libya or Tunisia to see the Roman roads, still there, and sometimes capable of taking 4x4 traffic.

The Worli Sealink bypasses Mahim, which as any Bombayite knows, is an olfactory delight for anyone passing through it. However it also bypasses the Lady Jamshedji Road (the main road that connects Bandra to Dadar). This road - also known as the Mahim Causeway - was built in 1856 or so by Lady Jamshedji. She built it at a cost of Rupees One Hundred Thousand, and gave it to the city. Earlier, traders had to load up boats at Bandra and cross over to the other side. Now, they had a road. The impact on commerce and on the growth of this astonishing city was phenomenal. It is hard to quantify the magnitude of the generosity in today's money. But it never hurts to remember what happens if you build once, build well, and build for the future.

I came across a letter in the FT, (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9ce6a3d2-8159-11de-92e7-00144feabdc0.html) deriding India's efforts to try and stem the decline of the Himalayan glaciers in association with China. Now, we are talking about two countries that are villains in Western eyes, for refusing to toe the line on emission cuts. And now they get together to try and save the glaciers without first cutting emissions. This German academic, no doubt echoing the Indian rope trick, asked about the "Indians magic tricks to rescue the world from global warming".

The “magic trick” that India needs to continue to pull – as she has done with some success – is to provide a degree of economic development to its teeming millions, guaranteeing them a chance at living a small part of the middle class life that I am sure Prof Sendler enjoys in ample measure. And she has to do this while making sure her borders are safe, her democracy and civil liberties are reasonably secure, her various communities strive to find common cause rather than yield to those who exploit differences, her forest and natural wealth are preserved – I could go on.

Mr Jairam Ramesh, the Indian minister who flatly refused to entertain the notion of unilateral emission cuts recently, is not a stupid or unreasonable man, and I am sure he reads the same literature as Prof Sendler. If the current path of economic development that India is on were to be arrested because India yields to concerns about emission control, the result would be social and economic chaos which I am sure the West will do very little to solve. If there is an alternate path, let it present itself. Until then, India has no choice.

If Prof Sendler would care to review the same evidence, he would perhaps realise that his country is the third largest polluter per capita in the world in terms of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere (Cf David Mackay, “Without the Hot Air”). The Indian position is not a simple one – this is because India’s development problem is not something that can be simplified. It needs to be understood, and I would urge Prof Sendler to do just that.

Having said all this, it is high time India and China collaborated on how to make their economies greener, and establish intellectual leadership in technologies that enable this path. Some of them are obvious measures. I am sure there are more things that can be done.