Prem Shankar Jha: Partition Lies and Amit Shah's Theatre of the Absurd
NB: The Sangh Parivar have been repeating this lie for decades. Modi said it in his 2013 campaign; and in the 2019 campaign, a BJP candidate said if Nehru had allowed Jinnah to be made PM, partition would not have happened. Since Amit Shah is now an expert historian of Partition, let us recall that in placing all responsibility for partition on the Congress, he and Modi were repeating what Jaswant Singh had said in his book. Why then did Modi ban Jaswant Singh's book in Gujarat! (August 2009). In fact Jaswant was accused of slandering Sardar Patel! Maybe someone reminded them that Patel was a high-level leader of the Congress. Media memory is so short that
nobody raised this question. See Gujarat
govt bans Jaswant's book on Jinnah (The ban
was lifted by the High Court).
Unfortunately the level of historical awareness - in parliament and outside it - is so abysmal that this deceitful propaganda is repeated by the mass media, and endorsed by some academics without any contestation. (Btw, here are some of Ambedkar's views on Pakistan) Thanks are due to Prem Shankar Jha for going against the tide of lies DS
During the Lok Sabha
debate on the Bill amending the Citizenship Act, Union home minister Amit Shah
suddenly lost his temper and blurted: “Is desh ka vibhajan agar dharma ke
aadhar par Congress na kari hoti to is Bill ka kaam nahin hota (Had
the Congress not partitioned this country on the basis of religion, there would
have been no need for this Bill).” His remark sent a
shock wave through the Lok Sabha, provoking responses which were echoed within
hours by civil society.
But Shah, the master tactician, had got what he wanted
– he had once again put India’s secular intelligentsia and the increasingly
befuddled Congress party on the defensive. And that might have been just the
extra edge the BJP needed to get this monstrous Bill through the Rajya Sabha. Shah’s obvious purpose
always was to hustle it through, as he did with the Unlawful
Activities Act Amendment Bill before the opposition had time to muster
its full strength. And he did it with great aplomb.
What is depressing is
the fact that even 48 hours after he made this outrageous claim, no one in the
Congress, or for that matter the rest of the opposition and civil society, has
pinned down the outrageous lie that Shah spoke in the august halls of
parliament on a Bill that, by changing the very basis of the Union of Indian,
has begun the process of tearing it apart. All have defended the
Congress by saying that while it accepted the creation of two nations, it did
not do so on the basis of the two-nation theory.
To the vast majority of
Indians, born well after Partition, tis must sound like sheer sophistry. That
is what Shah (who is only 55 years old) was almost certainly banking upon. It
was up to the present leaders of the Congress party to checkmate Shah’s
strategy. But that required an immediate command of history that Sonia Gandhi,
who was sitting in the front opposition benches, did not have. So, in a manner
with which we have grown wearyingly familiar, she stayed seated and remained
silent....
https://thewire.in/history/amit-shah-citizenship-amendment-bill-partition-congresssee also
As for the Home Ministers' claim that the Congress partitioned the country, this calumny has become a habit of the RSS/BJP. More about it may be read here. Didn't the Muslim League and the colonial power have something to do with it? Wasn't Sardar Patel, the BJP's favourite Congress-man and a senior member of the Congress Working Committee party to the decision? It is not proper for politicians to make deceitful utterances on historical matters, but they do it all the time.
Modi says Congress responsible for Partition: The Non-politics of the RSS