Booked, expunged

The decision to expel the senior BJP leader was taken at the Parliamentary Board of the party during the opening session of the three-day brainstorming session of the top leaders in Shimla. Listen to podcast

It was 9 in the morning. Jaswant Singh was getting ready for the BJP’s chintan baithak (introspection meet) when he got a call from party president Rajnath Singh asking him to stay away for a while. “Tempers are running high,” he was told.

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Rajnath Singh called back three hours later. This time, the message was terse: “The parliamentary board (BJP’s highest decision making body) has expelled you from the party.”

The BJP had sacked him ostensibly over a book that had rattled the party — some leaders more than others — but actually to salvage its Hindutva image and quell rising internal dissent.

Jaswant Singh was shocked. He was fired by the board of which he was a member, snapping a 30-year-old association with the party he had helped found. And, heartbreaking for him, over the phone.

“I was once depicted as Hanuman but today made out as a Ravan for writing a book,” he said, addressing a news conference later. “The day we start questioning thought, it (would be a) dark day for India.”

Jaswant Singh’s book, Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence, upset the Sangh and the BJP not for its attempt to give the founder of Pakistan a flattering makeover, but for showing Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in a poor light in the process.