From the Others

"BEEING THE OTHER: The Muslim in India" by the veteran journalist Saeed Naqvi is a sometimes self-congratulatory memoir cum reportage of the progressively unsettling experience of being a Muslim in India post 1947. The significant point he makes is that the troika of Gandhi, Nehru and Patel (and not only Jinnah, as is usually believed) were as much responsible for the sub-continent's immature and bloody partition, eager as they were to ascend the 'Hindu' throne in Delhi, with or without what is now Pakistan. He also importantly asserts that the seeds of today's toxic and ubiquitous 'Hindutva' hate wave were sown by none other than the Congress leaders themselves, upto Rajiv Gandhi's times.