Jaswant says Jinnah, Gandhi dreamt of federal India

ISLAMABAD: Insisting that a federal India was the dream of both Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Mahatma Gandhi, former External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh has said that the country would have been "a global power" now had it not been "cut up" to form Pakistan.

Singh, whose controversial new book 'Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence' led to his expulsion from BJP, repeated his claim that first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru along with the then Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and the Congress party had contributed to the partition of the Indian subcontinent.

A federal India was the dream of both Jinnah and Mahatma Gandhi but "we let the country be cut up. Patel and Nehru agreed to what Jinnah demanded but in a truncated form. Today we would have been a global power," he said in an interview to Pakistan's 'Dawn News' channel.

However, he also said the future envisaged for India by Nehru, especially on issues like secularism, is yet to be realised. The "destiny of India Nehru spoke of had not been realised," Singh said responding to a question on the fate of secularism in India.

Apart from being reviled by his party for his stance on Pakistan's founder Jinnah, Singh's book has been banned in the BJP-ruled state of Gujarat.

Singh referred to the ban and incidents of the burning of his book and said he felt "wounded" as if an "innocent child had been burnt."