New Delhi:
In ten days of it's launch, Jaswant Singh's book,
Jinnah: India-Partition, Independence, has created quite a flutter. On one hand, it cost the leader his place in the BJP but on the literary front, the expelled leader has gathered huge support for his courage on a book on Jinnah and a debate on the ban of books.
Sorrow and joy almost came in equal measure for Jaswant Singh. Where doors of a Parivar have closed, his book has helped him discover a world of new friends.
Jaswant moved to tears to hear people hail his efforts and condemn the ban on his book by the Gujarat government.
"I see no logic in this," said T N Chaturvedi, former Governor of Karnataka.
But bans are a part of the literary world. Salman Rushdie, Tasnima Nasreen James Laine to Aubrey Menon - all have to go through this. Tushar Gandhi -- the great grandson of Mahatma Gandhi -- also faced flak for his book Let's Kill Gandhi. He was blamed for accusing Brahmins of kill the Mahatma.
"What was done wasn't justified. I was hanged before I was tried," Tushar said.
But political parties hold guard. From Nehru, the Left government, to Mayawati -- they all have banned books.
"If we can ban behaviour, if you can ban the way people think, if you can ban the way people can conduct their lives, then you can ban books," Politician and author Salman Khurshid said.
But for the man in the centre of the debate, banning books is stopping young India from knowing its past.
"The new generation that has come up. Men and women want to know what happened 60 years back, and what ever happened needs to be relooked at," Jaswant Singh said.
The book's publisher, Rupa & Company, has many political biographies on it's shelves, including the marketing of the banned Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.
"Forty thousand copies have been sold in ten days. The 13th re-print is on its way," said R K Mehra, Chairman of the company.
A book is either well written or badly written, perhaps Oscar Wilde forgot to add the controversial books. But irrespective of how they are written they are a rage, banned or not.