The roots of Pakistan's siege mentality today goes back to 1947, says author Nisid Hajari on why he chose Partition as the subject of his debut book. Mr Hajari argues that Nehru and Jinnah could have prevented turning India and Pakistan into rivals. "The decisions they made in those critical months just before and after independence drove their two countries apart, and that had a lot to do with their egos," he said in an interview to NDTV. Pakistan was initially just a "bargaining chip" for Jinnah, says Mr Hajari and that Lord Mountbatten was "frustrated" with Jinnah's hard stance and used the adjective "psychopathic" to describe him. Talking about Gandhi, Mr Hajari says that a lot of Muslims didn't connect with him because they saw him as a "Hinduised figure". "The language he (Gandhi) was speaking, the idioms he was using, the iconography, he was appealing to the majority population. He was using what was natural to him, which was his faith," Mr Hajari said.
