Tourists are warned: history is a merciless province, full of hidden traps and dead-ends, inhabited by hungry ghosts. There are still sightseers who fall for its many temptations. Lal Krishna Advani in Pakistan was one such traveller. In Karachi, the sovereign lord of Hindu nationalism met a Mohammad Ali Jinnah with a secular mission. Such a Jinnah could be traced in academic screeds but not in the popular consciousness of India-certainly not in the book of the BJP. Advani's blasphemy shook the party and transformed the blasphemer, and Karachi was about to become the unlikeliest site for a martyrdom. Advani survived Jinnah. Comeback Advani may have gained little, but Jinnah has. Fifty-seven years after his death, the man who spent the best part of his political career for a communal division of India has returned to divide the popular mind, to polarise the political space. So who is Jinnah? Is there a clash between what Advani has scribbled in the visitor's book at the Jinnah Mausoleum and what is written in the blood-stained pages of India's freedom? Can the father of the two-nation theory ever be called secular? Any narrative of the fractured freedom of the subcontinent is incomplete without the legend of Mohammad Ali Jinnahbhai.

True, there was a Jinnah, one of the finest barristers of British India, who was the antithesis of the "separatist" he would become. Born in Karachi, reportedly on Christmas Day in 1876, in the Shiite Muslim Khoja community, raised in Bombay, mastered in the finer points of law in Lincoln's Inn, he was the pukka brown sahib in Savile Row elegance, bound to be drawn into the noble cause of freedom. Even though he was first elected to the viceroy's Central Legislative Council as a Muslim member from Bombay, he was not Muslim enough for sections of the Muslim League, of which he would become the lifetime president later. For he didn't dress or speak like a Mohammedan. Such a man would come to epitomise the rage against Hindustan. The constitutionalist would become the evangelist of a Muslim homeland. He would position himself against the other Gujarati, whom he insisted on calling Mr Gandhi, not Mahatma Gandhi. And Nehru, for him, would turn out to be "the impetuous Pandit". The man who once insisted on the constitutional unity of the Indian state now wanted a "surgical operation" on India, for Hindus and Muslims were different people and freedom from the Raj would not be freedom for Muslims. What made him incompatible with not only Gandhi and Nehru but also the vast Muslim population, which was not anyway going to be accommodated in Jinnah's Pakistan?

His own mind, brilliant but flawed, was his constituency, for Jinnah was never a mass leader. For him Partition was just an alteration of the map, a division of the real estate, and the human cost was incidental. For Gandhi, it was a huge human tragedy; for Jinnah, it was the collateral damage of an argument. When he won the argument, when a theocratic state was born, the loser was the spirit of secularism-and India. He is back; and this time Janab Jinnah Saheb is the argument, divisive as always. As the following pages show, he defies consensus. If there had been one 58 years ago, there would have been a different India-and a Quaid-i-Azam acceptable to Hindus as well as Muslims.

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