By IANS,
New Delhi : Former Indian external affairs minister Jaswant Singh, sacked from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for his bestseller book on Pakistan founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah, has no intention of visiting Pakistan and has not even applied for a visa.
Setting at rest speculation that Jaswant Singh was going to Pakistan, his son Manvendra Singh said: “He has not even applied for a visa.”
“Where is the question of the Indian government denying him a security clearance to visit Pakistan?” he asked, referring to some media reports that Jaswant Singh had been denied security clearance by the Indian government for a promotional visit to sign copies of the book at a leading bookshop in Islamabad and for a speaking engagement.
“Moreover, there is no Pakistani edition of the book yet. The publishers may be pushing up the sales there. But for the moment he has no plans to go there,” Manvendra Singh, a former MP who represented Barmer in Rajasthan, told IANS.
The former external affairs minister’s three-decade membership of the BJP ended abruptly last week with the launch of his book “Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence”.
The admiring biography of Jinnah by Jaswant Singh placed the onus of partition on Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel that promptly led to his expulsion from the party. The Gujarat government went a step further and banned the book in the state.
However, Manvendra Singh pointed out that his father did nurse an ambition to go to Pakistan at “some point in the future”.
“Sure, he wants to go there at some point in the future. But the dates have not been fixed.”