The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday expelled former finance minister Jaswant Singh from its primary membership for praising Pakistan founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah in a book.

The decision to expel Singh came after the release of his book “Jinnah - India, Partition, Independence” which the BJP said went against the party ideology.

As a visibly upset Singh, a founding member of the party, questioned the decision, the latest controversy to hit the BJP seems to have brought its internal conflicts out in the open.

Many pressing issues haunt the party as it begins its ‘Chintan Baithak’ – an annual brainstorming session.

The BJP was drubbed at the 2009 general election and faced a leadership crisis. Its elderly leaders are perceived as being out of sync with a young vote base and it has had an ideological falling out with its Hindu right-wing parent.

The BJP may need to take a hard look at these issues if it hopes to reinvent itself.

Singh’s book and its fallout have led some liberal thinkers in politics to question the wisdom of meting out punishment to an individual for expressing a personal opinion especially since larger issues like revamping the organizational structure of the party and its revival need to be addressed.

It is ironical that the controversy over Singh’s expulsion happened on the day the BJP top brass met in Shimla to chart out its future course of action after a dismal showing in the general election.

Do you think the expulsion of Singh, a veteran national level leader with a career spanning three decades, is yet another example of the BJP losing the political plot? Will it be able to resurrect itself in time for the next election?

Was it necessary to divide India and Pakistan ? Was Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, really the obdurate Muslim leader who forced Partition along religious lines in 1947 or was he pushed into it by leaders of India's Congress party, especially first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

A new book by former Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh re-opens that painful, blood-soaked chapter whose price the region is still paying more than 60 years on.

Singh, a leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, challenges the widely-held belief in India that it was Jinnah's insistence on a  separate homeland for Muslims that forced the breakup of India and the mayhem that accompanied it.

Jinnah, an impeccably secular leader, didn't start with this, he argues in the book "Jinnah - India, Partition, Independence."

What Jinnah said, in the tumultuous years before Britain finally left the subcontinent, was that he wanted  "space in a reassuring system" for Muslims so that they didn't get engulfed in a Hindu-majority India, Singh says.

A federal structure that would have given Muslims a certain amount of autonomy, a sort of a Pakistan within India, may well have worked. But Nehru shot it down, believing in a highly centralised polity , influenced as he was by the prevailing Western, European socialist thought of the time.

""Consistently he stood in the way of a federal India until 1947 when it became a partitioned India," Singh told CNN-IBN in an interview . If the Congress had accepted a decentralised federal state, then a "united India was clearly ours to attain," he says.

Jinnah has too long been demonised by Indian society. "I think we misunderstood him because we needed to create a demon.  We needed a demon because in the 20th century, the most telling event in the sub-continent was the Partition of the country."

Strong words these and especially coming from a leader on the Hindu right. Not surprisingly, members of his party have distanced themselves from Singh's revision of history. The Congress party, of course, would have none of it , accusing Singh of denigrating the country's first prime minister while eulogising Pakistan's first head of state.

Pakistan has welcomed Singh's attempt to review the role of  the  "Quaid-i-Azam or Great Leader as Jinnah is known.

The Daily Times in an editorial said the book was an important Indian revision of a highly demonised Muslim leader and held hope for the future. if India and Pakistan could agree on their history a bit more, perhaps that may be the starting point of a more lasting detente ?

[Photographs of Pakistani helicopters flying past a portrait of Jinnah 2)children lay flowers at a portrait of Nehru and 3) former foreign minister Jaswant Singh)

Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan was en route to Chicago for a parade to mark Independence Day when he was detained and questioned at Newark airport.

After a couple of hours’ interrogation, the 43-year-old actor was allowed to make a call, getting in touch with the Indian consulate who vouched for him and secured his release.

The incident sparked uproar among Khan’s fans in India, who vented their anger over the Internet and in protest marches.

This is not the first time an Indian celebrity has had trouble with U.S. immigration officials and security checks.

Last month, U.S-based carrier Continental Airlines apologised to former Indian president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam for frisking him at New Delhi airport.

On Saturday, Information Minister Ambika Soni said while she could not say if Khan had been detained “on religious grounds, there have been too many instances like these in the U.S. concerning Indians”.

A Times of India report on Sunday said U.S. officials feel some Indian visitors are “needlessly huffy about routine security procedures and there is a broad cultural mismatch”.

Are Indians overreacting? Or is the U.S. taking things a bit too far?

Khan is a celebrity but what about ordinary Indians who travel to the U.S. — do they face racial profiling?

With the number of swine flu fatalities in India touching double figures on Tuesday, panic is slowly setting in.

Schools, malls and cinema halls in Pune are already shut and nearly a thousand people across India have tested positive for the virus.

The H1N1 flu outbreak, declared a pandemic on June 11, has spread around the world since emerging in April and could eventually affect 2 billion people, according to WHO estimates.

But is India ready to tackle the outbreak?

More supplies of flu drug Tamiflu and testing kits are being imported and private hospitals are being asked to help state-run hospitals cope with a surge in people rushing to get tested.

Some also feel that the media hype over swine flu is causing needless fear.

On Tuesday, the Hindustan Times said the common flu could be killing an estimated 572 Indians every day, much more than H1N1 flu — in most cases, infection has been mild and patients have fully recovered.

So is there really cause for panic?

(C. Uday Bhaskar is a New Delhi-based strategic analyst. The views expressed in this column are his own)

Yet another Hiroshima Day will be observed on August 6 with grave solemnity in Japan but few other parts of the world will mark the mushroom day of August 6, 1945 with the deep concern it ought to receive.

Sixty-four years after the apocalyptic destructive potential of the atomic bomb was recognized, it may be posited that the global community is less secure apropos the nuclear domain with every passing day.

While Myanmar is now perceived to be the latest potential member of the nuclear  weapon ‘club’, the overlap between state and non-state entities who are contributing to covert nuclear  proliferation remains as opaque as it has been for well over three decades.

The highly publicized but little investigated A.Q. Khan episode that irrefutably pointed to a clandestine nuclear Wal-Mart has been swept under the carpet since it did not serve the realpolitik compulsions of the major powers – and this includes some of the non-weapon states who are prominent members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

While U.S. President Obama is publicly committed to global nuclear disarmament – but recognizes that it will not occur not in his lifetime – and former American Cold War stalwarts led by Henry Kissinger advocate the ‘cause’, the reality in the strategic grid of the world is stark.

The most comprehensive estimate of the global nuclear arsenal places the current stockpile (as of June 25, 2009) at 23, 335 warheads. Of these, more than 8,000 are deemed to be operational.

India, which was always in the vanguard of the disarmament debate became a reluctant nuclear weapon power in May 1998 and is now reviewing its options as a state with nuclear weapons.

With the launch of the ARIHANT on July 26, it is now committed to acquiring a nuclear deterrent at sea – the invulnerable ‘second-strike’ capability. Welcome to the global nuclear reality on Hiroshima Day.

While nuclear deterrence strategy and practice is averred to be cast in stone – a tenet inherited from the menacing Cold War decades – the global nuclear environment is brittle, sullen and uncertain.

Adversarial dyads are bristling and the US-Russia divergence over missile defences is case in point.

States with nuclear weapons including those with nascent arsenals, non-state entities that have extreme revisionist agendas and the inevitability of the permeation of knowledge through the ever growing global technological advances have only added to the complexity of the nuclear challenges that now abound.

Many commendable non governmental initiatives have been mooted over the last decade in different parts of the world and a sturdy set of detailed reports and recommendations are now available.

Yet no significant state level policy-shift has been made – except for the rhetorical commitment that is made – the most well-known being that of U.S. President Barack Obama.

No state that has the nuclear weapon capability – or the ostensible protection this WMD provides – is willing to forsake it unilaterally. This reliance on the ‘nuke’ is an indicator of the insecurity index of the security planners worldwide and it is instructive that even Japan is unable to move out of the US nuclear umbrella – let alone an Australia or UK.

The case for a blue ribbon Global Nuclear Convention that distils all the available reports and assessments and objectively suggests the way ahead is imperative. The nuclear doctrine, strategy and related operational posture of  nuclear weapon states needs to be reviewed and the non-state entity with its  tangled  tentacles candidly identified  - along with the many red herrings that have been deliberately strewn.

It is prudent to recall that even as some constituencies reflect over the enormity of   Hiroshima Day – as many as 2,200 American and Russian warheads are on high alert and ready for ‘launch on warning’ use.

Such irrefutable empirical reality can lead to cynicism – but this should not be devoid of hope - that the Holy Grail of total disarmament is elusive but we must persevere.