India Insight

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.

When it comes to climate change, the environment and other weighty issues, what could the leaders of the world's biggest democracy possibly learn from the rural Indians who cobble together rickety cars out of scrap metal and old bits of wood?

One of India's best known businessmen says the improvised vehicles that carry crops and passengers along dusty village roads show how local people are often the best innovators, coming up with cheap and effective answers to tough problems.

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of the technology company Infosys, thinks politicians would do well to remember the decentralized philosophy behind the "jugaad". Mechanics with little money and poor access to cheap parts use whatever is at hand to build them: water pumps replace normal engines; wooden blocks stand in for brakes and old planks of wood provide the floor.