"Party is greater than the realities of history", said the BJP spokesman Prakash Javadekar in a live phone-call to a Pakistani news channel. The very statement by the BJP man shows one of the major parties of India, even after sixty-two year of independence, is still trapped in the snare of ingrained biases and outdated principles. The sole crime of Jaswant Singh, one of the most senior members of BJP, is that he has shown complete intellectual honesty in his tumultuous book 'Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence'. For this, he has to face the brunt of the hard edge of his party's fanaticism. No wonder, the expulsion of Mr Singh has made Pakistanis apoplectic with rage. India takes pride in its status of being the 'biggest democracy of the world' but that has been badly spotted by the knee-jerk reaction of the BJP and the Modi government in Gujarat against Mr. Singh's book. Siddharth Varadarajan, the noted columnist of The Hindu in his article titled 'The diminishing of Indian democracy' writes "Jaswant Singh's expulsion and the Gujarat government's shocking decision to ban his book, have revealed the undemocratic core of the BJP's politics and diminished the stature of Indian democracy as well. The book is a work of historical analysis pertaining to events which occurred more than 60 years ago and not a critique of the BJP's policies or ideology. (The reaction) is symptomatic of both Hindutva's own authoritarianism and the new intolerance that is permeating every aspect of social and political life in India". -NABEEL ANWAR DHAKKU, Chakwal, via e-mail, August 22.