After stating what very well could be a fact while on a trip to Pakistan, BJP leader LK Advani has asked his party to “relieve” him of his duties. Or, to put it bluntly, he’s resigned after much drama.

A chief architect of the political ascendancy of Hindu nationalism in India in the 1990’s and the current opposition leader in Parliament, L. K. Advani, resigned today as head of his party, amid a storm of criticism from within his own ranks over remarks he made while in Pakistan.

Last weekend, on a visit to Karachi, where he was born, Mr. Advani stood at the tomb of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and praised him as a “secular” leader.

Now I was raised to hate on Jinnah like most good, slightly perplexed toddlers were; my father vividly remembered an “India” that still contained an unbroken Punjab and like many of his generation, he bitterly resented Jinnah for “what he did to us”.

I never really thought of or questioned this until today, when I started to see these stories on NYT and the Beeb. I went to trusty Wikipedia to see about Jinnah. What if Advani was right, and gasp he WAS secular?

A common view, especially in India, is that it was Jinnah who was responsible for “the division of India”, creating Pakistan. The portrayal is that of a religious leader completely committed to his community having a country of its own. Jinnah himself, however, was a very secular person. Most of his career till about 1930 was spent trying either to bring the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League to work together or getting mainstream parties like the Congress (of which he was a member much longer than the League) to be sensitive to minority priorities. When the League was founded in 1905, he was probably the only major Muslim personality to refuse to join.

Hmmm. So Advani was telling the truth, he just probably shouldn’t have told it. I get it. As a dilettante political consultant, even I could’ve told the BJP’s leader to, oh, not stand on the tomb of an “enemy” of India and exalt someone we’re supposed to loathe by gracing him with verbal love like “secular“. I mean, come on. Advani practically canonized him with that comment. Anyone could’ve predicted the backlash that went a little something like this:

Hindu nationalist groups like the Rashtriya Shyamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad demanded to know why Mr Advani had “heaped praise” on Mr Jinnah.

The RSS, the ideological fountainhead of various Hindu groups including the BJP, also protested against Mr Advani’s statement that the day when the Babri mosque was destroyed in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya was the “saddest” in his life.

Mr Advani furthered angered the hardline Hindu groups when he told a meeting in Pakistan that the emergence of India and Pakistan as “two separate, sovereign and independent nations is an unalterable reality of history”. Many Hindu groups like RSS are still opposed to the idea of partition and talk about a “united India” comprising Pakistan and Bangladesh” in their maps and literature.

Sigh. It’s all well and good to molt those hawk feathers and become a moderate so that you no longer have to head the opposition party…but this ain’t the way to do it. Yes, relieve Mr. Advani. Not because he lied about Jinnah and secularism: rather because it seems like he’s done playing the game.