Jaswant, whose book "Jinnah - India, Partition, Independence", will be released on Monday, also said Indian Muslims are treated as aliens.
"Oh yes, because he created something out of nothing and single-handedly he stood against the might of the Congress party and against the British who didn´t really like him... Gandhi himself called Jinnah a great Indian. Why don´t we recognize that? Why don´t we see (and try to understand) why he called him that," Singh said, when asked by Karan Thapar in an interview whether he viewed Jinnah as a great man.
He said he did not subscribe to the popular "demonization" of Jinnah.
Singh, a former external affairs minister, feels India had misunderstood Jinnah and made a demon out of him.
Contrary to popular perception, Singh feels it was not Jinnah but Nehru´s "highly centralized polity" that led to the Partition of India.
Asked if he was concerned that Nehru´s heirs and the Congress party would be critical of the responsibility he was attributing to Nehru for Partition, Singh said, "I am not blaming anybody. I am not assigning blame. I am simply recalling what I have found as the development of issues and events of that period."
Singh contested the popular Indian view that Jinnah was the villain of Partition or the man principally responsible for it. Maintaining that this view was wrong, he said, "It is. It is not borne out of the facts...we need to correct it."
He feels Jinnah´s call for Pakistan was "a negotiating tactic" to obtain "space" for Muslims "in a reassuring system" where they would not be dominated by the Hindu majority.
He said if the final decisions had been taken by Mahatma Gandhi, Rajaji or Maulana Azad -- rather than Nehru -- a united India would have been attained, he said, "Yes, I believe so. We could have (attained an united India)."
Singh said the widespread opinion that Jinnah was against Hindus is mistaken.
When told that his views on Jinnah may not be to the liking of his party, he replied, "I did not write this book as a BJP parliamentarian. I wrote this book as an Indian...this is not a party document. My party knows I have been working on this."
Singh also spoke about Indian Muslims who, he said, "have paid the price of Partition". In a particularly outspoken answer, he said India treats them as "aliens".
"Look into the eyes of the Muslims who live in India and if you truly see the pain with which they live, to which land do they belong? We treat them as aliens...without doubt Muslims have paid the price of Partition. They could have been significantly stronger in a united India...of course Pakistan and Bangladesh won´t like what I am saying."
The veteran BJP leader feels Pakistan has remained a conceptual orphan, the result of somewhat barren attainment; ´barren´ because Pakistan itself, as both the progenitor and as the first born of the idea, has demonstrated that this notion of "Muslims being a separate nation does not work".
"However, sadly, even this land for Muslims has not been the end of the journey. Pakistan went further along the path of Islamic exclusiveness, it opted to become an Islamic state, and this after having already separated on grounds of Islam..."
He says it is a compendium of many accumulated grievances, a deep sense in the minds and hearts of the citizens of Pakistan that they have been repeatedly betrayed, wronged continuously, decade after decade since 1947 by the West, also often by India, and it is this that has made Pakistan not a strategic outpost of Western interests but in reality a great threat to the West.
The book describes as "epic journey of Jinnah from being the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity to the Quaid-e-Azam of Pakistan".
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