L. K. Advani

Lal Krishna Advani (born 8 November 1927) known as L. K. Advani is an Indian politician who served as the 7th Deputy Prime Minister of India from 2002 to 2004 under Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Advani in 2009

Quotes

• You were merely asked to bend, but you chose to crawl.
  • L.K. Advani about press censorship during the Emergency. Quoted in NYT, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/opinion/Indias-Press-Under-Siege.html . Full quote: When Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister, declared a state of emergency on June 25, 1975, she immediately imposed strict censorship of the press. With defiant exceptions, much of the press caved in quickly to the new rules, prompting L.K. Advani, one of the founders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, who was jailed during the emergency, to comment later: “You were merely asked to bend, but you chose to crawl.”

• Bullets for the kar sevaks, biryani for the Kashmiri militants.
  • Advani commenting on the contrast of the Government's treatment of the Hindu agitation by Hindu kar sevaks and of armed Kashmiri militants who were provided with biryani during the siege of the Char-e-Sharif mosque. Quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p58

• India should not betray its essentially Hindu personality.
  • Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p.171

• After all, the Congress party's defeat in the 1989 parliamentary elections was a major triumph for India's democratic forces. The gains of this victory needed to be consolidated. Towards this end, I took an important initiative at a function in New Delhi on 10 August, while releasing Koenraad Elst's book Ram Janmabhoomi vs Babri Masji: A case study in Hindu Muslim conflict. I offered to the Muslim leaders that I would personally request leaders of the VHP to relinquish their demand on the Hindu shrines in Mathura and Varanasi if the Muslim claim over Ramjanmabhoomi was voluntarily withdrawn, paving the way for the construction of the Ram temple. I was deeply disappointed when Muslim leaders rejected this offer.
  • • • L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008). ISBN 978-81-291-1363-4, page 371

• Dr Koenraad Elst, in his two-volume book titled The Saffron Swastika, marshals an incontrovertible array of facts to debunk slanderous attacks on the BJP by a section of the media. About the Rath Yatra, he writes: ‘But what about Advani’s bloody Rath Yatra (car procession) from Somnath to Ayodhya in October 1990? Very simple: it is not at all that the Rath Yatra was a bloody affair. While in the same period, there was a lot of rioting in several parts of the country (particularly Hyderabad, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh), killing about 600 people in total, there were no riots at all along the Rath Yatra trail. Well, there was one: upper-caste students pelted stones at Advani because he had disappointed them by not supporting their agitation against the caste-based reservations which V.P. Singh was promoting. Even then, no one was killed or seriously wounded. It is a measure of the quality of the Indian English-language media that they have managed to turn an entirely peaceful procession, an island of orderliness in a riot-torn country, into a proverbial bloody event (“Advani’s blood yatra”). And it was quite a sight how the pressmen in their editorials blamed Advani for communal riots of which the actual, non-Advanirelated causes were given on a different page of the same paper. Whether Advani with his Rath Yatra was at 500 miles distance from a riot (as with the riot in Gonda in UP), or under arrest, or back home after the high tide of the Ayodhya agitation, every riot in India in the second half of 1990 was blamed on him’.
  • L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008). ISBN 978-81-291-1363-4, quoting Koenraad Elst, The Saffron Swastika (2001)

Quotes about the 1998 Coimbatore bombings

• But we cannot include [here] a discussion of the awkward dishonesty evident throughout secularist reporting.. For now, we merely want to draw attention to what Mira Kamdar omits about L.K. Advani: that he has survived several attempts on his life. The most spectacular instance took place during an election meeting in Coimbatore in February 1998, where an Islamist bomb attack failed to kill Advani because he arrived late. It did, however, kill forty BJP activists present. Not being wealthy secularists, they were never put on alert by helpful "threats".
  • Elst, Koenraad. The Problem with Secularism (2007). The Struggle for India's Soul A reply to Mira KAMDAR, in : The Problem with Secularism (2007)

• Another spectacular occasion of imported explosives in action was the bomb attack against L.K. Advani in Comibatore in February 1998, killing over fifty BJP activists.
  • Elst, K. (2010). The saffron swastika: The notion of "Hindu fascism". p 743

• In this wave of terrorism against the BJP (a new high in a campaign of anti-BJP terror which has been striking now and then since March 1993), Reuters leaves its information consumers to guess who the victim was, and whether the BJP was the perpetrator or the target of the violence. Nothing in the 94-line report explicates that the violence was directed against the BJP, eventhough that was the first and only fact of which we could be certain right away... The policy seems to be, not to concede anything whatsoever to the Hindu movement, not even its martyrs.
  • Elst, K. (2010). The saffron swastika: The notion of "Hindu fascism". p 760

• The recent Coimbatore bombing that killed a number of BJP workers was likened in the New York Times to the Reichstag fire which Hitler staged to gain power. The implication was that the BJP planned the bombing as an election ploy, even sacrificing its own members, and that they are as ruthless as Hitler. That Islamic terrorist groups were linked, was ignored.
  • David Frawley, The elections in India, p 5. quoted in Elst, K. (2010). The saffron swastika: The notion of "Hindu fascism". p 760

About L.K. Advani

• [L.K. Advani is] really one of the most able, cool-headed, courteous and clean politicians left today.
  • Khuswant Singh, quoted in Y. K. Malik and V. B. Singh, Hindu Nationalists in India, p. 42.

• That is why I say the nation needs a leader. Dr. Manmohan Singh has not even visited all the states in the five years of his prime ministership, while Advaniji is a leader who has, at some point in time, spent a night in our 400 districts.... He knows the entire land, there is not a stain on him, he is blemishless, has vast administrative experience having served in various [c]abinets, and fulfilled his responsibilities to everyone's satisfaction, whether it was as the chief executive of the Delhi metropolitan council or as information and broadcasting minister or deputy prime minister. Advaniji rose from the ranks to become a mass leader, there's a world of difference between the two.
  • Narendra Modi : Interview in: "'The nation is waiting for a strong, experienced leader'," in: Rediff.com, 8 April 2009.

• L.K. Advani, who had been the front man of the Ayodhya movement until he broke down in tears at the sight of the demolition... If the Indian media were not as corrupt as they are (power corrupts, and the media wield tremendous power, so), they would have found out and told us who exactly masterminded the demolition... But instead, the Indian media spurned the scoop of the year and insisted on the politically more useful version blaming Mr. Advani, somewhat like Jawaharlal Nehru's attempt to implicate Veer Savarkar in the Mahatma Gandhi murder.
  • Elst, Koenraad. (1997) BJP vis-à-vis Hindu Resurgence

• But we cannot include in this paper a discussion of the awkward dishonesty evident throughout secularist reporting.. For now, we merely want to draw attention to what Mira Kamdar omits about L.K. Advani: that he has survived several attempts on his life. The most spectacular instance took place during an election meeting in Coimbatore in February 1998, where an Islamist bomb attack failed to kill Advani because he arrived late. It did, however, kill forty BJP activists present. Not being wealthy secularists, they were never put on alert by helpful "threats". [...] we find Prof. Hansen casting suspicion on L.K. Advani by describing him as "indicted in a massive corruption scandal in 1996" (p.266) without mentioning that the investigation cleared him completely of the charges (which were minor, the "massive" scandal mainly pertaining to dozens of Congress secularists, as Hansen fails to explain).
  • Elst, Koenraad. The Problem with Secularism (2007). The Struggle for India's Soul A reply to Mira KAMDAR, in : The Problem with Secularism (2007)

See also

• Ram Rath Yatra

External links

• Excerpts from L.K. Advani, My Country, My Life