L. K. Advani Quotes (1927-)

“"I would demand the president's assent to the state laws of Gujarat and Rajasthan akin to the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) pending with the (central) government. The Gujarat law has been pending for the last four years."”

“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their demand on the Hindu shrines in Mathura and Varanasi if the Muslim claim over Ramjanmabhoomi was voluntarily withdrawn, paving the way for the construction of the Ram temple.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.”

“I heartily congratulate the Government of Gujarat, and the state police in particular, for the important breakthrough they have achieved in busting a pan-India terrorist network responsible for the serial bomb blasts in Ahmedabad and other cities in the country. The arrest of 10 people, including Mufti Abu Bashir, who is described as the mastermind of the terror network, is indeed a major accomplishment. I have spoken to Shri Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, today and congratulated him for his Government's success. This success shows what a Government determined to deal firmly with the menace of terrorism can achieve in a short time. It stands in stark contrast with the utter lack of clarity and will power that the UPA Government at the Centre has exhibited in handling the threat of terrorism.”

“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’.”