LK Advani’s Blog

The first non Congress Government formed in New Delhi was the result of people’s anger against the 1975 emergency. In this government, headed by Shri Morarji Desai, I had my first experience of Government.The Prime Minister asked me whether I had any personal preference in the matter of portfolio. My response was unhesitating : Information and Broadcasting.

Three factors prompted me to make this choice. As a journalist I was familiar with the media. My opinion was that the maximum damage caused to democracy during the emergency was because of curbs imposed on the media and on media men. Thirdly, for long, I had been pleading that the Government stranglehold on Akashwani must be smashed, and autonomy be conferred on it.

As I and B Minister I came across the script of a feature broadcast by the BBC which I found of great interest in the course of my campaigning for electoral reforms. The programme was a serial on the functioning of British Parliament over the centuries. In these papers, I read about a remarkable incident that occurred in eighteenth century Britain.

A member of the House of Commons received a letter from his constituents in which he was asked to vote against certain excise proposals in the Budget. According to the BBC feature, the M.P. sent a stinging reply to his voters as follows :

“Gentlemen, I have received your letter about the excise, and I am surprised at your insolence in writing to me at all.

“You know, and I Click to Read More

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When in July 2001, General Musharraf returned from the Agra summit he was very angry with the Indian Government for having invited him and sent him back empty-handed, without even a joint statement containing some goody goody observations about Indo-Pak amity.

In his initial reaction all his vitriol seemed concentrated on me. Later, however, in his memoir, In The Line of Fire, he did not spare even Shri Vajpayee. His acerbic comment was:

“There is the man and there is the moment. When man and moment meet, history is made. Vajpayee failed to grasp the moment, and lost his moment in history”

Taking due note of his remarks, Prime Minister Shri Vajpayee reacted, and put the record straight thus:

“General Musharraf’s reported comment on the failure of our talks at Agra have surprised me. Every one in our government was acutely alive to the fact that there could be no normalcy in Indo-Pak relations until cross border terrorism, which had cost thousands of innocent lives, ended. But during our talks General Musharraf took a stand that the violence that was taking place in Jammu and Kashmir could not be described as ‘terrorism’. He continued to claim that the bloodshed in the state was nothing but the people’s battle for freedom. It was this stand of General Musharraf that India just could not accept. And this was responsible for the failure of the Agra Summit.”

Indeed, my own opinion is that it was Shri Vajpayee’s Click to Read More

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In 1950, the Constituent Assembly of Independent India adopted a constitution committing the country to Parliamentary Democracy as its system of government.

Till then, Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerji was a member of Pandit Nehru’s Cabinet, holding the important portfolio of Industrial Development. In the Constituent Assembly, along with Pandit Nehru, Sardar Patel, Dr. Ambedkar and others like Dr. K.M. Munshi etc., Dr. Mookerji also played a critical role in shaping India’s constitution.

With the constitution framing task completed and the country poised at the threshold of its first General Election, Dr. Mookerji decided to part company with the Congress Government, launch a party of his own, and seek the support of the masses on issues like Kashmir, Tibet, China’s designs, plight of Hindus in Pakistan-both West and East, and the urgent need to make the people realize that our country’s economic progress could not be achieved by imitating western models. All these were issues on which he differed very sharply with Pandit Nehru’s way of thinking. On several of these matters even Sardar Patel did not agree with Pandit Nehru.

In 1951, thus, Dr. Mookerjee founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. Those of us who are in the BJP today and were old enough at that time to aspire making some worthwhile contribution to free India’s nascent democracy were attracted towards Dr. Mookerji’s thinking. Our political yatra thus started in 1951 and except for a Click to Read More

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The Congress Party has always projected Pandit Nehru as an exemplary helmsman of India’s foreign policy.

The founder of our political movement, Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerji, on the other hand, regarded Panditji’s handling of Pakistan, as well as China, as two egregious blunders of his.

Sadly, the shock that Nehru suffered when confronted by China’s gross betrayal in 1962 virtually cost him his life. His mishandling of Pakistan has left terrorism and Kashmir as two festering sores for our body politik right up to this day.

Fareed Zakaria, Editor of Newsweek International (whose late father was a committed Congressman) has recently made some very pertinent observations about Nehru’s conduct of India’s Foreign Policy. A Penguin publication by Zakaria has been titled “The Post American world”. In this book Zakaria says that the “central paradox of India” today is that “its society is open, eager and confident ready to take on the world”, but its state – its ruling class – is “hesitant, cautious and suspicious of the changing realities around it”. The Newsweek Editor adds: “Nowhere is this tension more obvious than in the realm of foreign policy, the increasingly large and important task of determining how India should fit into the new world”.

Zakaria’s book recalls that when Mountbatten suggested that there be a powerful chief of defense staff, Nehru turned down the suggestion.

Zakaria adds Click to Read More

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In the course of his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama had remarked that “working with Pakistan and India to try to resolve the Kashmir crisis in a serious way” would be among the critical tasks of his administration if he was elected. Talking to Joe Klein of Time magazine, Obama elaborated :

“Kashmir in particular is an interesting situation (that) is obviously a potential tar pit diplomatically. But for us to devote serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there, to figure out a plausible approach, and essentially make the argument to the Indians, you guys are on the brink of being an economic superpower, why do you want to keep on messing with this? To make the argument to the Pakistanis, look at India and what they are doing, why do you want to keep on being bogged down with this particular (issue) at a time when the biggest threat now is coming from the Afghan border? I think there is moment when potentially we could get their attention. It won’t be easy, but it’s important.”

New Delhi’s sudden announcement last week that India was willing to hold foreign Secretary level parleys with Pakistan has naturally made many political analysts in the country ask : is this the consequence of Obama’s above assertion being put into action?

The question people have been asking in a more straight forward manner is : After the 26/11 attack on Mumbai, India had been steadfastly refusing to resume talks with Click to Read More

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My hearty kudos to the State Government of Karnataka and its Chief Minister Shri Yediyurappa for organizing last week, the 500th Anniversary of the coronation of Samrat Krishna Deva Raya at Hampi in a really befitting manner.

Every year a three day utsav is celebrated at Hampi, a colorful procession organized through the city, but not many in the country outside this region are really familiar with the glorious history of this great kingdom, aptly known as Vijaynagar (the city of Victory). Last year I had occasion to visit Hampi for the first time, and participated in this procession.

The procession used to start from the main temple of the town – the Virupakasha temple. When my family visited the temple last year the Head Priest welcomed me and my family and informed us that for Hampi the coming year would be very significant. It would mark the 500th anniversary of the coronation of Shri Krishna Deva Raya, the greatest king of the Vijaya Nagar Empire. I promised to visit again in 2010, and so I did.

This year several lakhs of citizens from all parts of the State flocked to Hampi and participated in the celebrations with great gusto and joy. Pujya Shri Shri Ravi Shankar, Head of the Art of Living Organisation also attended. He addressed the nearly one lakh strong gathering that had assembled at the concluding function where the pièce de résistance was a musical extravaganza depicting Krishna Deva Raya’s coronation. The music programme was Click to Read More

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Hearty greetings for the New Year to all friends and well-wishers who have kept in touch with the BJP through this website and the forum. I have been going through the many valuable suggestions you have been sending to us. Commencing with this year’s Republic Day I propose to resume blogging as I used to do in the first half of the year 2009.

The Constitution of India came into force from 26th January 1950. The Election Commission is to launch today, a day prior to Republic Day, its Diamond Jubilee Celebrations. I well recall how cynical many western observers were when India adopted parliamentary democracy after independence. How can a country with such a large population of totally illiterate citizens run a successful democracy? This used to be the main thrust of criticism.

While in most other developing countries which became liberated from colonial rule about the same time as India, and which at the outset adopted democracy as we did, their option did not survive for long. They became victims either of army rule, or some other form of authoritarianism. India can be legitimately proud that despite the many disadvantages with which we started we have functioned as a vibrant and vigorous democracy for all these six decades - the nineteen months Emergency (June 1975 to March 1977) being the only bad patch.

I remember discussing this issue once with late Benazir Bhutto and asking her as to why in the matter of democracy, our two countries - both of Click to Read More

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In most of my speeches during the current election campaign I have been referring to the BJP’s Information Technology Vision, and trying to explain to the people how this latest gift of man’s ingenuity in the field of science has presented our country with a unique opportunity to overcome the many daunting challenges in socio-economic development.

The BJP’s IT Vision, we have promised the people, will help India (a) overcome the current economic crisis; (b) create productive employment on a large scale; (c) accelerate human development through vastly improved and expanded education and healthcare services; (d) check corruption and (e) make India’s national security more robust.

This week when I addressed a massive meeting at India’s principal IT Centre Bangalore, I recalled how for ages now the biggest invention in the history of science has been supposed to be the WHEEL. I observed that based on what we have been witnessing and experiencing in the past two decades, it would have to be acknowledged that the COMPUTER CHIP has displaced the Wheel!

An extremely interesting book I have come across lately is one titled 1000 Years 1000 people. The book is not just a compilation of names of the thousand leading persons of the last millennium; it actually has done a meticulous ranking of the men and women who shaped the Click to Read More

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My website received a lot of appreciation for the creative manner in which our team presented the message of greetings on March 8, International Women’s Day. The usual masthead of the website was replaced with three alternating screens, the first saying “Naari Tum Shraddha Ho” (Woman, you are Devotion); the second saying, “Naari Tum Samskaar Ho” (Woman, you are Culture); and the third saying, “Naari Tum Shakti Ho” (Woman you are Strength). The idea was inspired by the famous lines by renowned Hindi poet Jayashankar Prasad:

Nari! Tum keval shraddha ho,
Vishwas-rajat-nag-pal-tal mein,
Piyush srot si baha karo,
Jeevan ki sundar samtal mein.

(Oh woman! you are devotion personified
Under the silver mountain of faith,
Flow you, like a river of ambrosia
On this beautiful earth.)

“Shraddha”, “samskaar” and “shakti” — these three words capture some of the greatest attributes of women in general, and Indian women in particular. Nevertheless, it pains my heart when I look at the statistics about the development status of women in India.

• Female life expectancy: 64.6 years.
• Infant mortality: 57 per 1000 Click to Read More

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I have been traveling constantly these days. Gorakhpur (Uttar Pradesh; 15 February), Madanapally (Andhra Pradesh; 27 February) and Bidar (Karnataka; 28 February) were, respectively, the places where I addressed my 31th, 32st and 33rd Vijay Sankalp Rallies. My party asked me to tour the entire country as a part of its mass contact programme, prior to the formal election campaign, and organized my first Vijay Sankalp Rally in Jabalpur in February 2008. These rallies have taken me to practically every part of the country, from Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh to Calicut (Kozhikode) in Kerala, and from Dumka in Jharkhand to Vashim in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra.

In the last week alone, I have traveled to Gandhinagar in Gujarat, which is my own Lok Sabha constituency; to Mumbai, where my party workers donated to me a purse of Rs. 11.11 crore, collected from nearly 50,000 donors, towards the election fund; to Bangalore, where I addressed an anti-terrorism rally of over one lakh students, and to Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh where I participated in a large rally organized by the Scheduled Castes Morcha of the BJP.

Although every event gave me deep satisfaction, there was one that brought alive many precious and deeply cherished memories associated with a defining period not only in my personal life but also in the life of India. It was when I was invited by the Government of Karnataka to inaugurate the Freedom Park in Bangalore on 27th February. This is where Click to Read More

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