LK Advani’s Blog

B. RAMAN has been a bright intelligence officer who even after retirement is held in high esteem in IB circles.

On June 28, the day it was announced in the press that the P.M. would the next day break his maun vrat and meet the media, Rediff.com carried an article by B. Raman which the website described as the author’s sage counsel for Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh.

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A martyr is one who sacrifices his or her life on the battlefield fighting against an enemy nation. But Dr. Mookerjee became a martyr while fighting a government in our own country. His fight was for the full integration of Jammu & Kashmir with the Indian Union. He was a visionary who had foreseen the consequences of placing Jammu & Kashmir, a strategically located state, in a separate and tenuous Constitutional relationship with the rest of India. 

Sadly, neither the government of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in New Delhi nor the government of Shaikh Abdullah in Srinagar believed that Jammu & Kashmir needed to be fully integrated into the Indian Union.

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From a purely historical point of view the month of June is very important. For us in the BJP there are several dates which are unforgettable.

I am writing this blog on June 25. It was on this date in 1975 that Prime Minister Smt. Indira Gandhi made President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed sign a Proclamation under Art. 352 of the Constitution declaring an internal Emergency. The Prime Minister had not consulted the Cabinet. The Home Minister and the Law Minister also were unaware of this move.

June 12 of the same year 1975 Click to Read More

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The first time that I saw a single actor perform an hour long scene from a play all by himself in a manner as to keep the entire audience spell-bound was seventy years back when I was a student at the St. Patrick’s High School, Karachi. To the best of my recollection the performer was an able thespian from Ireland who played the role principally of Shylock in a powerful scene from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. The other minor roles in the presentation were also enacted by the same artist.

After that, in the past few years I have witnessed Shekhar Sen, an outstanding artiste from Mumbai, perform gripping musical dramas on the lives of Kabir and Tulsi and an enactment on Vivekananda, again all alone. Each one of these performances Click to Read More

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Article 1 of the Indian Constitution describes India as a ‘Union of States’. The Constituent Assembly rejected the proposal to designate India as a ‘Federation of States’. While introducing the Draft Constitution, Dr. Ambedkar, Chairman of the Drafting Committee, explained this aspect thus:

“Though India was to be a federation, the federation was not the result of an agreement by the States to join in a federation, and that the federation not being the result of an agreement, no State has the right to secede from it. The federation is a Union because it is indestructible.

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I have always been cynical about palmists, astrologers, etc. In politics quite a few hesitate to embark on a new project without having a clearance from the soothsayer they trust.

I have often recounted how on one occasion my own skepticism was rudely shaken.

Way back in the 1970’s we had in our party (then Jana Sangh) National Executive a reputed professional astrologer, by name Dr. Vasant Kumar Pandit. He was based in Mumbai (then Bombay). He was a committed activist of the party who had courted arrest fourteen times including during the movement Click to Read More

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Last Saturday, May 28, was Veer Savarkar’s birth anniversary. This great revolutionary was born in 1883 in Bhagur, a village near Nasik in Maharashtra.

A born genius that he was Savarkar had a rare talent in poetry and his poems were published by well known newspapers when he was hardly 10 years old. When he was just 16 years old, Savarkar formed a body named Abhinav Bharat whose principal objective was to drive out the British from India and attain complete political independence for the country.

I was 15 years old Click to Read More

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In February this year M.J. Akbar launched his book on Pakistan with the title TINDERBOX, published by Harper Collins India. Its subtitle was The Past and Future of Pakistan. I had described this as a brilliant book. In his introduction, Akbar wrote:

“Muslims of British India had opted for a separate homeland in 1947, destroying the possibility of a secular India in which Hindus and Muslims would coexist, because they believed that they would be physically safe, and their religion secure in a new nation called Pakistan. Instead, within six decades Pakistan has become one of the most violent nations on earth, not because Hindus were killing Muslims, but because Muslims were killing Muslims”

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I have just returned from an exhilarating trip to Dharamshala (Himachal Pradesh). Some time back H.H. the Dalai Lama had come to my residence at Prithviraj Road, New Delhi. He had suggested then that I visit his place at Dharamshala some day.

I had been wanting for long to visit this place which he has made his home ever since he along with tens of thousands of other Tibetans have been forced to flee Tibet. As I had mentioned in one of my earlier blogs, I had last met the Dalai Lama at Rishikesh during the Kumbh Mela in 2010, and I had been deeply impressed by his innate goodness and more so, by his childlike simplicity. So, when a fortnight back, my Lok Sabha colleague and our party’s Youth Wing Chief Anurag Thakur invited me to come to Dharamshala on 17^th May to watch an IPL cricket match between Bangalore and Punjab, I just asked him to find out if the Click to Read More

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Francis Fukuyama is a bright political thinker but many disagreed with him when in 1992 he wrote a book titled “The End of History and the Last Man”, in which he observed:

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold war, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of the mankind’s ideological evolution and universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

In the context of the last round of Assembly elections in our country whose results have been announced last week, the most significant result is the Click to Read More

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