L. K. Advani Quotes

Works

My Country My Life

L. K. Advani

L. K. Advani: 4 quotes0 likes

Famous L. K. Advani Quotes

“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 book My Country My Life

L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008). ISBN 978-81-291-1363-4, quoting Koenraad Elst, The Saffron Swastika (2001)

“India should not betray its essentially Hindu personality.”

L. K. Advani

Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p.171

“Bullets for the kar sevaks, biryani for the Kashmiri militants.”

L. K. Advani

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

“You were merely asked to bend, but you chose to crawl.”

L. K. Advani

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.”