Quotes from book
My Country My Life

My Country My Life

My Country My Life is an autobiographical book by L. K. Advani, an Indian politician who served as the Deputy Prime Minister of India from 2002 to 2004, and was the Leader of the Opposition in the 15th Lok Sabha.


L. K. Advani photo

“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)

Similar authors

L. K. Advani photo
L. K. Advani 4
politician 1927
Les Brown photo
Les Brown 24
American politician
Pietro Mennea photo
Pietro Mennea 1
Italian sprinter and politician
Bertil Ohlin photo
Bertil Ohlin 11
Swedish economist and politician
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva photo
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva 10
Brazilian politician, 35th president of Brazil
Salvador Allende photo
Salvador Allende 16
Chilean physician and politician
Margaret Thatcher photo
Margaret Thatcher 348
British stateswoman and politician
Arnold Schwarzenegger photo
Arnold Schwarzenegger 52
actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heri…
Antonio Gramsci photo
Antonio Gramsci 22
Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and lingu…
Mario Vargas Llosa photo
Mario Vargas Llosa 30
Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist