The BJP Statement

The Bharatiya Janata Party lauds the path-breaking visit to Pakistan by its president, Shri LK Advani. The week-long tour has brought the people of India and Pakistan closer, helped remove a mountain of misunderstandings between them and taken the momentum of better relations to a new level, in continuation of the policy of friendship initiated by successive governments led by Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The warm and enthusiastic response Shri Advani’s visit elicited from both the officials and ordinary people of Pakistan proves the correctness of the NDA’s policy of pursuing good neighbourly ties between the two countries.

The party is happy to note that Shri Advani raised the issue of cross-border terrorism with the President of Pakistan and impressed upon him the need to immediately dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism and bring cross-border terrorism to an end. Shri Advani emphasized that lasting peace in South Asia would be possible only when such issues were satisfactorily resolved between India and Pakistan.

The BJP appreciates the Pakistan Government’s invitation to Shri Advani to inaugurate a project for the restoration of Katasraj Temples, revered by all Hindus of the Indian sub-continent as a resting place of the Pandavas. The overwhelming response to his Katasraj visit could well go down as a turning point in removing long-held misgivings between the people of the two countries. The BJP hopes that Pakistan will progress further along this path and ensure that the rights of Hindus and other religious minorities are fully protected and that official initiatives to restore and develop other mandirs and gurudwaras continue in the future.

Shri Advani welcomed the event in Katasraj as a good beginning and in that context without describing Mr. Jinnah as secular, reminded the people of Pakistan of it’s founder’s address to the country’s Constituent Assembly in which he had urged full freedom of faith for all its citizens and no discrimination between its citizens on grounds of religion.

The BJP reiterates that whatever may have been Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan, the state he founded is theocratic and nonsecular, the very idea of Hindus and Muslims being two separate nations is repugnant to it. The BJP has always condemned the division of India on communal lines and continues to steadfastly reject the two-nation theory championed by Jinnah and endorsed by British colonialists. There can be no revisiting the reality that Jinnah led a communal agitation to achieve his goal of Pakistan, which devoured thousands of innocent people in its wake and dispossessed millions of their homes and livelihoods.

Perhaps we are supposed to take it that the party also finds Mr Savarkar'svarious articulations of the same two-nation theory repugnant too?

1923 ("We Hindus are bound together not only by the love we bearto a common fatherland and by the blood that courses through our veins... butalso by the tie of the common homage we pay to our great civilisation - ourHindu culture... we are one because we are a nation, a race and own a commonSanskriti" -- Hindutva)

1937 ("India cannot be assumed today to be Unitarian andhomogenous nation, but on the contrary there are two nations in the main - theHindus and the Muslims." -- Swatantrya Veer Savarkar, Vol. 6 page296, Maharashtra Prantiya Hindu Mahasabha, Pune, quoting his address to theAhmedabad session of the Hindu Mahasabha) and

1945 ("I have no quarrel with Mr. Jinnah's two nation theory. We,the Hindus are a nation by ourselves, and it is a historical fact that theHindus and the Muslims are two nations. " (Indian Educational Register1943 vol. 2 page 10)

We wonder what the RSS makes of it all, or perhaps we would be back to theold dodge and dilations on the nation and the state and some painful semanticsabout how the "Hindu-rashtra".