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Head of India's opposition resigns after praising Pakistan's founder during visit

Bharatiya Janata Party leader Lal Krishna Advani comes out of the residence of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh after a meeting in New Delhi yesterday. Advani offered to resign from his post after Hindu hardliners expressed outrage at his praise of Pakistan's founder during a recent visit to Pakistan. PHOTO: AP

It's been a political PR coup and a PR disaster all rolled into one: When Lal Krishna Advani went to Pakistan, he was the darling of Hindu hard-liners and one of the most disliked men in Pakistan. By the time he returned to India a week later, he was admired in Pakistan, but called a "traitor" by his right-wing Hindu allies.

India's best-known Hindu nationalist, a man often blamed for spreading anti-Muslim hatred in Hindu-majority India, quit Tuesday as head of the main opposition party -- stung by criticism for praising a man widely reviled in India, the founding father of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

It was a political irony unimaginable until a week ago -- Advani's hardline Hindu allies called him a "traitor" and asked for an apology while Pakistan's government said the "new Advani" had endeared himself to Pakistanis.

The resignation of Advani, 77, as president of the Bharatiya Janata Party also made official that India's Hindu political movement -- the allies that transformed the BJP from a fringe organization to a national power under Advani's aggressive leadership -- was splintering.

The movement has become increasingly polarized, particularly since a BJP-led government lost power last May. Staunch hard-liners in the RSS, the BJP's parent organization, criticized the party's peace overtures to Pakistan and the RSS chief said last month that Advani and former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee should step down and make way for younger leaders.

But the most recent trouble began last week when Advani left on his history-making trip to Karachi, the now-Pakistani city where he was born when Britain still ruled the subcontinent. It was a surprising trip: Advani had long been disliked in Pakistan as the man responsible for a nationwide campaign that led to the 1992 razing by a Hindu mob of a 16th century Indian mosque, sparking weeks of bloody communal clashes. But his trip marked a week in which he reinvented himself. "The best week of my whole life," he called it.

The man who had long slammed Pakistan for aiding Islamic militant groups in Kashmir spoke of friendship between the two nations. He endeared himself to the alumni of his former high school, St. Patrick's, in Karachi. He visited Jinnah's mausoleum and left calling him a leader who believed Hindus and Muslims should live together peacefully.

"My respectful homage to this great man," Advani wrote in mausoleum's visitors' book.

That brought him praise from Pakistan.

"His remarks ... have given him a new look in Pakistan," Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said. "The people have forgotten his old face and they were looking at a new Advani."

But as with Advani, secularism is a quality rarely associated in India with Jinnah. Many people here blame him for causing the partition of India and the creation of the new overwhelmingly Muslim nation of Pakistan when British colonialists divided the subcontinent at independence in 1947. The partition led to the killings of an estimated 1 million Hindus and Muslims in communal riots, and 10 million were displaced.

Yet Jinnah said in his public speeches after Pakistan's founding that the new nation belonged to all religions, not just Muslims.

Media reports of Advani's statements in Pakistan created a storm in India. Advani responded with his resignation, apparently writing it even before he arrived home.

"I have not said or done anything in Pakistan which I need to retract or review," Advani said in his resignation letter.

It appeared increasingly likely that his resignation would eventually be accepted, and he would no longer serve as the BJP's leader.

"He stood by his resignation, though we are pleading with him to accept our requests and to take back his resignation," BJP General Secretary Venkaiah Naidu said.

Naidu slammed the sharp comments against Advani by the BJP's Hindu allies, who called him a "traitor" and on Tuesday celebrated his resignation with firecrackers.

"The BJP strongly disapproves of the statements ... the language used is totally objectionable, not expected from a nationalist organization," Naidu said.

The ruling Congress party, a staunchly secular movement that has long waged political war with Advani, appeared to have trouble making sense of the developments. Some Congress leaders called it a drama to rally support.

"He must have reached this decision that he needs an image change," said Congress party leader Ambika Soni. "All his life, he has exercised a politics based on religion."
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