Bharatiya Janata Party Politicians

"As I have expressed earlier, two people—Rajpal Puri and Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya—exerted the deepest influence on my public life."

"Muslim goondas may, at a single stroke, besmirch the honour and reputation of the highest citizens. ... Our sisters and daughters are carried away be the Muslims, they are victims of assaults by British soldiers in broad daylight."

"‘With the support of Universal knowledge and our heritage, we shall create a Bharat which will excel all its past glories, and will enable every citizen in its fold to steadily progress in the development of his manifold latent possibilities and to achieve through a sense of unity with the entire creation, a state even higher than that of a complete human being; to become Narayan from nar (man). This is the external divine form of our culture. This is our message to humanity at a cross roads. May God give us strength to succeed in this mission.’"

"Politics is ultimately subservient to the interests of the nation. If we give up all thoughts of a nation’s basic identity, history, culture and traditions, of what use is that politics ?”"

"If I could get two or three more Deendayals, I will change the entire political map of India.’"

"Dharma is the repository of the nation’s soul. If Dharma is destroyed, the Nation perishes. Any one who abandons Dharma, betrays the nation…… Since Dharma is supreme, our ideal of the State has been Dharma Rajya…… What constitutes the good of the people, Dharma alone can decide. Therefore a democratic government Jana Rajya must also be rooted in Dharma i.e. a Dharma Rajya... Since in the West injustice and atrocities were perpetrated, bitter conflicts and battles were fought in the name of religion, all these were en bloc listed on the debit side of Dharma also. We feel that in the name of Dharma also battles were fought. However battles of religion and battles of Dharma are two different things. Religion means a creed or a sect, it does not mean Dharma. Dharma is very wide concept. It is concerned with all aspects of life. It sustains the society. Even further, it sustains the whole world. That which sustains is Dharma.”"

"A monotonous life, lived without any purpose or direction, is not worth much. To achieve anything big in life, you should be prepared to risk your all and take a leap of faith for whatever they believed in."

"God has blessed our family with some means. Can we not offer at least one of our members for the service of the nation? Having provided me with education, moral instruction and all sorts of qualifications, can you not turn me over to the Samaj (society), to which we owe so much? This will hardly be any kind of sacrifice, it will rather be an investment. It is like providing the farm of the Samaj with manure. We are nowadays interested only in reaping the harvest and have forgotten to provide the field with manure. There is thus the danger of our land becoming barren and unproductive. Can we not forgo a few worthless ambitions for the protection and benefit of a Samaj and a faith, for which Rama suffered exile, Krishna bore innumerable hardships, Rana Pratap wandered about from forest to forest, Shivaji staked his all, and Guru Govind Singh allowed his little sons to be buried alive?"

"It is an irony of the country’s political situation that while untouchability in the social field is considered to be evil, it is sometimes extolled as a virtue in the political field. If a party does not wish to practise untouchability towards its rivals in the political establishment, it is supposed to be doing something wrong. We, in the Jana Sangh, certainly do not agree with the communists’ strategy, tactics and their political culture. But that does not justify an attitude of untouchability towards them. If they are willing to work with us on the basis of issues, or as part of a government committed to an agreed programme, I see nothing wrong in it…. These (SVD) governments are a step towards ending political untouchability. The spirit of accommodation shown by all parties, despite their sharp differences, is a good omen for democracy.’"

"India after Independence has produced few leaders who were also political philosophers. Deendayalji was one of the few, and the finest."

"Large-scale riots in East Pakistan have compelled over two lakh Hindus and other minorities to come over to India. Indians naturally feel incensed by the happenings in East Bengal. To bring the situation under control and to prescribe the right remedy for the situation it is essential that the malady be properly diagnosed. And even in this state of mental agony, the basic values of our national life must never be forgotten. It is our firm conviction that guaranteeing the protection of the life and property of Hindus and other minorities in Pakistan is the responsibility of the Government of India. To take a nice legalistic view about the matter that Hindus in Pakistan are Pakistani nationals would be dangerous and can only result in killings and reprisals in the two countries, in greater or lesser measure. When the Government of India fails to fulfill this obligation towards the minorities in Pakistan, the people understandably become indignant. Our appeal to the people is that this indignation should be directed against the Government and should in no case be given vent to against the Indian Muslims. If the latter thing happens, it only provides the Government with a cloak to cover its own inertia and failure, and an opportunity to malign the people and repress them. So far as the Indian Muslims are concerned, it is our definite view that, like all other citizens, their life and property must be protected in all circumstances. No incident and no logic can justify any compromise with truth in this regard. A state, which cannot guarantee the right of living to its citizens, and citizens who cannot assure safety of their neighbours, would belong to the barbaric age. Freedom and security to every citizen irrespective of his faith has indeed been India’s sacred tradition. We would like to reassure every Indian Muslim in this regard and would wish this message to reach every Hindu home that it is their civic and national duty to ensure the fulfillment of this assurance."

"It is not unheard of that when one political party replaces another, pages will be torn out of the old social studies textbooks if there is not enough time to replace the textbooks published under the previous political party's influence. This happened to an English language Reader in the Indian state of Rajasthan written in 1998 when there was a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in charge of the state. The Course Reader for Class Twelve, with English essays included the writings of Mahatma Gandhi, R.S. Sharma, Jawaharlal Nehru, and controversially one by Deendayal Upadhyaya, chapter four. Democracy and Political Parties, beginning on page twenty-nine. Deendayal is held in high esteem by the BJP because he was instrumental in fouirdlng the party that led to the growth of the BJP. He was murdered mysteriously, but is considered an intellectual of the Sangh Parivar. When the Congress won back control of the state government in Rajasthan, they continued to use the same English reader the following year, but the essay by Deendayal was torn out and the title crossed out of the table of contents. The next essay My Life and Mission by Swami Vivekananda began at the bottom of the last page of the grammar and writing exercises following the Deendayal essay and the remaining questions were marked through several times with a blue pen. The Deendayal essay discussed the democratic process and was not about any particular political party. Though his essay was truly nonpartisan, his name was not wanted in a textbook published under the Congress party. When the Congress returned to power in that state they simply sliced out that chapter thereby using up the remaining textbooks before republishing them a practical, if political, solution."

"But we cannot include in this paper a discussion of the awkward dishonesty evident throughout secularist reporting.. For now, we merely want to draw attention to what Mira Kamdar omits about L.K. Advani: that he has survived several attempts on his life. The most spectacular instance took place during an election meeting in Coimbatore in February 1998, where an Islamist bomb attack failed to kill Advani because he arrived late. It did, however, kill forty BJP activists present. Not being wealthy secularists, they were never put on alert by helpful "threats". [...] we find Prof. Hansen casting suspicion on L.K. Advani by describing him as "indicted in a massive corruption scandal in 1996" (p.266) without mentioning that the investigation cleared him completely of the charges (which were minor, the "massive" scandal mainly pertaining to dozens of Congress secularists, as Hansen fails to explain)."

"That is why I say the nation needs a leader. Dr. Manmohan Singh has not even visited all the states in the five years of his prime ministership, while Advaniji is a leader who has, at some point in time, spent a night in our 400 districts.... He knows the entire land, there is not a stain on him, he is blemishless, has vast administrative experience having served in various [c]abinets, and fulfilled his responsibilities to everyone's satisfaction, whether it was as the chief executive of the Delhi metropolitan council or as information and broadcasting minister or deputy prime minister. Advaniji rose from the ranks to become a mass leader, there's a world of difference between the two."

"L.K. Advani, who had been the front man of the Ayodhya movement until he broke down in tears at the sight of the demolition... If the Indian media were not as corrupt as they are (power corrupts, and the media wield tremendous power, so), they would have found out and told us who exactly masterminded the demolition... But instead, the Indian media spurned the scoop of the year and insisted on the politically more useful version blaming Mr. Advani, somewhat like Jawaharlal Nehru's attempt to implicate Veer Savarkar in the Mahatma Gandhi murder."

"But we cannot include [here] a discussion of the awkward dishonesty evident throughout secularist reporting.. For now, we merely want to draw attention to what Mira Kamdar omits about L.K. Advani: that he has survived several attempts on his life. The most spectacular instance took place during an election meeting in Coimbatore in February 1998, where an Islamist bomb attack failed to kill Advani because he arrived late. It did, however, kill forty BJP activists present. Not being wealthy secularists, they were never put on alert by helpful "threats"."

"Another spectacular occasion of imported explosives in action was the bomb attack against L.K. Advani in Comibatore in February 1998, killing over fifty BJP activists."

"In this wave of terrorism against the BJP (a new high in a campaign of anti-BJP terror which has been striking now and then since March 1993), Reuters leaves its information consumers to guess who the victim was, and whether the BJP was the perpetrator or the target of the violence. Nothing in the 94-line report explicates that the violence was directed against the BJP, eventhough that was the first and only fact of which we could be certain right away... The policy seems to be, not to concede anything whatsoever to the Hindu movement, not even its martyrs."

"I would demand the president's assent to the state laws of Gujarat and Rajasthan akin to the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) pending with the (central) government. The Gujarat law has been pending for the last four years."

"The blasts are reflective of the states' inability to preempt these strikes."

"We have received some clues about yesterday's incident, which shows that a neighbouring country, and some terrorist organisations active there are behind it."

"The recent Coimbatore bombing that killed a number of BJP workers was likened in the New York Times to the Reichstag fire which Hitler staged to gain power. The implication was that the BJP planned the bombing as an election ploy, even sacrificing its own members, and that they are as ruthless as Hitler. That Islamic terrorist groups were linked, was ignored."

"I heartily congratulate the Government of Gujarat, and the state police in particular, for the important breakthrough they have achieved in busting a pan-India terrorist network responsible for the serial bomb blasts in Ahmedabad and other cities in the country. The arrest of 10 people, including Mufti Abu Bashir, who is described as the mastermind of the terror network, is indeed a major accomplishment. I have spoken to Shri Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, today and congratulated him for his Government's success. This success shows what a Government determined to deal firmly with the menace of terrorism can achieve in a short time. It stands in stark contrast with the utter lack of clarity and will power that the UPA Government at the Centre has exhibited in handling the threat of terrorism."

"Bullets for the kar sevaks, biryani for the Kashmiri militants."

"India should not betray its essentially Hindu personality."

"After all, the Congress party's defeat in the 1989 parliamentary elections was a major triumph for India's democratic forces. The gains of this victory needed to be consolidated. Towards this end, I took an important initiative at a function in New Delhi on 10 August, while releasing Koenraad Elst's book Ram Janmabhoomi vs Babri Masji: A case study in Hindu Muslim conflict. I offered to the Muslim leaders that I would personally request leaders of the VHP to relinquish their demand on the Hindu shrines in Mathura and Varanasi if the Muslim claim over Ramjanmabhoomi was voluntarily withdrawn, paving the way for the construction of the Ram temple. I was deeply disappointed when Muslim leaders rejected this offer."

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

"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 is] really one of the most able, cool-headed, courteous and clean politicians left today."

"Pub culture does not suit our country and hence we should try to control it. We should not sell our tourism on pub culture."

"AYUSH can definitely help as ayurveda has special medicinal syrups in this regard. Already 5,000-6,000 people have received the medicine at Rajasthan. The National Institute of Ayurveda at Rajasthan has already sent batches of that medicine to different states and we have also requested them to send the same to other states."

"Some ayurveda practitioners have told me that doctors prescribing allopathy medicines often advise patients not to opt for ayurveda. Such doctors are anti-nationals."

"The real solution to the Ayodhya issue lies in determining what the originanl character was of the said place of worship."

"Last week I went to see Arun Jaitley. He is one of the few politicians whom I respect. I have known him from the time I was a junior reporter and can say honestly that he is one of a handful of politicians who is not in politics for personal gain but for public service. He is in the process of moving out of the house in Lutyens’ Delhi that was allotted to him as a senior minister. While waiting to see him I noticed blank spaces on the walls where pictures have been taken down. His decision to surrender his government house as soon as he demitted office is remarkable in itself. I know millionaires and maharajahs who have to be physically evicted."

"I have already made it clear that there is an atmosphere of complete peace in the country. This country has never been intolerant and won’t be so in the future too."

"The last 60 years have seen collapse of many democracies. For a poor country, it is more difficult to sustain a democracy. From poverty, we have come to being a developing nation. Not only did we survive, we have the distinction of becoming world’s largest democracy."

"So the world needs other engines to carry the growth process. And in a slow down environment in the world, an economy which can grow at 8-9% like India certainly has viable shoulders to provide the support to the global economy"

"It is a wake-up call for all of us unless we put our house in order. The people of this country are becoming restless."

"When the international prices rise, we expect the government to cut its share of profit and its revenue earnings and share the burden of the increase with the common man."

"He has embarrassed the government. By continuing as minister without portfolio he has earned himself a price for silence."

"If the prime minister was in the know of it, then he is equally culpable. If he was not aware, then it is for him to introspect as to what kind of government he is running."

"We condemn the attack on press freedom in #Maharashtra. This is not the way to treat the Press. This reminds us of the emergency days when the press was treated like this."

"No country allows such slogans anywhere in the world. Show me a country and give me some reasons to allow such things. This is never allowed and should not be allowed."

"Innovation is a process of rebellion essentially. Unless you rebel, unless you challenge the status quo, how can you innovate anything"

"We have opened a new chapter of hope in the lives of 7 billion people on the planet. We have [the planet] on loan from future generations. We have today reassured these future generations that we will all together … give them a better earth."

"We have to reduce our carbon emissions. But I have not created the carbon emission problems, which have been done by others. But I am not into any blame game. The issue is that I have a right to grow. India and developing countries have the right to grow. These are the emerging economies. To that end, we need to grow. Our net emission may increase."

"Historical responsibility is a fact. It cannot be wished away. We are just 2.4 percent of the world's historical emissions."

"Do you expect teachers to draw on the blackboard, how to wear a condom? This would be surely embarrassing to our teachers. The curriculum must be changed to suit Indian conditions."

"Why do we lack innovation in India? Because, we don't allow questioning. We don't promote inquisitiveness. If a child asks questions in school, he is asked to sit down. This should not go on. We need to promote inquisitiveness, children should ask questions"

"This is a machine and anything can go wrong with it."