Delivering the keynote address at the HT Leadership Summit on Tuesday, he said while democracy in India was stable, it needed to be strengthened and cleansed. "Corruption in high places must be dealt with firmly," he said. He also said intolerance, particularly of the religious kind, was a big threat to democracy.

India has the second largest Muslim population in the world, but Al Qaeda has failed to attract them to its ranks, he said.

Welcoming Congress chief Sonia Gandhi's assurances earlier in the day that the Volcker Report expose would be probed and the guilty punished, Advani repeated his party's demand for a white paper on the Mitrokhin Papers, which talked of KGB funding of Indian political parties, and a thorough and sincere investigation into the oil-for-food scam.

Advani said India had undertaken many reforms but a lot still needed to be done to curb the influence of money power. Referring to the achievement of the UK since the time its parliamentary seats were "bought and sold", he said, “India could learn from UK where today there was not a single case of electoral corruption."

Calling for electoral reforms in the country, he stressed on public funding of polls saying the Opposition would cooperate with the government on the issue.

Advani said even if India was not a two-party system, it had become a bipolar polity "in which the Congress and the BJP are two principal poles of the national politics."

Advani refused to elaborate on his troubles with RSS and the controversy over his remark on Jinnah in Pakistan. "What I said about Jinnah’s speech to that country's constituent assembly defines secularism, and I stand by that." He likened RSS to his family and said he believed that everyone had a right to hold a particular view on various issues.

Advani also called for radical steps to contain population growth and illegal immigration from Bangladesh which, he said, weakened the democracy and created problems for India's economy and security.