Age is relative, experience isn’t, Advani tells GenX

Pushing behind recent controversies dogging his party, L K Advani revived his campaign for the Lok Sabha polls by chatting with fellow Indians online, reports Shekhar Iyer.

Pushing behind recent controversies dogging his party, L K Advani on Thursday revived his campaign for the Lok Sabha polls by chatting with fellow Indians online. He told the web chatters that he would make as able a Prime Minister as anyone younger than him.

HT Image

Advani was asked if India needs a younger Prime Minister at a time “when there is a need to understand the global situation and who can think of a modern India.”

BJP's PM nominee said, “I think the important part (of your question) is that one must understand the global situation, and who can think of a modern India. I can humbly claim that it is not impossible for me to do so.”

Advani spent over 90 minutes, on rediff.com — batting 35 of the 11,000 questions that were put to him. In reply to a query on whether Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi made a good PM material, Advani said, “we have several junior colleagues in the party who make Prime Minister material. Modi is one of them.”

“My satisfaction in life and happiness is because of my personal family, as also my ideological family by which I mean the BJP and the RSS.”

He added, “I am a small eater. A doctor told me once that when God creates man in his lifetime, it depends entirely on him whether he takes 50 years to consume it or 70 years.”

Advani's top priority, he told a chatter, would be “to dispel the gloom and recreate the general climate of optimism and hope that was seen in the six years of (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee’s rule. Presently, one of our groups is working on what precise steps that need to be taken in the first 100 days to bring about this transformation.”