Advani sets sight on building base in South

As Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani's 'Bharat Uday Yatra' coasted across southern states, his eyes were firmly set on building a base in the region as he mounted a political offensive against the dominant political forces Congress and Left parties.

As Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani's 'Bharat Uday Yatra' coasted across southern states, his eyes were firmly set on building a base in the region as he mounted a political offensive against the dominant political forces Congress and Left parties.

HT Image

Ever since the yatra began from the southern most point of Kanyakumari on March 10, Advani trained his guns on Congress and the Left parties and sought to blackwash both these parties, especially congress, accusing it of being primarily responsible for the "misgovernance of the country and the economy".

Congress and Left parties are the main political forces in the southern states of Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

The BJP is yet to win a single assembly or Lok Sabha seat in Kerala. In Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, it is playing second fiddle to ruling AIADMK and TDP respectively.

Referring to the license-quota-raj of the earlier governments, Advani said "so far as BJP is concerned, we have been a severe critic of the license-quota-raj which stemmed from the Marxist philosophy that state control of all economic resources is in the best interests of society".

Dwelling on issues like Swadeshi and FDI, Advani said Swadeshi, in economic matters, did not mean a reversal of liberalisation but "it simply meant that the country must depend essentially on its own resources.

"That does not mean shutting our doors to foreign investment and this approach has been adopted by the bjp-led NDA Government and I think this is not against Swadeshi," he added.

Summing up his trip, Advani said "the response from these states has been very encouraging and I have been overwhelmed by it" and hoped that it would yield dividends for the party.

"The message of national pride, the yatra seeks to communicate, has touched a chord in the people of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. In all these states, I detected an outpour of faith in India's ability to fight poverty and backwardness and emerge as a developed economy and a world power by 2020," he said.

He said the yatra was "unique" in the sense that it sought to propagate the achievements of Vajpayee Government and what it yielded was definitely positive as "it has been greeted with enthusiasm precisely because the NDA Government and the BJP now has a proven track record".

The yatra saw Advani seeking to put Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on the same pedestal as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru when he stated that it was after Nehru's first government when it had cabinet ministers with different ideological backgrounds in the government like SP Mukherjee and BR Ambedkar in 1951.

Under Vajpayee, a similar kind of government is there as was seen in the NDA, he pointed out.

"The NDA Government headed by Vajpayee aims to be inclusive and truly national in character. Not since Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's administration of 1947-51, which included important non-Congress ministers like Mukherjee and Ambedkar, has India had a government that represents so many currents.

At the same time, the NDA is united by a common objective to make India a developed country by 2020," he said.