The Hindu : Advani betrayed Hindutva: Singhal

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Apr 25, 2003

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Advani betrayed Hindutva: Singhal

By Our Special Correspondent

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM APRIL 24. The International Working President of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Ashok Singhal, today said that the Home Minister, L. K. Advani, had betrayed the Hindutva cause after having ridden to power in the name of Ram and Hindutva.

"People like him have no future in this country," Mr. Singhal told a "meet the press" programme organised by the Kesari Journalists Trust here. "If you cannot stick to your plank, how can you get votes?" Politicians were the worst people in the country, he added.

Although the VHP did not have plans to launch a political party, alternatives to the BJP and Congress would emerge in a few years, he said adding the National Democratic Alliance was a secular conglomerate.

It was the duty of the Government to hand over the disputed land at Ayodhya for construction of the temple, the VHP leader said and pointed out that the ownership of the land was involved the faith of the people. The future course of the agitation (for acquiring the land) would be decided by the high-power committee which would meet in Ayodhya at the end of April.

Describing communists as terrorists, Mr. Singhal said the communists had resorted to terrorist acts both in Kerala and West Bengal. Large-scale conversions were taking place in Kerala with foreign funding, he said and alleged that Christian agencies in the State were receiving Rs. 2,013 crores a year to make people literate in order to covert them to Christianity.

Claiming that VHP's international operations did not involve efforts to convert Westerners to Hinduism, he said it was only organising the Hindus living abroad.

`Hindu alliance in next LS poll'

Our Bangalore Special Correspondent writes:

Later, Mr. Singhal said in Bangalore that a "Hindu alliance" of like-minded parties would be formed for the next general elections. "It will be a Hindu conglomeration in the next general elections, not the NDA. It will be a Hindu alliance and it will get a two-thirds majority on its own," he said but declined to specify which parties would be the constituents of the alliance.

"Secularism as some persons understand it is responsible for destroying the spiritual life of the country, and we will uproot it; we will do it under our constitutional rights," Mr. Singhal said. Secularism of the kind advocated by certain political parties had become a dead philosophy, and the VHP would try to establish secularism as taught by the sages of India.

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