The Hindu : Advani calls on RSS leaders

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jul 04, 2002

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Advani calls on RSS leaders

By Our New Delhi Bureau

NEW DELHI JULY 3. The Deputy Prime Minister, L. K. Advani, went this morning to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh headquarters at Jhandewalan here and sought the blessings of its leaders for his innings in the new `avatar'. It was called a "courtesy visit."

The RSS spokesperson, M. G. Vaidya, said Mr. Advani was at Jhandewalan for about 20 minutes where he met the organisation's chief, Sudarshan, and others including H. V. Seshadri, Mohan Bhagwat, Madandas Devi and Mr. Vaidya himself. There was no one-to-one meeting with Mr. Sudarshan. Several other Ministers also went to Jhandewalan today.

Mr. Advani and the Bharatiya Janata Party have roundly criticised the recently-adopted resolution of the RSS favouring the trifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir. The party leaders, in and outside the Government, have been privately conceding that the implementation of the proposal would, in effect, mean handing over the Kashmir Valley to Pakistan.

The RSS chief stopped here for a couple of days after the recently-concluded session of the organisation in Kurukshetra where a resolution favouring the trifurcation was passed.

Meanwhile, with elections in Jammu and Kashmir only a few months away, the BJP Minister of State for Defence, Chamanlal Gupta, who took charge today, strongly demanded that the State be placed under President's rule before the elections. "When all the parties are demanding this why should the Chief Minister, Farooq Abdullah, object... especially since he claims he got a two-thirds majority in the previous election when the State was under President's rule?''

The Centre was committed to a free and fair election and to ensure this, President's rule was one of the options, Mr. Gupta said, referring to the Prime Minister's recent statement in Lucknow.

The Awami National Conference, headed by the former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, G. M. Shah, has spelt out its own "conditions'' for participating in the elections. "There should be two boards, one at the Central level and another at the State. Eminent personalities like former Prime Ministers, jurists, human rights activists, leaders of the All-Party Hurriyat Conference and eminent opposition parliamentarians could be on the boards. It will only help the Government in ensuring free and fair polls,'' the ANC leader, Muzaffar Shah, said at a press conference here. A peace conference in Srinagar in August, where people from both sides of the border could participate to ponder over a possible Kashmir solution, could provide a platform for discussing the holding of free and fair polls.

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