September holds special significance for Advani

NEW DELHI - September holds special significance for senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L.K. Advani. He left his birthplace Karachi this month 63 years ago, embarked on his rath yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya this month 20 years back, and it is on Sep 24 that a court will give its verdict on the Ayodhya title suits, he writes in his blog.

In his post titled “The importance of September”, Advani says that the Allahabad High Court announced last week that the bench considering the title suits relating to the Ayodhya dispute will pronounce its verdict Sep 24.

“Everyone is keenly awaiting what the three-judge Bench of the High Court decides in respect of the several title suits before the Court. At a Parliamentary Party meeting some days back, I advised all MPs not to indulge in any speculation about the possible verdict and whatever be the outcome, let the party reaction be restrained and low-key. Partymen have generally heeded this advice,” he says.

Referring to his rath yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya in 1990, Advani says he had started his journey on Sep 25, the birth anniversary of party ideologue Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya.

The BJP leader says he has been visiting Somnath every year on Sep 25 since 1990 to seek blessings of the deity.

“This month too I propose to go there on that date. This year would be the 20th anniversary of my Ram Rath Yatra, which has been a landmark event in my life,” Advani says, adding that it was a remarkable coincidence that the bench considering title suits relating to the Ayodhya dispute will pronounce its verdict on the eve of his visit to Somnath.

The senior BJP leader says it was Sep 12, 1947 - exactly 63 years back - that he left his birthplace Karachi “for good”. He says he has visited the city only twice since.

Advani says when former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, who was born in Delhi, visited the city in 2001 for the first time since independence, he told him it was unfortunate that they had made rare visits to the cities of their birth.

The BJP leader says that his suggestion during the meeting to hand over Dawood Ibrahim, the main accused in the 1993 serial blast case of Mumbai, to improve ties between the two countries, precipitated quite a tense situation.

He says Musharraf asserted that Ibrahim was not in Pakistan. “Every one of the nearly one dozen officials from India and Pakistan present at the meeting knew that the Pak President had resorted to a gross untruth,” Advani writes.

The BJP leader says that Sep 12 and Sep 25 are important for him personally, but for the world no date in the month is more significant than 9/11 (Sep 11, 2001).

Referring to former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s speech to the joint session of the US Congress in September 2000, Advani says the senior party leader had asserted that distance and geography provide no immunity against international terrorism and India’s neighbourhood was the biggest source of terrorism.

Terming Vajpayee’s remarks as “prophetic”, Advani says that that the attack on the World Trade Centre, New York, was a “horrendous terrorist attack” causing the death of nearly 3,000 people, more than one hundred of whom were Indians.

Advani mentions that during his visit to the US in 2002, he described India and USA as the twin towers of democracy and added that terrorists may have destroyed the steel and concrete structures of the World Trade Centre, but they “can never harm the structures and the spirit of our two democracies”.