Senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L K Advani today blamed his former colleague Jaswant Singh for ‘denigrating’ India’s first home minister Sardar Vallabhai Patel in his controversial book on Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and hitting at the ‘core ideology’ of the party.
Commenting for the first time on Jaswant Singh’s expulsion from the BJP, Advani told his colleagues on the final day of the party’s ‘chintan baithak’ (brainstorming session) in Shimla “it was a painful but necessary” decision.
He said the BJP believes that Patel’s feat of unifying 700-odd Indian states was a “super human effort” while Jaswant Singh’s account of him in the book tended to denigrate a national hero. “It’s painful for anyone to expel a colleague of 30 years,” Advani told a group of 23 leaders of his party, at the end of the three-day meet. “But what he (Jaswant Singh) wrote was against the ideology of the party,” he is reported to have said. Advani is reported to have vociferously supported the move to sack Jaswant at the meet of the party’s parliamentary board.
Joining issues with Singh, who had earlier wondered as to how Patel was linked to the core ideology of the BJP since he as the home minister had banned the Rashtriya Swayemsevak Sangh, Advani claimed that Patel had done it under pressure from the then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Advani alleged that Jaswant Singh was speaking half-truths as Patel had written a letter to Nehru a month after the ban to convey him that “there was not an iota of evidence against the RSS”.
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