Mumbai, March 29: Senior BJP leader L K Advani on Monday said that the cricket diplomacy between India and Pakistan with the Pakistan Prime Minister accepting an invitation from his Indian counterpart to watch the cricket World Cup semi-final between the two countries on Wednesday, is at best a welcome engagement and not a strategic development.
“We have said time and again that there should be people to people engagements between the two nations, person to person interactions between politicians or diplomats. However, there can be no strategic dialogue if the latter does not act firmly and credibly against terrorism,” Advani said while replying to a panel of journalists.
On the issue of corruption which was heavily debated in Parliament recently, Advani said that the entire country was asking questions and they are yet to be answered. Talking especially on the 2G spectrum scam, Advani said now that the joint parliamentary committee has been formed it will go into all the implementation of government decisions and policy prescriptions on telecom licenses and spectrum from 1998 to 2009, things will come out in the open very soon.
“There were some suggestions to even probe on matters before 1998, some would remember the Sukh Ram case of 1996, but at least our efforts yielded results and now the JPC is in place,” he said.
Giving an account of his own probity in political life, he said when he was implicated in the Jain hawala scam during the time regime of Narasimha Rao, he had temporarily quit parliamentary life and came back only after he was acquitted.
Answering Ram’s question on Arun Jaitley’s alleged comments on the BJP’s opportunistic Hindu nationalism, Advani said certain things in the WikiLeaks cable like Satish Sharma inviting US embassy diplomat to actually see the cash that was used to buy MP’s was a matter of actual fact, while those comments on Jaitley could at best be described as an individual view point of a diplomat.
He also made clear that Jaitley had refused using such a particular word that has been listed in the cable that has been reported. In his key note address Advani started by saying that India has survived as democracy due to our attitude of tolerance against a different view point.
However, when Ketkar sought to ask about his party’s intolerant views on M F Hussain, where BJP cadre resorted to vandalism, Advani deflected by saying he was against any sort of hooliganism. Advani also avoided commenting on issues like his rath yatra which Ketkar said created a communal divide in the country and reiterated that his party were against any sort of violence.
—Agencies