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Advani wants debate Obama style,
but see what he has to say
WSN Network
NEW DELHI: Poll
season brings in its wake claims and proposals that you will not
hear the politicians make otherwise in more sober times. For
decades, BJP's candidate for the hot seat in India did not even
mention the subject in passing. All through the time when the world
was tracking the US presidential debates, Advani did not even
mention it in passing, but he has spent the last few days repeatedly
asking for something which may be desirable but which India has not
discussed in any good measure.
Debate with me,
anywhere, US presidential style, Advani told Manmohan Singh a few
days back. When he did not get an answer, he fired another blank.
Ok, ask Sonia to debate if PM is not ready. He still has not got the
answer, but political pundits said Advani's idea of scoring points
like an oversmart high school boy will not help build an image of a
leader who can engage in a meaningful debate.
“I have told the
Prime Minister several times that it would be so nice that like in
foreign countries, we should also have a debate. Instead of a BJP
public meeting, the Election Commission could organise a meeting,”
Advani told an election rally. The Election Commission did not
react, no one else in the political spectrum took up the challenge
but India's middle classes, tired of listening to inane debates
every night on prime time news shows had a feeling of ennui.
But if such a
debate had indeed occurred, there is little doubt what Advani would
have peddled from that platform. In the same breath in which he
asked for a debate, Advani also said the expectations of the people
that a "grand Ram temple" be built at Ayodhya would definitely be
fulfilled. He did not mention about other expectations of the people
which are not so grand: two square meals a day, minimal employment,
ration on ration cards, a roof on their heads, and a life of human
beings for those called slumdogs.
But he did talk
of one promise that he intends to fulfill as soon as he becomes PM:
hang Afzal Guru. And as if Advani's rank communalism was in any
doubt, here is what this man dreaming of becoming the Prime Minister
of India had to say: "The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance
(UPA) has not hanged the 2001 Parliament attack prime accused Afzal
Guru because of minority appeasement and vote-bank politics. Had he
been an Anand Kumar or an Anand Mohan, do you think he would have
evaded hanging for so long?”
But he did not
say what he would have done had he been called Varun Kumar.
1
April 2009
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