India Shining slogan was a mistake: Advani

Four years after its debacle in the last Lok Sabha elections, the BJP has finally conceded that the party's India Shining campaign in 2002 was a mistake.

At a speech in Shimla, BJP’s PM-in-waiting LK Advani said: "I had accepted in the past also that India Shining was our fault. It should be India Rising. I had accepted it publicly that it was not right as election campaign."

The BJP and the NDA government led by the party had undertaken an aggressive ‘India Shining’ campaign before the last Lok Sabha polls before being voted out of power.

Advani is upbeat about victories in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh. He says it is a ‘lucky coincidence’ that the same two states that had inspired the party's electoral jump have gone to the polls together.

Winding up the BJP's election campaign, the Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha claimed the results of the Assembly elections in the two states would help the saffron party in the next parliamentary polls.

He said it was in Palampur in 1989 that he had drafted the party resolution to support the Ayodhya movement. Dwelling on the importance of Gujarat, he said the proposal on Ayodhya was inspired by a decision by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1952 for renovation of the Somnath temple.

Attacking the UPA, Advani said the Manmohan Singh government was a great ‘disappointment’ on the economic and national security fronts and its ‘wrong policies’ impacted the poor and the middle class who suffered due to rise in prices of essential commodities.

Courtesy:ibnlive.com
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