NEW DELHI, June 10: Indian opposition leader Lal Kishan Advani took back his resignation as president of the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Friday after his party issued a statement that appeared to reject his recent remarks in which he described the Quid-i-Azam as secular leader.

BJP leader Pramod Mahajan announced Mr Advani’s decision following a marathon meeting of the party’s Parliamentary Board.

Mr Advani had quit as BJP president soon after his return from Karachi on Monday when his Hindu extremist followers turned upon him, calling him a traitor for his positive remarks on Mr Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

In a statement on Friday the BJP parliamentary board praised Mr Advani’s visit to Pakistan but rejected the interpretation that he had endorsed Mr Jinnah as a secular leader.

“The BJP reiterates that whatever may have been Mr Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan, the state he founded is theocratic and non-secular. The very idea of Hindus and Muslims being two separate nations is repugnant to it. The BJP has always condemned the division of India on communal lines and continues to steadfastly reject the two-nation theory championed by Jinnah and endorsed by British colonialists. There can be no revisiting the reality that Jinnah led a communal agitation to achieve his goal of Pakistan, which devoured thousands of innocent people in its wake and dispossessed millions of their homes and livelihoods,” the statement said.

It lauded the “path-breaking visit to Pakistan” by Mr Advani. The week-long tour has brought the people of India and Pakistan closer, helped remove a mountain of misunderstandings between them and taken the momentum of better relations to a new level, in continuation of the policy of friendship which was initiated by the government led by former BJP prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The BJP said it was happy to note that Mr Advani raised the issue of cross-border terrorism with President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

Mr Advani impressed upon Pervez Musharraf the need to immediately dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism and bring cross-border terrorism to an end.

“Shri Advani emphasized that lasting peace in South Asia would be possible only when such issues were satisfactorily resolved between India and Pakistan,” the BJP said.