NEW DELHI, June 12: A majority of India’s youth believe the controversy over veteran leader Lal Krishna Advani’s remarks on the founder of Pakistan is not relevant today, a newspaper survey showed on Sunday.
On a visit to Pakistan this month, the man credited with building up the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) praised the late Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a man the Hindu right — committed to one day reuniting India and Pakistan — blames for the 1947 partitioning of the subcontinent.
More than a million people died in the chaos surrounding the creation of Pakistan and India.
Advani’s comments infuriated many hardline Hindu allies, particularly the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), regarded as the BJP’s ideological parent.
The Hindustan Times survey of 921 people between 18 and 25 showed the Jinnah debate rated a low 3.5 on a relevance scale of 10 while 54 per cent thought India’s politicians were stuck in the past.
“Young India knows history but doesn’t want to live in it. The question for the young is not Jinnah who, but why,” said the survey headlined “The Youth Don’t Care”.
“That is, why should the controversy have all but appropriated national discourse when surely partition, while important, matters less than economic progress and geo-strategic power projection?”
Advani, 77, quit as party chief following the controversy over his remarks on Jinnah, but eventually withdrew his resignation.
A BJP statement said Advani had not described Jinnah as secular — the trigger for the controversy — but merely recalled the Pakistani leader’s address to the new-found nation in 1947 where he had sought freedom for all faiths.
