NEW DELHI, June 9: Demand for major works on the Quaid-i-Azam has shot up across India since the remarks by the Bharatiya Janata Party chief, with some leading shops reporting that the best titles were almost sold out.

News reports quoted senior ministers of the ruling Congress party, including Education Minister Arjun Singh, as ordering a large number of books on Mr Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

BJP leader Arif Mohammad Khan was quoting from Stanley Wolpert’s biography of Mr Jinnah in a handful of TV chat shows that he appeared in. He was defending BJP president Lal Kishan Advani’s comments in Karachi last week when he described the founder of Pakistan as a secular man.

The Bahri bookshop, popular with Pakistani intellectuals in Delhi’s Khan Market, claimed it had 100 titles on Mr Jinnah, which had depleted substantially.

A Delhi-based publishing house has decided to come out with paperback editions on some of the books.

According to senior BJP sources, the crisis in the party had deepened on Thursday after former education minister Murli Manohar Joshi refused to allow a new resolution in support of Mr Advani.

Lal Kishan Advani appeared to have galvanized the support of a majority of the influential BJP leaders. But his rivals, eg Dr Joshi and former foreign minister Yashwant Sinha, were believed to be opposed to an evaluation of Mr Jinnah as worthy of a debate that Mr Advani wants to start.

Mr Advani is also facing opposition from the younger leaders in the party who have joined hands with the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) in its tussle with him over the formulation of the compromise draft.

The RSS says it would never agree to any formulation that recognizes Mr Jinnah as secular and accepts the partition of India as a settled fact.