Advani,

New Delhi, Nov. 7: L.K. Advani has written a congratulatory letter to US President-elect Barack Obama, terming his win “a victory of democracy and certain basic human values that are universal”.

“For us in India, your victory is a matter of joy for two reasons. Firstly, it reaffirms the close bond between India and the US. Secondly, by reposing faith in the ideals of equality, freedom and racial non-discrimination, the people of your great country have signalled the triumph of the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr,” the BJP leader said in the letter, released to the media today.

But his party faced uncomfortable questions on the “shadow of doubt” over the RSS in Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and on Advani himself in the Babri Masjid demolition. The reason: BJP spokesperson Rajiv Pratap Rudy defended the attack on S.A.R. Geelani, a Delhi University professor, by a worker of the party’s student wing ABVP yesterday.

Geelani was not clean, Rudy said, and the seminar he was attending had been organised by pseudo-secular and radical elements. If that made “nationalist students” fly into a rage, it can be understood, the BJP spokesperson said. “The protest, however, could have been more hygienic,” he added. The ABVP worker had spat on the professor.

Rudy argued that Geelani deserved this treatment because he had been convicted by the high court in the Parliament attack case. It did not matter that the Supreme Court had later acquitted him, the “shadow of doubt” still hovered around him.

When this led to questions about the “shadow of doubt” over parent organisation RSS’s hand in Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and Advani and other senior BJP leaders’ role in the Babri demolition, Rudy laughed them away.

The BJP will launch what it calls “India’s largest political portal on the Internet” — www.lkadvani.in — on the life and politics of Advani tomorrow, when he turns 81.

The party was in a spot on another issue — the rising political temperatures in Bihar over Raj Thackeray. Although the BJP has criticised Raj, said to be behind the latest attacks on north Indians, the Shiv Sena, which started the hate politics, is a close partner. Advani proudly flaunts Bal Thackeray as his oldest ally.

Praise from Yechury

Like the BJP, the CPM too had praise for Obama today. Politburo member Sitaram Yechury said that at a time leaders like the US President-elect and French President Nicolas Sarkozy had admitted the crisis in capitalism, the UPA was clinging to the “discredited neo-liberal economic policies”.

The CPM called for a special fiscal package to increase public expenditure in ways that would raise the income and consumption of common people, employment-intensive public investment, strengthening the public distribution system and reducing fuel prices to “protect the Indian people from the global economic crisis”.