NEW DELHI, June 7: Indian opposition leader L.K. Advani resigned as the head of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday after he was criticized by his former Hindu extremist supporters for describing Quaid-i-Azam as a secular leader of Pakistan.

Former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, himself a Hindutva ideologue, urged Mr Advani to take back his resignation. In fact, Mr Vajpayee went on to back Mr Advani’s statement in Pakistan and said that Mr Mohammad Ali Jinnah had played an important role in the freedom struggle.

India’s ruling Congress party slammed Mr Advani’s remarks that were made after a visit to the Quaid’s mausoleum in Karachi. A Congress spokesman said a speech by Mr Jinnah on August 11, 1947 in which he had spoken of Pakistan’s secular ideals was not enough to absolve him of the charge as a divisive leader. Last year, Mr Advani had read out parts of the Quaid’s speech as deputy prime minister during a book released in February when he told his BJP supporters that Mr Jinnah was a secular leader. There was no reaction from the rightwing Hindu extremists at that time.

“I have come to know that my remarks have triggered a debate, I have no objection to it, the matter should be debated,” Mr Advani said to reporters on arrival at Delhi airport on Monday.

He did not take questions and did not interact with the media on his first day back from Pakistan. The BJP appeared divided after the attack launched against Mr Advani by sections of the Hindu revivalist Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and the extremist fringe of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). It put forth no arguments to fend off the criticism, with the Hindu Jagran Manch even putting up posters asking “Jinnah sympathiser Advani” to go back to Pakistan.

Launching a counter attack against the VHP whose strong criticism and “insult” prompted Mr Advani to resign as BJP president, the Gujarat unit of the BJP dubbed VHP as a “saffron brigade having no existence outside the state.” Reacting to Mr Advani’s resignation, the state BJP President Vaju Vala said: “Apart from some places in Ahmedabad city and some other parts scattered across the state no one will listen to the VHP. Moreover they have no existence outside Gujarat at all.”

VHP General-Secretary Praveen Togadia who had been the most vocal of the Hind extremist leader to oppose Mr Advani has not spared a single occasion of late during programmes in Gujarat to criticize the BJP’s “diluted” Hindutva and its “uncertain” stand on the Ram temple issue in Ayodhya. Mr Advani’s resignation, though yet to be accepted, came after RSS General-Secretary Mohan Bhagwat made it clear to BJP senior leaders late on Monday night that he would have to either retract his statement or quit, RSS sources said.

They said this was the reason he chose to handover the resignation to RSS point-person in BJP Sanjay Joshi and not to any other party functionary. In his meetings with senior party leaders, Mr Advani said he was agonised by the type of language used against him and regretted that no party leader reacted to it. “BJP strongly disapproves of the statements made against Advani by VHP leader Praveen Togadia. The language used is totally objectionable not expected from a nationalist organization,” former BJP president Venkaiah Naidu, flanked by several top party leaders, told a news conference here. “The BJP condemns it in the strongest possible language,” said Mr Naidu, accompanied by Pramod Mahajan, Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj, SanjayJoshi, Bal Apte, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Ananth Kumar.