New Delhi, India - A chief architect of the political ascendancy of Hindu nationalism in India in the 1990's and the current opposition leader in Parliament, L. K. Advani, resigned today as head of his party, amid a storm of criticism from within his own ranks over remarks he made while in Pakistan.
Last weekend, on a visit to Karachi, where he was born, Mr. Advani stood at the tomb of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and praised him as a "secular" leader.
Mr. Jinnah has been vilified by Hindu nationalists ever since the 1947 partition of the subcontinent between a secular, but largely Hindu India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
The decision reveals the splits within Mr. Advani's Bharatiya Janata Party, India's biggest opposition party, between its hard-line loyalists and those who seek to broaden its base.
It also signals efforts by Mr. Advani, once the iconic hawk on India-Pakistan relations, to salvage his party from creeping irrelevance by casting himself as a moderate. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which led a coalition government for six years, was trounced in national elections last year, when a Congress Party-led coalition was returned to power.
Mr. Advani's comment came at a time when relations between India and Pakistan seem to be thawing, at least at the level of symbol and rhetoric. The question of what to do about Kashmir, the Himalayan territory both countries claim, remains unresolved.
"Maybe he wants to win the next election on his attitude to Pakistan," Hamid Ansari, a former Indian ambassador to the United Nations, said wryly. "He is trying to cast himself as a responsible man, someone who could be considered a future leader of India and projecting that to Pakistan, in Pakistan."
Mr. Advani was the most prominent B.J.P. leader who led a convoy of Hindu hard-liners who demolished a 16th-century mosque in December 1992 in the small North Indian town of Ayodhya; they contended it was the birthplace of an important Hindu deity called Ram.
The attack became a flashpoint of Hindu-Muslim violence in the country and, many students of politics believe, ultimately carried Mr. Advani's party to power in 1998. At the time, Mr. Advani was arrested in connection with the mob violence and offered to resign as the party chief. In Pakistan last weekend, he described the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque as "the saddest day of my life."