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At the special silver jubilee national council session of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on 6 April 2005, BJP President LK Advani pledged the party’s commitment to Hindu nationalist politics. “I am committed to building a grand Ram temple in Ayodhya,” he said. In a speech that made it clear that he was rooting for Hindutva, Advani said the BJP's desire to see the Ram temple on the site where the Babri mosque stood, was "total, unshakeable and irreversible". Advani, who was Deputy Prime Minister in the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government that was voted out a year ago, said it was the mass movement for the Ram temple in the 1980s that gave the BJP a distinct identity in Indian politics. The BJP President said the temple campaign also ignited a nationwide debate on secularism "and the debate continues". "The BJP is proud of having made its contribution to this movement, which was aimed as much at the reconstruction of the temple as at countering a dangerous campaign to denigrate, distort and erase the basic Hindu identity of India's nationhood in the name of a perverted version of secularism,” he said. "Our party's commitment to the reconstruction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya remains total, unshakable and irreversible," he added. Advani went on to say that secularism existed in India "only because the cultural core is Hindu". "Our inflexible stand on our association with the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh gave us a distinct ideological identity, about which we have never been apologetic nor will we ever be. We must nurse our ideological and organisational constituency, that is the chief lesson from Election 2004,” he said. Explaining his stand, the BJP President said, "Just as every MP or MLA has to nurse his constituency well in order to get re-elected, every political party also has to nurse its core constituency of ideological supporters and organisational workers in order to be able to win a renewed mandate. In the past six years, the BJP ignored the karyakarta, the Sangh Parivar and the core voter." Advani said, "Transforming the one-party rule of the Congress in the country into a bipolar polity with the BJP emerging as the more cohesive, more purposive and more vision driven of the two poles has been our greatest achievement."
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