Dubai: Seeking to clear misconceptions about the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), particularly in the Arab world, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has said the party "has never been and never will be a Hindu fundamentalist movement".

"We have never had the narrow agenda of undermining India's pluralistic and secular system," Vajpayee said in an interview to Saudi-based English daily 'Arab News' published on September 5.

"We believe in secularism, by which we mean 'sarva dharma sambhava' or equal respect for all faiths," he stressed.

Vajpayee said the BJP is a "national party and a nationalist party. It cannot subscribe to any narrow ideology based on discrimination that is repugnant to traditional national culture."

"We are wedded to the goal of prosperity and welfare for all our citizens irrespective of their caste, creed, language and religion," he said.

Asked about India's pledge that it would never use nuclear weapons first nor would it direct them against non-nuclear states, the Prime Minister said the imperatives of its complex security environment had compelled India to develop nuclear weapons.

"But we regard our nuclear weapons as a credible deterrent and not as instruments of aggression," he said while emphasising that India continued to stress the need for a co-operative thrust to reduce the salience of nuclear weapons by subscribing to such measures as no first-use, and a move away from hair-trigger deployment.

PTI