NEW DELHI: Describing expulsion of Jaswant Singh as a "painful but necessary" decision, senior BJP leader L K Advani on Friday answered his criticism on Sardar Vallabhai Patel saying the first Home Minister had banned the RSS at Jawaharlal Nehru's behest.

"It is mentally painful to expel somebody who has been with you for the past 30 years but what he wrote was against the basic ideology of the party," he said in his address at the concluding day of the three-day 'Chintan Baitak' here.

In his first comments on the party's decision taken on Monday, he told top BJP leaders attending the conclave that he felt that the expulsion of the Darjeeling MP as "painful but a necessary" action. link