It was Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president L.K. Advani's first press conference in four months during which he and the party went through their worst crisis.

The media room in the party headquarters at 11 Ashoka Road was jam-packed. OB-vans of all the major news channels, expecting a major announcement, were lined up outside in case the story needed to be broadcast live.

Even senior journalists had turned up on a national holiday in order not to miss a big story that the press conference was expected to produce. After all it was for the first time Advani was addressing the media after his tiff with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) over his controversial remarks on Mohammad Ali Jinnah during his visit to Pakistan.

It was also going to be his first media interaction after the national executive meeting in Chennai last month where he announced his stepping down from the post of party president in December.

But the 78-year-old political veteran disappointed everyone.

Throughout the brief 20-minute press conference, which he began with an apology for calling the scribes on a holiday, Advani merely talked about the party's demand to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for a white paper and a probe into the recent revelations that the Soviet spy KGB had bribed Indian political parties and the media during former prime minister Indira Gandhi's tenure in the eighties.

Despite his recent political travails, Advani looked happy and relaxed and betrayed no trace of his haunting troubles with his party and ideological peers.

"You must be expecting me to make some announcements. I have made all the announcements at Chennai," he said pre-empting questions from the media. Advani was referring to his speech at the Chennai national executive where he deplored the RSS's interference in the affairs of the BJP.

"I do not want to talk about anything and lessen the importance of this issue," he rationalized.

However, that did not stop him from justifying the much-criticised handling of the 2002 communal violence in Gujarat by Narendra Modi's government.

Advani said he had appreciated the action of Manmohan Singh for his apology in parliament for the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, even though he was not in government at that time, and advised him to act similarly to probe the KGB revelations dating back to happenings during the Indira Gandhi era.

Asked if his party would do the same for the victims of the Gujarat violence that killed more than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, Advani remarked: "There is a huge difference between the two (incidents). What happened in 1984 was brutal killing and no action was there from the police. But in Gujarat around 200 people were shot dead by the police during their attempts to contain the riots," Advani claimed.

"There has been no finding against the Gujarat government," he hurriedly added before announcing the press conference was over.

Advani's last press conference was on May 25 before his trip to Pakistan. His remarks praising Jinnah, who is considered in India as the main villain of the 1947 partition of the subcontinent, had irked the RSS and Hindu hardliners who had since then been clamouring for his ouster.