Bunty’s soap bubble

Advani’s premonition

Two days before his trip to Karachi, Advani confided to a well-wisher that his great regret was that a section of the Parivar did not comprehend that the party’s ideology had to evolve with the times. He recalled that the socialist leader, Ram Manohar Lohia, had once asked Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, in the ’60s whether the Jana Sangh still believed in the concept of ‘‘Akhand Bharat’’. Upadhyaya replied that the party now wanted a subcontinent re-united not by force, as was earlier conceptualised, but by mutual interest on the lines of the European Common Market.

Swami suggested J’s secularism

Many BJP leaders blamed L K Advani’s speech-writer Sudheendra Kulkarni for his remarks on Jinnah, but the inspiration was actually the late head of the Ramakrishna Mission Swami Ranganathananda. In Kolkata in 2003, Advani, then Deputy Prime Minister, called on the Swami Ranganathananda, whose discourses he has been listening to since he was a student in Karachi. Ranganathananda, who was 94, reminded Advani of Jinnah’s speech in Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly remarking, ‘‘that was truly a secular speech’’. He asked Advani to send him a copy of the speech from the Parliament House library.

The swami’s remark seems to have made a deep impact on Advani. In fact, he referred to it at a condolence meeting for the swami in April this year, which was attended by both Manmohan Singh and I K Gujral. In Pakistan, Advani first brought up the secular side of Jinnah at the Katas Raj temple function. After a hue and cry was raised back home, Advani tried to put his comments on Jinnah in perspective in Karachi with a lengthy explanation, which was faxed to Delhi. But far from mollifying the hardliners in the Parivar, they were further irritated. Particularly as Advani visited Jinnah’s mausoleum the same day.

Spinning from Left to right

In the BJP office they wonder how a former Communist like Sudheendra Kulkarni has come to exert so much influence in the party and some even accuse him of being a Trojan horse. An IIT graduate, Kulkarni was a member of the CPI(M) and deputy editor of the Left leaning Blitz weekly. When Blitz owner R K Karanjia suddenly took a Right turn, so did Kulkarni, and he showed up at the BJP’s national council in 1993. Later he worked for the Hindujas.

In 1996, Advani allotted Kulkarni a room in the BJP party office in Delhi and a year later he accompanied Advani on his Swarna Jayanti Yatra. When Vajpayee became prime minister, Kulkarni joined the PMO and rose rapidly, thanks to the confidence Vajpayee reposed in his speech-writing abilities. He returned to the party office after the BJP defeat and was appointed political secretary to the party president and a secretary in the BJP’s organisational set-up.

Kulkarni impressed both Advani and Vajpayee by his cerebral approach, even if was responsible for such bloomers as Vajpayee’s musings and Advani remarks about ‘‘an instrument of the divine.’’ And while Kulkarni may not have raked up the 1947 Jinnah speech, his detractors point out that it was his responsibility as speechwriter to ensure that Advani’s remarks were sufficiently nuanced and circumspect. If he had been in sync with the party ideology, he could have warned Advani of the dangers of an intellectual reassessment of a man long on the party’s hate list.