Ghost Buster

If some call him a 8216;8216;leftist mole8217;8217; out to wreck the party from within, others regard him as an 8216;8216;opportunist8217;8217; who always gravitates towards the Big Boss first Advani, then Vajpayee, briefly Venkaiah Naidu, and now Advani again.

But even the burgeoning ranks of his detractors admit that Kulkarni has a way with words and a better way with ideas, and in a party short of intellectuals capable of out-of-the box thinking, he fulfills a need that both Vajpayee and Advani crave for.

Kulkarni, of course, was not the only left intellectual to join the saffron bandwagon in the 1990s. But unlike the high-profile Oxbridge Bengalis who traded ideologies with elan, Kulkarni8217;s more rooted and varied background lent a nuanced texture to his transformation.

BORN in 1957 to a Kannadiga father and Maharashtrian mother, Kulkarni was brought up in the small town of Athni in Belgaum district on the Maharashtra-Karnataka border. He made it to IIT Powai to study civil engineering but was soon influenced by Marxism. He worked in various fronts of the CPIM and while most of his friends migrated to jobs in the US, he decided to 8216;8216;stay back and work in the social field.8217;8217; To earn a living, he turned to journalism, starting with a science magazine and finally moving to R.K. Karanajia8217;s Blitz. He was employed by the Hindujas for a year 8216;8216;to start a magazine8217;8217; that never started.

A visit to the Soviet Union in 1985 as part of a leftist youth delegation was a turning point. The communist reality was very different from the propaganda, and he soon became an ardent admirer of 8216;8216;Gorbachev and what he stood for8212;free thought, openness, honesty about the past.8217;8217; Back home, he was disillusioned with the CPIM8217;s hard line against glasnost and perestroika, and started drifting away from the Party.

And like many disillusioned radicals before him, he turned to Indian spiritual thought as an alternative8212;devouring the works of Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi, and though not quite in the same league, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya. By the time Advani launched his Ram rath yatra in 1990, Kulkarni had become sufficiently transformed to see 8216;8216;merit in the demand for a Ram temple in Ayodhya.8217;8217; He wrote as much in his columns in the Blitz, and Advani8212;always eager for praise from adversaries8212;was moved enough to publicly commend him.

By 1996, Vajpayee and Advani had found place beside Gorbachev in Kulkarni8217;s pantheon of living heroes and so he decided to work full time for their party. He moved to Delhi his doctor wife and young daughter stayed behind in Mumbai, lived in the outhouse of the BJP headquarters with Govindacharya and Khushabhau Thakre for neighbours, and toured the country with Advani on his 1997 Swarna Jayanti yatra.

When the BJP came to power in 1998, Kulkarni joined the PM8212;penning Vajpayee8217;s musings and contributing 8216;8216;my own bit to policy and programmes.8217;8217; That included Vajpayee8217;s unabashed wooing of the Muslim vote in Elections 2004 that came a cropper.

With the NDA out of power, Kulkarni was back at the party headquarters, becoming political secretary to the BJP chief and a national secretary of the BJP. Despite all the flak he has received in recent weeks, Kulkarni insists he is here to stay.

RSS ideologue Dattopant Thengadi had once told him that work satisfaction is all that matters8212;and it doesn8217;t come from power or position. Kulkarni feels if he can contribute just a little to the paradigm shift Advani has embarked on of India-Pakistan ties, of changing existing realities, of the BJP8217;s ideological trajectory that is satisfaction enough.

Advani, he seems to think, could be another Gorbachev. Given the fate of the CPSU, you can8217;t blame the BJP for regarding Kulkarni as a latter-day Rasputin.