Opinion Advani will prove his obituary-writers wrong

Today I am no longer with the BJP,and no longer an aide of Advani. Nevertheless,I am pained to read such premature obituaries of him.

The BJP lost the elections on account of many reasons,and Advani himself,as the party’s prime ministerial candidate,has not rejected his primary responsibility for its defeat. Indeed,nobody who was associated with the party’s election campaign,this columnist included,can disown their individual and collective responsibilities for the debacle. The BJP’s second successive defeat in a parliamentary election has naturally pushed it in the throes of turmoil. Its woes got worsened by a thoroughly avoidable,unjustifiable and bizarre blunder committed by the top leadership in the form of summary expulsion of Jaswant Singh over his book on Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Jaswant Singh’s subsequent diatribe against both Advani and the BJP gave Advani’s obituary-writers more ammo. Since Advani himself has chosen to remain silent on Kandahar,the cash-for-votes episode and his own stand on Jaswant Singh’s expulsion at the parliamentary board meeting in Shimla,he has invited upon himself a lot of unjustified criticism. However,when true facts are known,unbiased observers will surely see Advani not as a liar and a trickster,but as someone who,with all his costly mistakes,still possesses rare virtues in politics.

One such virtue is that,in a situation in which the top decision-making body in the party is divided on a certain issue,or in which he is the sole dissenter,he will never disclose to the media his personal stand just in order to run down his colleagues or to burnish his own image in society. He won’t do it even when he knows that his silence could hurt his public image. “How can I do something which I preach others in the party not to do?” he asks.

His virtues of discipline,dedication,selflessness,incorruptibility and idealism are inherited from his RSS background,and further strengthened by his close association with Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya,whom he regards as his political guru. These are precisely the qualities that once set apart the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and subsequently,for several years,the BJP,from the rest in the country’s political spectrum. Even ideological critics of the Jana Sangh and BJP did not hesitate to admire them for these qualities. Sadly,and somewhat inevitably,these qualities suffered erosion and corrosion when the BJP started to enjoy power at the Centre and in states. Although Advani personally remained unsullied,in recent years he did not assert his authority to arrest the BJP’s moral decline.

However,a few mistakes cannot cast an illustrious political life into oblivion. With Atal Bihari Vajpayee becoming inactive due to poor health,Advani is the only veteran leader today who can guide the BJP to re-connect to the best part of its legacy,enriched by the likes of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee,Deendayal Upadhyaya,Loknayak Jayaprakash Narayan (who served as the crucial non-RSS transitional link between the Jana Sangh and BJP,via the Janata Party). The legacy of these great men has taught him and the party that power politics is not the only mode in which a political leader can serve the nation. God has blessed Advani,who will be 82 in November,with admirably good health. He does not need a formal position in the party to play the role of a mentor. He can devote the remaining active years of his life to steer his party along the difficult path of revitalisation from the bottom up under a new generation of young leaders. He can help it rediscover its waning idealism,renew its nationalist ideology by making it inclusive and all-embracing,and add to it the new dimensions of good governance and development,which Atalji and he tried to pursue in the NDA government. In addition,with his long standing in India’s public life,he also has the opportunity to emerge as someone who cares for the nation beyond the BJP by promoting the politics of national consensus on major national issues.

Quite a few had written Advani’s political obituary after his historic peace-making visit to Pakistan in 2005,which unfortunately led to his being asked to step down from presidentship of the BJP. One of them was Mani Shankar Aiyer,who as India’s cabinet minister was then on an official visit to Pakistan. Speaking on a Pakistani TV channel,Aiyer had declared,“Advani is politically dead.” Advani proved his critics wrong in 2005. He can,and will,do so again in 2009. I say this on the basis of what he has written in the introduction to his autobiography,My Country My Life: “In Chinese script,I am told,the word ‘crisis’ is written as a compound of two characters,one denoting ‘danger’ and the other ‘opportunity’. My own life has recurrently brought home to me the fact that there is an immense truth in the inter-relationship of these two concepts. Both for an individual and a community,conditions of adversity pose a challenge. And a challenge brings out the best in each one of us.”

sudheenkulkarni@gmail.com