Opinion Sudheendra Kulkarni writes: Bharat Ratna L K Advani’s greatest achievement is that he helped end Congress’s monopoly over power in India

I ended the tweet with the words ─ “Why not Bharat Ratna for L K Advani?” I quickly deleted it since I felt that it could be misinterpreted as denigrating a widely respected OBC leader.

Ten days later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that Advani would be honoured with the Bharat Ratna.

This announcement occasions an examination of whether the 96-year-old Advani’s public life, spanning over seven decades, has an enduring legacy, and if it does, what ideals, achievements and concerns of his life are still relevant. I shall list four of them here.

His greatest achievement is that he ─ along with his senior colleague Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whom he respected as his leader throughout his political life ─ ended the Congress party’s monopoly control over the power structure in India. As Advani stated repeatedly after the end of the Emergency (1975-77), when a non-Congress formation in the form of the Janata Party came to power at the Centre for the first time, India’s polity needed to be transformed from a “single-pole” system dominated by the Congress into a “two-pole” system with the united opposition emerging as a stable alternative. This, he believed, was imperative for keeping Indian democracy healthy, vibrant, responsive and accountable. Sadly, the government headed by Morarji Desai collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions because the Janata Party was a hurriedly formed amalgam of disparate parties without a strong leader to keep them together.

The next two decades were marked by tragedies and instability, until Vajpayee and Advani succeeded in establishing a fairly stable BJP-led National Democratic Alliance in 1998. The NDA government, with Vajpayee as the prime minister and Advani as his second-in-command, lasted six years with reasonably good performance. It was the first purely non-Congress government in India’s history, thus validating Advani’s espousal of a “two-pole” polity.

The credit for re-converting the polity into a “single-pole” system goes, of course, to Narendra Modi. He has achieved what was unthinkable until a decade ago. He has nearly decimated the Congress (with a lot of help from the Congress leadership itself) and established the BJP’s domination over politics and governance. One thing is certain: If the Congress party’s monopoly over power was detrimental to India’s democracy, so too is the BJP’s.

Some of the undemocratic means Modi has used to achieve this success are antithetical to the ideals Vajpayee and Advani stood for. This only reinforces Advani’s enduring contribution to keeping democracy alive in India. The finest hour of his life was when he fought valiantly against the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi’s government. Till date, it remains the darkest period in the history of Indian democracy. The Congress party mutilated the Constitution. Citizens were deprived of their fundamental rights and freedoms. The press came under total censorship. The judiciary was enslaved. The government imprisoned thousands of leaders and activists of the Opposition, including the venerable Jayaprakash Narayan. Advani spent 19 months in jail. His struggle against dictatorship was as intellectually inspiring as it was politically impactful. As the minister of information and broadcasting in the Janata government, he played the most decisive role in dismantling the edifice of the Emergency.

A Prisoner’s Scrap-Book, the book he published after the Emergency was lifted, is one of the most inspiring works in the category of underground literature. Parts of it were smuggled out of jail and circulated widely by those who were fighting in defence of democracy. Many of today’s BJP leaders and supporters would be embarrassed if they read this book because it contains thoughts that strongly disapprove of the Modi government’s assaults on democracy and democratic institutions. Of particular relevance today, when the media is sought to be made a slavish propagandist of the ruling party, is the way Advani rebuked most newspapers and journals for voluntarily surrendering their freedom during the Emergency ─ “You were asked only to bend, but you crawled”.

The second pillar of Advani’s legacy is most widely known, but it is also the most controversial. It is his spirited leadership of the Ayodhya movement demanding construction of the Ram Temple at Ram Janmabhoomi where the Babri Masjid stood for centuries. He did not initiate this demand. Ironically, several Congress leaders, including Gulzari Lal Nanda (who became India’s interim prime minister on two occasions), had supported this demand much earlier. Rajiv Gandhi, when he was prime minister, also lent indirect support to this cause. But it was Advani’s Ram Rath Yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya in September-October 1990 that imparted to this demand the power of a nationwide mass movement.

Advani was not in favour of demolition of the Babri Mosque. He appealed to the Muslim community to voluntarily give up its claim on the disputed site by respecting the religious sentiments of Hindus. He said both the temple and the mosque (after its relocation) could be rebuilt jointly in the spirit of reconciliation and national integration. He even offered to persuade the Hindu community to give up its claim on the disputed sites in Kashi and Mathura if Muslim leaders did so in Ayodhya. His efforts came to nought.

When unruly kar sevaks pulled down the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, Advani unsuccessfully tried to stop them. He called it “the saddest day of my life”. Should he and Vajpayee have made a stronger effort to rein in hardliners in the temple movement? Yes. After all, without the involvement and leadership of the BJP, the rest of the Sangh Parivar could not have made much progress with its demand. Therefore, Advani should certainly take some of the blame for what happened on December 6 ─ and what happened was indeed both against the Constitution and violative of the essence of Hinduism, which teaches respect for all faiths.

However, history would certainly absolve Advani on the charge that he led a movement that was fundamentally communal and anti-Muslim. As mentioned earlier, the Muslim leadership took an intransigent stand on an issue that stirred Hindu sentiments all over India. Left-oriented secularists (who greatly influenced the Congress leadership) made ─ and are continuing to make ─ the mistake of believing that the Hindu sentiment for the Ram Temple was artificially whipped up by the Sangh Parivar. How disconnected they are from India’s cultural and spiritual soil has been proved by two landmark events ─ the spectacular Hindu response to Advani’s Ram Rath Yatra and the nationwide jubilation over the consecration of the Ram Temple on January 22.

Throughout the Rath Yatra, and also subsequently, Advani explained that although Ram has religious significance for Hindus, he is respected by Indians of all faiths as a hero of our national culture. Not unlike Jawaharlal Nehru, he argued that India’s age-old culture is the determinant of our nationhood and national identity. This is how he presented his Hindutva as “Cultural Nationalism”. Predictably, this earned him many critics.

In his autobiography My Country My Life, Advani counters the criticism against the Rath Yatra by stating that there was “not an iota of communal bigotry in my speeches”. He writes, “On the contrary, whenever I heard an inappropriate slogan in my meetings, I promptly expressed disapproval. For example, at some places people shouted: ‘Jo Hindu hit ki baat karega, vahi desh pe raj karega’ (They alone shall rule India, who speak of Hindu interests).  I immediately stood up to affirm that the BJP represents every citizen of India irrespective of whether he is a Hindu or a Muslim or Christian or a Parsi or follower of any other faith. I said that the policies we promote seek to benefit hundred per cent of the Indian people, not just Hindus who constitute eighty-two per cent. Of course, we strongly disagree with pseudo-secularists for whom eighty-two per cent just do not matter. Therefore, if a slogan had to be raised, let it be: ‘Jo rashtra hit ki baat karega, vahi desh pe raj karega’. (They alone shall rule India, who speak of the nation’s interests.)

At a time when Hindu triumphalists are trying to hijack religious sentiments of the majority community ahead of the 2024 parliamentary polls, it is necessary to make a clear distinction between narrow Hindu interests and the larger national interests.

Third, Advani’s lifelong concern ─ which was also the concern of Vajpayee and their common mentor Deendayal Upadhyaya ─ was to see that politics in India remained principled, clean and corruption-free. He tried to keep his own party committed to this ideal. He did not achieve much success in this effort. Nevertheless, he will be remembered for his strong advocacy for electoral reforms (with an emphasis on state funding of elections), judicial reforms and reforms in the working of the Indian state. Both he and Vajpayee were against misuse of the office of the governor to throttle state governments ruled by opposition parties. Hence, governors acting like “Governor Generals”, as is happening today in states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala, would have been unthinkable in the NDA-I government. Advani, if he were in active politics today, would have surely reproached his own party for its unethical power politics in Maharashtra and other states.

The fourth pillar of Advani’s legacy is his sincere and sustained effort to promote good neighbourly relations between India and Pakistan. He was himself a victim of India’s blood-soaked Partition. Born in Karachi in 1927, he (along with lakhs of Hindus and Sikhs) became an alien in his own homeland and migrated to the truncated part of India in 1947. He never hesitated to condemn Pak-sponsored cross-border terrorism in Kashmir, Punjab and elsewhere. Nevertheless, he believed in the imperative of normalisation of relations between India and Pakistan. He further believed this would greatly promote harmonisation of relations between Hindus and Muslims in India itself.

The high point of his effort in this regard was his visit to Pakistan in 2005, when he was the BJP president. As someone who accompanied him on this visit, I saw the tremendous positive response he evoked wherever he went. The Pakistani government even gave him the honour of laying the foundation stone for the inauguration of the historic Katas Raj Hindu temple complex near Lahore.

Alas, his visit to the mausoleum of the founder of Pakistan in Karachi, and his tribute to Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s speech in Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, as an example of secularism, created an unnecessary controversy in India. His remark on Jinnah was factually irrefutable. But hardliners in the Sangh Parivar prevailed again, and succeeded in marginalising and weakening Advani in his own party. Not surprisingly, he failed to lead the BJP to victory in 2009.

I have had the privilege of working closely with Advani ─ also with Vajpayee ─ for many years. In him I have seen a leader who lived an untarnished life. He remained loyal to the ideals of the RSS, which he joined at the age of 14, throughout his active public life. But this did not prevent him from seeing and appreciating what was good in other organisations and ideologies. He had great respect for Nehru’s patriotism and for his foundational contribution to building institutions of democracy in India. He even admired E M S Namboodiripad, Hiren Mukherjee and other communists for their selfless commitment to the cause they believed in. “In politics, I regard idealism to be more important than ideology,” he often told me. Despite political differences, his relations with Sonia Gandhi, Pranab Mukherjee and other Congress leaders were extremely cordial. In his very first meeting with Rahul Gandhi, he said, “In politics, there will always be adversaries. But there should be no enemies”. Today, these words sound as if they belong to a bygone age.

Perhaps, the best way to summarise Advani’s personality is to recall what Vajpayee said in his foreword to his trusted comrade’s autobiography (published in 2008). “During the course of his long, and inarguably eventful, political life, Advaniji has, at times, been misunderstood and as a result become a victim of the dichotomy between image and reality.  But those who have worked or interacted with him closely know him as a man who has never compromised on his core belief in nationalism, and yet has displayed flexibility in political responses whenever it was demanded by the situation. Above all, he has an open mind that always absorbs new ideas from diverse sources, a quality that has been nurtured by his lifelong love for books. I have always been amazed at how he manages to keep this hobby alive, in spite of devoting so much time to public life.”

This cerebral, selfless and devoted servant of a democratic and culturally resurgent India is truly a Bharat Ratna.

The writer was an aide to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee