“Unfortunate and regrettable.” In the flickering candle flame that lit up the dingy room in a nondescript building barely a stone’s-throw away from the disputed Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi site in Ayodhya, these were the words uttered by Lal Krishna Advani after a tumultuous afternoon on December 6, 1992,
In an off-the-cuff interaction with mediapersons, after the 16th century shrine in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh was razed to the ground by Hindu fundamentalist zealots, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stalwart came across as a shaken man. His exhortations to karsevaks (volunteers) from his party and Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the ultra-rightwing Hindu organisation, earlier in the day were primarily aimed at raising the pitch for electoral gains. But as the day progressed, the political agenda got hijacked by thugs and hoodlums from Hindu rightist forces and Advani helplessly watched the demolition and desecration of the shrine, marking the biggest blow to India’s secular ethos in the post-Independence era.
With Hindu fanaticism on the rise in vast swaths of the “cow belt” in northern India and a P.V. Narasimha Rao-led Congress government at the Centre still grappling with the de facto power centre called Sonia Gandhi, Advani went for the kill. His carefully cultivated political hysteria through a nationwide rath yatra (chariot sojourns) served as a perfect catalytic converter to transform religious fanaticism into a popular mandate at the hustings.
But December 6, 1992, made Advani realise that there’s “many a slip ‘tween the cup and the lip”. The Babri demolition threw a spanner in his works as his hardline Hindutva came under the scanner like never before — forcing him to pull the plug on a high-octane campaign.
Until this day, the louha purush (iron man) of Indian politics is left with the unenviable task of clearing the air on this unsavoury episode.
Jump-cut to June 2013.
Sensing a strong anti-incumbency wave against the Manmohan Singh-led United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre, a desperate Advani staked his claim as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 general elections. He had failed as the BJP commander in 2009. At the ripe old age of 86, Advani knew this would be his last chance. But sending out shock waves to the party patriarch and moderates within the BJP rank and file, party chief Rajnath Singh cleared the deck for anointing the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi as the saffron brigade’s poster boy for the make-or-break polls. Even opposition from Advani sympathisers such as Sushma Swaraj and Murli Manohar Joshi failed to cut much ice with the parliamentary unit of the party as gung-ho Modi backers saw the Gujarat chief minister as a perfect antidote to ten years of insipid governance under Manmohan’s watch.
Irony of fate – yet again!
Soon after the 2002 Gujarat riots, when prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was all set to sack Modi for failing to control the mayhem that ruled the streets of Ahmedabad, it was Advani who threw his lot firmly behind Modi and saved the day for the Gujarat strongman. Advani’s logic was simple. If Modi was shown the red card, it would only help opposition Congress build a case, pointing fingers at a readymade villain. Thanks to Advani, Modi stayed on as Gujarat chief minister in the summer of 2002 — only to emerge as an Advani party-pooper in the autumn of 2013! As a last-ditch attempt to hold the BJP top brass to ransom against naming Modi as the prime ministerial candidate, Advani tendered his resignation as a party functionary. But within 48 hours, he was forced into a volte face.
“There’s many a slip ‘tween the cup and the lip”, as Advani once again found out!
Born in Karachi, in undivided India on November 8, 1927, Advani is one of those few leaders in the BJP who managed to garner the respect and admiration cutting across party lines. And his brand equity as a political behemoth perhaps lies in the dichotomy that his ideology has always come to represent. Despite being the original brand ambassador of BJP’s Hindutva agenda and all its allied political contraptions, Advani has always batted for India’s secular credentials. It is this ideological magnanimity that even saw him court a major controversy by extolling Mohammad Ali Jinnah as a true “secular” and “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” during a much-publicised visit to the mausoleum of the founding father of Pakistan in 2005.
The same Advani who was elected as the secretary of the ultra-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in Karachi during his formative years in politics, emerged as a true statesman at the Jinnah mausoleum, his comments winning him wholesome praise in Pakistan. But back in India, a peeved RSS forced Advani to put in his papers as BJP president.
Circumstances forced Advani to play second fiddle to Vajpayee for a substantial part of his political career. Being designated as the deputy prime minister from 2002-2004 under Vajpayee’s prime ministership was the closest he could get to the coveted job. His moderate image helped Vajpayee emerge as the political glue in an era when coalition satraps ruled the roost in national politics — though it was Advani’s fervent, rightist pitch that helped BJP increase its tally of just two seats in 1984 to being a decisive force with 86 seats in 1989.
As Vajpayee bid farewell to active politics, the mantle could have naturally fallen on Advani. But the script went horribly wrong for this octogenarian. Modi’s image as a backer of radical Hinduism was given the right mix of a pro-development peddler of “India Inc” to create a heady concoction that snuffed out the BJP patriarch from the bullring.
“Truth is stranger than fiction,” there goes the saying. The “Advani era” in Indian politics never really got off to a start, despite the man possessing all the qualities to be a successful statesman. And that indeed is “unfortunate and regrettable”.
This column aims to profile personalities who made the news once but have now faded from the spotlight.
What he said:
“I am not at all apologetic. Indeed, I am proud of my association with the Ayodhya movement. But I am extremely sad that our party’s credibility has been badly dented by the happenings of December 6.”
-- On Babri demolition
“There are many people who leave an inerasable stamp on history. But there are very few who actually create history. Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah was one such rare individual.”
-- At the Mohammad Ali Jinnah Mausoleum in Karachi
“For some time, I have been finding it difficult to reconcile either with the current functioning of the party, or the direction in which it is going.”
-- After resigning from the party in June 2013
