A Self-Effacing Hindu Nationalist

IT IS REMARKABLE how a little time can play clever tricks with political memory. Around the time Atal Bihari Vajpayee successfully but narrowly pushed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) past the finishing line in the election of 1998, there was concern among the chatter­ing classes over the man who invari­ably appeared next to him in the party’s posters.

Lal Krishna Advani, the man who became deputy prime minister in the Vajpayee government, and the man who, alas, was not destined to ever occupy the topmost political post, was an unlikely monster. When he began his innings in electoral politics by winning the New Delhi parliamentary seat in 1989, people often equated him to the common man in RK Laxman’s cartoons. A self-effacing Hindu nationalist who thought in English, rather than Hindi, Advani seemed more at home in the dining room of the India International Centre than in the rough and tumble of agitational politics.

Yet, in just a year’s time, this gentle and shy individual was transformed into the public face of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation that redefined Indian politics unrecognisably and set in motion a mindset change that was to culminate in the election of Narendra Modi in 2014 and the inauguration of the grand temple to Lord Ram in Ayodhya. As his famous (some would say infamous) Rath Yatra moved across different parts of India in September and October of 1990, Advani’s public image changed unrecognisably. As his speeches became more forceful and direct, Laxman recast him as an angry leader with menacing eyebrows. Others compared him to Hitler and those who spoke up for him were dubbed stormtroopers and banished from polite society.

Today, all that has been forgotten. In the aftermath of the huge emotional churning that the country witnessed on January 22, it was only right that Advani’s monumental contribution to the Ayodhya movement was formally recognised through a Bharat Ratna. It was also reassuring that this time, the venom poured on him was limited to a few recalcitrant souls who saw themselves in the lofty role as the last decent Indians left on this planet. Those who cast stones at him for two decades after 1990 were either dead or had reinvented themselves. Those who remained sceptics now saw Advani as the good Sanghi and pitted him against the evil Sanghi that was Prime Minister Modi. For Advani, it was a reversal of roles. During the first NDA government, he was always the ‘hardliner’ against the ‘moderate’ Vajpayee.

As someone who saw him at very close quarters from 1990 to his ill-fated visit to Pakistan in 2005, I never bought this projection of Advani. However, it is undeniable that this unending vilification by the all-powerful English-speaking elite affected the man deeply. Throughout the period after the demolition of the Babri structure in 1992, Advani sought to persuade Lutyens’ Delhi and its counterpart in Mumbai that he wasn’t quite the ogre they imagined him to be. I don’t know if he succeeded, or whether it was worth the effort, but his bid to become ‘secular’ by positing Muhammad Ali Jinnah as ‘secular’ proved very damaging. It suddenly earned him new admirers among those who wouldn’t be caught dead saying anything nice about BJP, leave aside voting for it. In the process, it also offended those who had stood by him through the struggles of the past.

On the strength of his past contributions, BJP didn’t cast him aside. However, as became evident during the election of 2009, the rank and file of the party respected him, but no longer idolised him. There were facets of his career, particularly in the last few years of his innings in active politics, that are best forgotten. As they surely will be.

Advani deserved the Bharat Ratna. He was, of course, one of the most decent men in politics and one who valued his honour. How many people can match his determination to stay away from Parliament until he was exonerated in the Jain hawala case? He created a new vocabulary of politics. Terms such as pseudo-secularism and minority appease­ment acquired common currency only because of him. He took Hindu nationalism from the rarefied heights of Savarkar’s thought and the fringes of shakha existence and brought it to the forefront of national politics. He was the face of what was undeniably the greatest mass movement of post- Independence India, a movement that redefined the soul of Bharat.

About The Author

Swapan Dasgupta

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