The shadow of Ayodhya appears to hang over BJP patriarch Lal Krishna Advani. At the height of the Ayodhya movement, spearheaded by him, lumpen elements of the RSS cadre had brought down the Babri Masjid. Now 20 years later, a new generation of those elements have turned up at Advani’s home, virulently demanding that he accept Narendra Modi’s appointment as the party’s campaign chief, and thereby asking him, in effect, to move over. The slapstick protest by Modi’s younger supporters has captured the final irony of Advani’s career and a historic moment of the BJP caught in a clash of two generations.
Never before has Advani been so openly criticised, trivialised, even ridiculed. It was unlikely that the agitating youngsters were aware that they were targeting the original
Hindutva hero and builder of a party who did not deserve being humiliated in the manner he has been.
It was Advani who built the BJP along with Atal Behari Vajpayee, taking its insignificant two-member presence in parliament in 1984 to a respectable 182 in 1998. He was the home minister and the deputy prime minister in the only non-Congress-led government to complete a term in the history of independent India.
The party patriarch, who never hid his ambition of being the prime minister, however, had to give in eventually, leaving the youthful brigade to rejoice over their victory, which must have run on the lines of a plot orchestrated by a strategist behind the veil outside the work area of the BJP. The shadowy figure has come out into the open when BJP chief
Rajnath Singh revealed that the closure to the Advani’s resignation episode was brought about by the direct intervention of RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat.
Ironically, it was this kind of meddling that Advani has been trying to resist. Even in the resignation letter he has lashed out at the supra body for not leaving the BJP alone. He has been resentful of an increasing RSS role in the BJP affairs ever since it forced him to quit the party chief’s post following his praise for Pakistan’s founding father Mohamad Ali Jinnah as a “secular” leader during a visit to his mausoleum in Karachi in 2005.
His anguish over the party’s micromanagement by the RSS was no secret. Yet at the fag-end of his career Advani embarrassingly had to allow himself to be persuaded by the RSS chief to end his revolt of a sort and take back his resignation of a few party posts.
What he gained from the weekend political drama is not yet clear, but what is obvious is that he has most definitely stooped.
Although Advani’s poorly enacted resignation drama did succeed in attracting the spotlight, it has hurt his stature and exposed him as nursing a bruised ego and entertaining some aspirations. Advani apparently feared his gradual isolation once the party leadership rooted for Modi. His resisting of the Modimania sweeping the party and his objection to Modi’s elevation and concerns about the points he raised in the retracted resignation letter could all be better appreciated if he, instead of feigning illness, had taken the fight to Goa, argued his case and left it for the BJP national executive to take the decisive call. After all, the core issue on account of which many others oppose and resist Modi’s rise - his alleged complicity in the 2002 communal carnage of Gujarat and his unrepentant position - cannot be the reason for the resistance of sulking Advani who had 11 years ago gone to his rescue and fought to save his job as chief minister at another conclave in Goa when the then prime minister Vajpayee wanted to replace him. Advani was successful in prevailing upon Vajpayee and other Modi-bashers.
Interestingly, Modi returned the favour when Advani scored a self-goal with his comment praising Jinnah and irking the RSS. When all efforts to make him withdraw or apologise over his remarks failed, Advani became persona non grata for the RSS. Then it was Modi who mediated with the RSS to re-establish Advani as the real “hardliner”. Despite this quid pro quos and years of bonhomie, there is no love lost between them when leadership tussle came to the fore.
As the 2014 general elections draw close, the key question confronting the BJP and the RSS is whether Advani, at his advanced age, can engineer a turnaround in the party’s falling electoral fortunes. The “India Shining” campaign he led in 2004 failed with the BJP managing only 138 seats. In 2009, he was the party’s choice for the post of prime minister. But the campaign, again led by him, fetched the party only 116 seats.
How can the party afford to depend, once again, on the ageing war horse, especially when it has an alternative in Modi, who is getting favourable opinion polls? The RSS too sees in Modi the magic bullet that it hopes to turn the tide with. The BJP might have baulked at naming Modi as the prime ministerial candidate at this stage, but there are no such reservations within the RSS that is clear about its goal for 2014: Modi is its only hope of taking the hard Right ideology forward to a point where a Hindu state does not appear as just a mirage in the distance, but begins to acquire some contours of reality.
But the reckless haste with which the Goa congregation anointed a highly divisive individual like Modi, who had never really been active on the national front, to lead the BJP in the general elections did more harm than good. He has shown his divisive powers by dividing not only the BJP but also the National Democratic Alliance even before he has assumed charge.
The decision of the JD-U to dump its long-time ally BJP and walk out of the NDA will further aggravate the fissures in the grouping and will have far reaching consequences. Other “secular” parties too are haunted by the fear of being branded a collaborator of a rabidly communal force after Modi’s elevation. A realignment of social groups and forces also will be increasingly visible as the election season nears as they will be more watchful than ever about the evolving RSS-Modi combination.
But Modi, originally an RSS worker and later a saffron hero for his alleged role in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots, will prod on, using the gambit of development and growth and good administration to hide an essentially Hindutva agenda with the drum-beating by the media and big industry creating the necessary smokescreen. His galvanising the rank and file of the party means days of the Vajpayee-Advani generation are numbered. But the transition will be far from smooth.