Delhi Diary/By A K B Krishnan
Ageing politicians, who should call it a day, invariably hate to fade away. In their desperate attempts to stay on, these rebellious old guards often offer rather pathetic spectacles and suffer mortifying situations. In politics, as in everything else in life, it is important to know when the time is up. But that is what exactly the grand old men of Indian politics are unable to figure out yet despite their many dismal setbacks in inner party politics.
Nothing else could explain why BJP patriarch L K Advani once again threw tantrums over the party’s allotment of Gujarat’s Gandhinagar constituency to him against his expressed wishes to contest from Bhopal. When the BJP leadership was unwilling to grant his wish, he fell in line willy-nilly swallowing the ultimate sugar-coated insult after all the multi-episode drama of boycotting meetings, stage-managed “persuasion” by other seniors, and Narendra Modi’s flattering visits.
It’s the worst fall for Advani, who once walked tall on the national political stage, that he is being pushed to contest from a constituency located in his bête noire Modi’s home state Gujarat. Suspicious of Modi’s intentions, Advani no longer looks at his long-standing Gandhinagar as a safe seat. He could sense that the Gujarat BJP, under Modi’s leadership, was not very welcoming and made him feel like an outsider. He was keen to move to Bhopal where he would be in the safer hands of Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Chouhan who has promised to conduct the campaign for him.
Mostly thwarted and cornered, Advani, who played a key role in the demolition of the Babri Mosque that catapulted his party to power, has been shortchanged again. With the RSS having written him off long ago, it was easy for Modi to torpedo his plans. And Advani meekly succumbed to the diktat of the party’s new iron man instead of going down fighting, thereby substantiating the assessment that the self-styled “Iron Man-II” had rusted.
Advani has sadly ended up reducing himself to a factional leader who has been losing one battle after another within the party. The only impression that his words and actions leave is that of an old leader failing to come to terms with the loss of his place in the party. His signs of dissent had first surfaced last year when he refused to attend the BJP’s Goa meet, sending a letter instead signalling his displeasure at the way things were being conducted. Modi was appointed BJP’s then campaign committee chief, prompting Advani to tender his resignation from all party posts.
Subsequently, Advani moved heaven and earth in vain to stop the party from declaring Modi as the prime ministerial candidate. The latest seat row exemplifies the enduring friction between Advani and the party leadership. It also proves that Advani’s hurt pride and prejudices may not change things either for himself or for Modi. No wonder Advani had tears in his eyes, and wept publicly. The feeling of being let down by his protégé and even by a party he had raised like a baby from two seats in parliament to power through a calibrated policy of divisiveness must be phenomenal.
But who cares? Advani’s emotional outbreaks, instead of evoking sympathy, seemed to have “thoroughly exasperated” the saffron brass. Some in the party even accused him of “trying to spoil the Modi party.” It is unlikely that the BJP, which is certainly grateful to him for making the party an important factor in national politics by turning Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi dispute into a political issue, will shed any tears over the passing of the Advani era.
Advani has been an influential power player in the party for two decades, and ironically it is his own group of acolytes, that includes Modi, which has decided that it is time for them to be decision-makers. When Advani and others joined to praise Modi for the great work he had done, they never expected that the Gujarat leader would use the base that everyone had built for him to slowly but systematically acquire a commanding position in the BJP and launch himself on the national scene. Events moved too rapidly for the ageing leader to fathom.
Advani first lost the prime ministerial race to Vajpayee. After Vajpayee’s exit from political scene, Advani lived with a sense of entitlement that the position would finally be his. But Modi, his one-time protégé, not only systematically set about puncturing that entitlement but also reduced him to nobody in the party hierarchy. The displacement of Advani from the power perch in the party is a clear signal of the generational shift.
The plain truth is that Advani and company have been cut to size. Sushma Swaraj, who had cried foul when the BJP had made peace with the corrupt Bellary lot in Karnataka, is being wholly disregarded and told to stop raising “marginal” issues in public. Murli Manohar Joshi was displaced from his old constituency of Varanasi and moved to Kanpur to make way for Modi who decided to contest from two seats.
On Friday, Jaswant Singh was denied the chance to fight from his home base of Barmer in Rajasthan. A reluctant rebel, he decided to contest as an independent. The denial of party ticket to long-time Gujarat MP Harin Pathak also strengthens fears that the Modi camp is out to clip the wings of Advani’s supporters. Nobody, not even his claque of applauders, quite believes that Modi is patient with dissent or dissenters.
The BJP leadership’s authoritarian onslaught should be worrying its allies too. If the party deals with internal dissent in this fashion, how will it manage the coalition it will inevitably need to run? The fact that a buccaneer of the Hindu right, Pramod Muthalik, whose Sri Ram Sene wreaked havoc on young women and on the minorities in Karnataka, could be inducted into the BJP on the eve of the Lok Sabha polls says something for the dominant environment in the party.
But these vicious developments obviously don’t dispirit Advani who is consumed by a fire that refuses to die out. He keeps dreaming, nursing his old ambition. Now his only hope is that a less-than-expected tally for the BJP after the election could leave the party hunting for the numbers needed to tilt the scales when he would appear better placed to serve as a rallying point than Modi. Will the veteran’s political sixth-sense help him this time?
