Lal Krishna Advani
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Contents |
Bharat Ratna
Congress welcomes it, adds context
February 4, 2024: The Times of India
NEW DELHI: In a laconic reaction, Congress welcomed the Centre’s decision to confer Bharat Ratna on BJP veteran LK Advani, but offered a left-handed compliment by stating that he presented the reality of PM Modi before the country as a “brilliant event manager”.
Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge said, “What has been given to Advani, its okay. We welcome it.”
AICC spokesman Jairam Ramesh said, “In 2002, Advani saved Modi.
Then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee had reminded the then CM of Gujarat of his ‘raj dharma’ and was about to remove him. But one person who saved him in Goa (at a BJP meeting) was Advani... On April 5, 2014, in Gandhinagar, Modi and Advani were going to fill the nomination papers. Advani gave a famous statement, which will be written in golden letters in our history—‘Modi is not my disciple. He is a brilliant event manager’.”
Career
A summing up
Vikas Pathak, The Indian Express
In his prime, Advani, whose political career spanned several decades, was a remarkable politician who built his party from a small political outfit to a major national player that could challenge the Congress. He metamorphosed from a BJP organisation man to a mass leader after 1980s, courting controversies and giving his party the thrust to burst onto the national scene, thus converting India into a two-party democracy.
A Partition refugee from Sindh, Advani had joined the R S S as a young man. He later joined the Jana Sangh and worked in close coordination with Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Together, the two built the party brick by brick. If Vajpayee was the flamboyant orator, Advani was the organisation man who always showed he had an eye for spotting talent.
Vajpayee and Advani in tandem toned down the far-right rhetoric of the Jana Sangh in the 1960s to weave alliances with the Opposition parties in a bid to defeat what seemed to be an invincible Congress since 1952. The first alliance with the socialists and Swatantra Party was strung together in the 1963 by-elections for four Lok Sabha seats, with the parties agreeing to field a single candidate on all four. The anti-Congress alliance won three of these seats, with Deen Dayal Upadhyaya being the only losing candidate. Socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia won his Lok Sabha election as a common Opposition candidate.
In 1967, the Jana Sangh, socialists, Swatantra and communists formed the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal (SVD) governments in many states, depriving the Congress of power for a brief while in these states. But these governments proved unstable and soon fell.
In 1971, another grand Opposition alliance was stitched up to defeat then PM Indira Gandhi – by this time Chaudhary Charan Singh had broken with the Congress and joined the Opposition alliance – but failed miserably, as Indira was riding a wave on the back of Indira’s ‘garibi hatao (remove poverty)’ slogan.
Despite the loss, Advani’s career had begun to flourish. He became a Rajya Sabha MP for the first time in 1970, turning from a backroom party man to a parliamentarian. He would go on to complete four terms in the Rajya Sabha. His mass phase, however, was still far away.
When Indira imposed the Emergency in the country in 1975, Advani was imprisoned in a Bengaluru jail. Once the Emergency was lifted and fresh elections were announced early in 1977, the Jana Sangh, socialists, Lok Dal and Congress (O), which was formed in 1969 when the Congress split, merged into the Janata Party and defeated the Congress. Advani became the Union minister for Information and Broadcasting and eased many restrictions imposed on the press during the Emergency.
Once the Janata Party split on account of its ideological contradictions, the BJP was formed on April 6, 1980, with Advani as a founder member, working under Vajpayee, who was appointed as the party president.
Vajpayee tried to move the party in a direction of moderation – talking about Gandhian socialism and the legacy of Jaya Prakash Narayan – at a time when Indira, now back in power, was quietly taking a right-of-centre turn and taking a hard line on Khalistani militancy. Her assassination in 1984 led to riots and a wave of mass sympathy for her son Rajiv Gandhi, under whose leadership the Congress again stormed to power in the 1984 Lok Sabha polls.
Vajpayee was soon replaced by Advani as BJP president.
As the PM Rajiv Gandhi had a tough time due to the Shah Bano controversy and the Bofors scandal. The BJP and the Janata Dal led by V P Singh, who had made Bofors a major issue, made seat-sharing arrangements in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections. The Congress lost the majority, though still remaining the single-largest party. V P Singh became the Prime Minister with outside support from the BJP and the Left.
The running feud between V P Singh and his deputy PM Devi Lal led to the former gaining the edge by announcing the implementation of the Mandal Commission report to provide 27% reservation in central government jobs to the Other Backward Classes (OBCs).
Advani’s rise
In 1989, the BJP under Advani took a decisive ideological line. It gave up Gandhian socialism as the motto Vajpayee had been earlier promoting, and supported the Ram Janmabhoomi movement of the R S S and VHP through the Palampur resolution of 1989, which called for the site to be handed over to Hindus either through a negotiated process or legislation. The party had openly embraced Hindutva. Advani followed this up with a Rath Yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya from September 25, 1990.
The Yatra became a roaring success, polarising society along religious lines. There were riots in many places. Advani, who was arrested by Lalu Prasad’s government when his Yatra reached Samastipur in Bihar, became an instant mass leader, overshadowing Vajpayee.
This made Advani a key Lok Sabha face for almost the next two decades. He won from Delhi and Gujarat, the latter offering him multiple victories. After winning his first Lok Sabha election in 1989, he went on to become a seven-term Lok Sabha MP.
However, with the party becoming ‘untouchable’ in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992, it required the moderate face of Vajpayee once again. Using his gift of speech to perfection, Vajpayee defended the BJP several times in Parliament.
Advani surprised many by announcing that Vajpayee would be the face of the BJP for the 1996 Lok Sabha elections. The BJP continued to rise, forming governments for 13 days, 13 months and then six years, all under Vajpayee, between 1996 and 2004, with a 1996-98 hiatus in between. Advani now became the No. 2, playing the role of Deputy PM and Union Home minister.
Advani’s decline
After Vajpayee lost power in the 2004 Lok Sabha polls and his health began to deteriorate, Advani tried to step into his shoes. In 2005, he created controversy by calling Muhammad Ali Jinnah “secular” during a visit to Pakistan. The R S S was not happy and Advani had to resign as the BJP president.
However, what Advani was trying from now on was to cultivate an image of moderation so as to be acceptable to allies for the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. But he was stumbling while trying his image makeover. In 2009, the BJP lost badly with Advani as its PM candidate, winning just 116 seats. The Congress won 206 seats, its highest tally since 1991.
Advani tried to remain at the centre stage as the BJP appointed Nitin Gadkari and then Rajnath Singh as party president. But then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi was rising, even as Advani’s stock was rapidly falling. Advani was introduced as ‘Param Shraddheya (most venerable)’ in public meetings, and he would reminisce about his long political journey, repeatedly saying ‘mujhe smaran hai (I remember)’ and clutching both his hands in his trademark style, but he was slowly but surely approaching his political sunset. He had already lost the Leader of Opposition position to his protege Sushma Swaraj. He was soon to lose the chance to be the party’s face for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, as Modi was first made the campaign committee coordinator and, soon afterwards, declared the party’s PM face for the elections.
With the Congress facing massive anti-incumbency over corruption charges, Modi stormed to power in 2014. Advani, still a Lok Sabha MP, was to soon lose his place in the BJP’s Parliamentary Board, the party’s highest decision-making body, and was accommodated in a new body called the Margdarshak Mandal. In 2019, he did not get a Lok Sabha ticket from the party. His political dusk had finally arrived.
Advani, a man who showed immense physical energy even up to a ripe old age and led a disciplined life, gradually disappeared from the public view. He stopped taking requests for appointments from journalists.
With the conferring of the Bharat Ratna on Advani, the Modi government has feted the man who changed the course of India’s political journey.
Contribution to Hindutva
February 4, 2024: The Times of India
Advani contributed to BJP's rise through a powerful ideological response to the “secularists”, who had until then dominated political discourse, by accusing them of following “pseudo-secularism” and “minorityism” — the twin coinages which dented the halo that “secularism” had enjoyed and which had been enhanced by the Emergency-era constitutional amendment that inserted the concept in the Preamble of the Constitution. Coming against the backdrop of Rajiv Gandhi govt’s capitulation to Muslim clergy over the Shah Bano case, the two expressions found adherents outside the core constituency and significantly expanded BJP's support among sections which had until then found the party too conservative for their sensibilities.
However, the realist in Advani also acknowledged the limits of BJP's newfound appeal, a recognition that led him to make way for moderate Atal Bihari Vajpayee to be projected as PM candidate in the 1996 Lok Sabha elections. The move helped BJP enlist parties for the two Vajpayee-led NDA coalitions that were to helm the Centre for six years between 1998-2004.
Bharat Ratna, the second to have been bestowed within a fortnight after the unexpected one for socialist icon Karpoori Thakur, for Advani also represents his restoration to the pedestal after the distress he caused to the party and Sangh Parivar by praising founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. “I will always consider it my privilege that I got countless opportunities to interact with him and learn from him,” wrote PM Modi.
From Gandhian Socialism to Hindutva
Feb 4, 2024: The Indian Express
From Gandhian Socialism to Hindutva
The BJP emerged in 1980 following the dissolution of the Janata Party. In its first national conference, held in Mumbai that year, party president Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s address underscored that the BJP was not simply a new incarnation of Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s Bharatiya Jana Sangh. Rather, Vajpayee claimed the legacy of Jayprakash Narayan, and declared Gandhian Socialism to be the party’s foundational ideology.
“Vajpayee’s decision to chart a middle path was most likely based on a strategic calculation intended to retain supporters of the erstwhile Janata Party that had joined the BJP,” political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot wrote (‘Refining the Moderation Thesis’, 2013).
But this position did not reap rewards in the 1984 general elections. The Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress won over 400 seats on the back of a sympathy wave after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The BJP won only two. This failure, however, was pivotal for the BJP’s eventual rise. Advani took over the party’s reins, and guided it towards a new direction.
Cashing in on the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement
In the 1980s, Hindu nationalist organisations such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) upped the ante on the Ram temple issue. While the earliest proposal to build a Ram temple in Ayodhya came up in the 19th century, the 1980s saw the movement gather momentum.
The BJP, under Vajpayee, had been somewhat sceptical about openly wading into the matter. But Advani sensed that the growing Ram temple agitation offered a unique opportunity to consolidate the Hindu vote. In 1989, the party officially took on the Ram Janmabhoomi cause in its historic Palampur Resolution. With Advani also stepping up pressure on Rajiv Gandhi over his (mis) handling of Sri Lanka and Kashmir, as well as the Bofors scandal, the BJP quickly emerged as a potent political force.
In the 1989 general elections the BJP won 85 seats. But Advani sensed that even greater inroads could be made — and needed to be made. In 1990, V P Singh decided to grant OBC reservations for government jobs, accepting the Mandal Commissions recommendations. This, Advani felt, could seriously undermine the BJP’s Hindutva. Thus, he took to the road, with the intention to create pan-Hindu pressure to construct a Ram temple on the Babri Masjid site.
The Rath Yatra
On September 25, 1990, L K Advani commenced his Rath Yatra from Somnath, Gujarat. He planned to traverse across the country on a rath (a chariot, or in Advani’s case, a modified Toyota made to look like a chariot), building momentum for the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, and ultimately arriving at Ayodhya to stake claim to the Babri Masjid site.
Thronged by thousands of ‘activists’, Advani’s procession was marked by songs and slogans, all with a singular aim to galvanise pan-Hindu support for the temple. As historian Ramachandra Guha noted, “the imagery of the yatra was religious, allusive, militant, masculine, and anti-Muslim.” (India After Gandhi, 2007).
As he travelled through the country, Advani’s Yatra left a trail of violence in its wake. Communal violence intensified especially after Advani’s arrest in Bihar, on the orders of Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav. “Hindu mobs attacked Muslim localities, and — in a manner reminiscent of the grisly Partition massacres — stopped trains to pull out and kill those who were recognizably Muslim,” Guha wrote.
Historian K N Panikkar wrote that between September 1 and November 20, when the Yatra took place, a total of 166 “communal incidents” took place, killing 564 people. (‘Religious Symbols and Political Mobilization: The Agitation for a Mandir at Ayodhya’, 1993). Uttar Pradesh, where 224 people were killed, saw the worst of the violence.
Despite this, the Rath Yatra was a raging success for Advani and the BJP. In the 1991 elections, the BJP emerged, after the Congress (244 seats), as the second largest party in the Parliament, raising its tally to 120 seats. It also formed the government in Uttar Pradesh.
“Clearly, the Ram campaign was paying political dividends. Riots were being effectively translated into votes,” Guha wrote.
The Babri demolition and after
On December 6, 1992, around 100,000 kar sevaks descended upon the Babri Masjid and razed it to the ground. Advani too was in Ayodhya that day, but was not prepared for what had happened. He would later say that the events of December 6 “bothered him”.
A wave of communal violence would once again sweep through the country, and although Advani did not condone the mosque’s demolition, his party nonetheless reaped the benefits of it. Over the course of the 1990s, the BJP strengthened its national presence on the back of its role in the Ram Janmabhoomi temple, with Atal Bihari Vajpayee taking oath as the prime minister three separate times.
Advani gave way to Vajpayee in the aftermath of the Babri demolition, to allow the party to be helmed by a more “moderate” face. He would never be able to meet his prime ministerial aspirations. Nonetheless, his role in the rise of the BJP to its current, seemingly infallible position, remains undeniable.
2019, Mar: end of parliamentary career
Akhilesh Singh, March 22, 2019: The Times of India
The BJP replaced L K Advani with party chief Amit Shah as its candidate for Gandhinagar Lok Sabha seat, formally bringing the curtains down on the career of the 91-year-old stalwart who played a crucial role in the transformation of the saffron outfit from a marginal player to a major political influence.
After initial reluctance, Advani allowed himself to be persuaded that at this age he should stay away from the rough and tumble of electoral politics. It potentially clears the way for Shah to play a big role —this time officially, in the affairs of New Delhi — if Narendra Modi gets a second term as PM in May. The move could also presage the benching of other members of the Old Guard, including another former party chief Murli Manohar Joshi.
Advani hurt himself by praising Jinnah, never fully recovered from controversy
But it is Advani’s exclusion which highlighted the list of 184 candidates. Though not unexpected, the decision marks the political boldness which has characterised the functioning of the Modi-Shah duo and which could lead to far more significant changes, both in terms of governance and intra-party equations, if Modi wins a second term.
Advani played a major role in the revival of the party after the debacle in 1984, when it won only two seats. He won six times from Gandhinagar, the first time in 1991 (Vajpayee contested and won the next one, in 1996) and the last five elections since 1998 consecutively.
The original hardliner, Advani embarked on a rath yatra a year after winning first from Gandhinagar to push for the construction of Ram Mandir at Ayodhya: a campaign which arguably changed the course of politics. He also launched a powerful intellectual assault on ‘pseudo secularism’ and the politics of ‘appeasement’, shorthand for BJP‘s charge that the reigning consensus indulged Muslim sectarianism.
He, however, hurt himself grievously praising M A Jinnah during a controversial trip to Pakistan and could not fully recover from it even though the party projected him as its PM candidate in 2009. He started fading away after losing overwhelmingly to Narendra Modi in the contest for who should be party’s PM choice in 2014. The decision to bench him does not come as a surprise as Advani, it is learnt, was receptive to the suggestion that it was time that he made room for someone younger and be an accessory for Sangh Parivar’s plan for a generational shift.
