UNDER the influence of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s massive spin-machine, the Indian media is building up LK Advani as a leader whose swearing-in as prime minister is only waiting for the general election. Advani is being presented as an erudite man, with sharp analytical faculties and respect for ideas, and a gentle personality.
This resembles the past lionising of PV Narasimha Rao as a Chanakya (master-tactician), or of Atal Behari Vajpayee as a “soft” liberal.
Those who have followed Advani’s career will find it hard to believe such hype. His autobiography My Country, My Life should confirm their worst assessments. Reading it doesn’t validate the Vajpayee Foreword’s conclusion, that it’s authored by an “outstanding leader whose best... is yet to come”.
Advani emerges as someone whose time has already passed. His ideas and politics have no relevance for most Indians who want an open and just society free of discrimination on grounds of birth or religion, who long to be emancipated from deprivation, and who are yet to enjoy real, substantive democracy.
Advani’s 986-page book is a descriptive account with numerous anecdotes, some interesting, but most without insights. One doesn’t expect full, candid disclosures about the past from practising politicians. But one can hope for some analysis, honest reflection, new information, or self-doubt.
Advani disappoints. He doesn’t take critical distance from events. The book is compulsively self-justificatory. It also reveals some obsessions: “Hindu India’s” centuries-long victimhood, prejudice against efforts (eg Gandhiji’s) to forge a citizen-based identity independent of religion, blind faith in ultra-nationalism and India’s emergence as a Great Power. Even in the book’s best part, pertaining to the Emergency, Advani doesn’t rise above petty, person-centric polemics. He shows no understanding of the deeper causes of the structural crisis of governance of that period.
He condemns Indira Gandhi for saying that “the nation is more important than democracy”, and for invoking “the foreign hand” to violate civil liberties. He accuses her of having “explored the possibility of installing a presidential system of government”.
But Advani’s own party is distinguished for placing the nation before democracy. As home minister, he himself attributed the Kashmir unrest to Pakistan. And it’s the BJP-led NDA which established the Commission to Review the constitution — expressly, but unsuccessfully, to promote presidential government.
Advani closely observed or played a role in some momentous events — the Emergency, the Ram Janmabhoomi mobilisation, the 1998 nuclear tests, and India’s worst state-sponsored violence, in Gujarat. But there’s no self-critical reflection here. Totally missing is the larger social-political context of these events — including the Congress’s historic decline, rise of identity politics, and neoliberal economic policies.
The book doesn’t once mention the RSS’s interference in governance, which became starkly visible when it vetoed Jaswant Singh’s appointment as finance minister.
Advani also hides the rationale of the 1998 nuclear blasts. He presents the decision as a straightforward corollary of the Jana Sangh’s 1964 pro-bomb resolution.
Advani’s entire discourse on national security is banal, and his understanding of terrorism driven by a Pakistan obsession — as if the Kashmir militancy never had indigenous roots. Terrorism must be, can only be, smashed with force. There’s no need for addressing its root-causes. This thinking befits a small-town thanedar, not India’s home minister.
Advani always advocated a matching answer to Pakistan’s “threats”. But he doesn’t explain why India’s 10 month-long post-December 2001 mobilisation of seven lakh troops was no answer. Nor does he explain why Vajpayee extended “the hand of peace” to Pakistan in April 2003, a week after ruling this out.
The book contains outright lies too. During Advani’s June 2003 US visit, India all but agreed — subject to “clarifications” — to send troops to Iraq. But he now says, sending troops was “out of the question… right from the beginning…”
However, it was officially reported that India agreed in principle to send troops. A June 8 statement by the Indian embassy in Washington quotes Advani as saying “the matter [is] under consideration ...” He also told Aaj Tak that those opposed to sending troops were “uninformed”, with a “one-sided opinion”.
Advani doesn’t disclose who pressed for his resignation after his remarks on Jinnah’s “secularism” during his 2005 Pakistan visit, but they included his protégés (eg Arun Jaitley).
He sadly recalls: “One day...
I was told I should step down from the presidentship of the BJP...” He doesn’t gather the courage to say it was the RSS which told him!
Advani's account of the Kandahar hijack episode is a white lie. He repeatedly claims the BJP wouldn’t compromise with “terrorists” — when it exchanged hostages with them. He says he was unaware that Jaswant Singh was asked by the Cabinet Committee on Security to go to Kandahar. This is contradicted by every available account, including George Fernandes’.
This gravely damages Advani's USP as Loh Purush (Iron Man). If he was unaware of Singh’s brief, he was unfit to be home minister. If he was party to the CCS decision, that demolishes his claimed resolve to fight terrorism. Either way, Advani loses.
Advani's grotesque “secularism” never rises above religion-based “us” and “them” categories. He condemns Staines’ killing, and repeats the cliche, “some of my best friends are Christians”, but reverts to crass Hindutva: conversion is “a threat both to Hindu society and national integration”.
The most nauseating part of the book concerns Gujarat. Advani rejects the settled truth that the post-Godhra violence was state-sponsored. As proof, he narrates two instances in which, with Narendra Modi’s help, he prevented Muslims from being killed. But for every such example, there are probably 10 instances of unprevented murder, including the dismembering-alive of former MP Ehsan Jafri. Advani lionises Modi as “the most viciously, consistently and persistently maligned leader, both nationally and internationally”. Modi logically emerges as Advani’s successor — a shameful comment on the BJP.
Advani wanted to use the book as an election launching-pad and embarrass the Congress. Why, he even gifted Sonia Gandhi a copy on Holi day — to score a PR point. All he successfully does is expose his own pettiness.
Praful Bidwai, a fellow of the Transnational Institute, is a senior Indian journalist, political activist and widely published commentator. He is a co-author (with Achin Vanaik) of New Nukes: India, Pakistan and Global Nuclear Disarmament
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