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The Rediff Profile/ L K Advani

Mr Powerful

He controls the BJP. He runs the government. L K Advani is the most powerful man in India today

Though it was end-February, the winter of 1998 had been severe and chilly winds were still sweeping Delhi. The nation had already sealed its fate in the ballot-boxes. Despite opinion polls that placed the Bharatiya Janata Party some distance from power, its senior leaders assembled one evening at the residence of one of its members in Lutyen's Delhi.

Government formation was the agenda at this informal baithak. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was to be prime minister. There was no debate on that. But there was another suggestion. "Why not make Lalji deputy prime minister?" The reference was to Lal Kishinchand Advani, the 'man with a longish face, with a scar on his calf muscle.'

But the 'one with the longish face' rejected the idea firmly when, through the oral tradition of the Sangh, the suggestion reached him. Why? Explains a friend in whom Advani confided: "He believed that he would be seen as the most important man in the government after the prime minister, anyway. So why state the obvious?"

Obvious. That is the description that L K Advani has been stuck with for a long time. K R Malkani, BJP Rajya Sabha member who was also Advani's boss in the party organ Organiser in the 1960s, reminisces that when he first saw "Lal, I was struck by his obvious astuteness and clarity of thought." In 1942, when Malkani met his younger colleague for the first time in Hyderabad in Sindh, Advani "did not even have facial hair". That, however, did not prevent him from religiously attending the RSS shakha every day and listening to sermons of his first ideological mentor Rajpal Puri, the RSS prant pracharak of pre-Partition Sindh.

Confidence and self-belief have been Advani's credo from the time he began attending shakhas. A few weeks after the Narasimha Rao government proved its majority in Parliament in 1991, Advani declared in Parliament: "From now onwards, we are the government in waiting." Throughout the 1990s, while sceptics within the party and critics outside it kept repeating ad nauseum that the "BJP had peaked too early", Advani always had a caustic one-liner: "Why juggle with possibilities? Let the situation unfold."

Says Jagdish Shettigar, a part of the original post-liberalisation economic liberalisation: "Advani is important because his opinion is not an independent one. Instead, it reflects the mood of the entire cadre."

In Gandhinagar, where the BJP supremo handed over the reins of the party to Shashikant 'Kushabhau' Thakre some months ago, the spotlight was on him rather than on Thakre. Says a party source, "It was natural. Advani was the one who handled the turbulent pre-adolescence years of the BJP between 1986 and 1991 and again resumed charge during the party's march to manhood. Now he has handed over a fully matured party of 18 (the BJP was formed in 1980) to the next generation."

Ironically the "next generation" is presided over by the ageing Thakre who is actually senior to Advani in the party hierarchy. But this does not come as a surprise, given the fast track that Advani has always been on since 1957 when Deen Dayal Upadhyay "plucked him" from the Rajasthan unit of the Jana Sangh and appointed him as secretary of the parliamentary party in Delhi.

Since then, overtaking others within the party has been a recurring phenomenon. Consider this: in 1953 when the Rajasthan unit of Jana Sangh was set up, Advani was second in command to Sunder Singh Bhandari, now just a governor in Bihar. Similarly, Bhai Mahavir, who withdrew from the Jana Sangh presidential race in Advani's favour in 1973, is just another governor in MP.

What does this mean? It would be easy to paint Advani as an ambitious man who has learnt the delicate art of avoiding trading on the toes of seniors. But there is more to the man. His talents are unmatched in the Sangh Parivar and this recognition is coupled with his humility. Says Malkani, "If you ask me how history will describe Advani, I will say 'as a humble man of unwavering integrity'."

In many ways, the man is an oddity in a party whose ideological core is Hindutva. He went to a convent school -- St Patrick -- in Karachi and like other Sindhi families grew up with spiritual roots having their base in the Dargah of Sain Sachal. In fact, an uncharitable comment a critic within the party makes is that Advani's Hindutva "begins with his kurta and ends with his dhoti." Even on economic issues he is more at home with the "partial liberalisation lobby within the party and not with the swadeshi extremists," adds a BJP source.

There are other "weaknesses" of the strong man within the party which say more about his critics than about Advani himself. His critics speak uneasily about the "club culture" that he seems to promote. In a cadre-based party like the BJP, lateral political entry always causes comment.

Advani probably wants to make the BJP a professional party. But his critics assail the "long rope" that Advani has given to persons like veteran party-hopper Mohan Guruswamy and journalist Sudheendra Kulkarni. Earlier, there was strong resentment among the RSS-groomed cadre over his attempts to prop up former spokesperson Sushma Swaraj in the party.

But while dissent has been there, it has got muted progressively over the years. Today, the BJP government is packed with Advani-loyalists. To the extent that Vajpayee-loyalist rue the fact that this government is entirely L K Advani's.

Seeing himself in the Sardar Patel mould, Advani has always been a no-nonsense disciplinarian. One of his first acts after becoming Jana Sangh president was to effect the most significant disciplinary action since the party's formation in 1951: expulsion of former party president Balraj Madhok for anti-party activities.

Even in the recent past, any attempt to queer the pitch for either Advani or any of the chosen few has met with strong disapproval. It goes without saying that not being able to get on the "right side" of Advani or his men, cost Murli Manohar Joshi a second term as party president in 1993.

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay. Kind courtesy: Sunday magazine

L K Advani, continued

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