Advani and the rise of Modi

LK Advani, who finds himself discarded by the party he built, knows a thing or two about Gujarat and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). A refugee from Sindh, his constituency is Gandhinagar, Gujarat’s capital, whose voters sent him to the Lok Sabha much before they gave power to the BJP.

Advani knows the Gujarati voter and how the BJP was built in Gujarat — not through the genius of its current chief minister, Narendra Modi. The BJP took Gujarat over decades, starting with the BJP’s earlier avatar, the Jana Sangh, which got less than two per cent of the vote when it began contesting on the Hindutva platform in the 1960s.

The party built its constituency in the state with immense patience and by adding on a few percentage points in the popular vote through the 1970s and the 1980s. It was Advani’s Ayodhya gambit that finally won Gujarat over to the BJP. Gujaratis responded to the communalism of Advani’s message as no other state did and the Congress has not won an election in that state, or come close to winning it, after the Babri Masjid was pulled down.

The last time the Congress won a majority in Gujarat was, in fact, in 1985. So, it will be difficult to convince Advani that Modi is the magic ingredient for his party in that state. Advani also knows a thing or two about charisma built through a divisive and communal appeal. It was his own stock in trade till he decided, a few years ago, to moderate his image.

This knowledge is what got Advani upset at the coronation of Modi as the leader of the BJP for the 2014 general elections. Advani doesn’t buy the idea that Modi is indispensable and he might argue against the idea that Modi is even important. He was seething over the fact that people were seeing merit where, in his opinion, it did not exist or existed because of men other than Modi.

But he must pay for his own mistakes. It was, of course, Advani who saved Modi from being sacked when Atal Bihari Vajpayee wanted him to step down for his awful managing of the riots of 2002. And through all the years that Modi built his image at the cost of others in the BJP, Advani was silent. Modi finessed out first the old guard of his party in Gujarat. Men who built the BJP, like former chief minister Keshubhai Patel and undefeated six-term Surat MP Kashiram Rana, were forced to quit the party. Not because they had suddenly become secular but because Modi was threatened by them. They went to Advani, but he had no time for them. Modi then took over most of the powers of the cabinet, at one point holding the ministries of finance, home, industries, energy, mines and minerals, ports, Narmada and a few others. No other minister was even vaguely important. Advani did nothing to curb Modi’s power then, either. Modi took on, and defeated, even the RSS, by pushing away the man it had stationed in Gujarat to keep a watch on the party. This man, Sanjay Joshi, was humiliated after a sex scandal and remains on the margins. Advani did nothing.

And so, when Modi came after Advani’s job, having created his image through demagoguery in exactly the same way Advani did, there was nobody to save poor Advani.

In my opinion, it serves him right. No good comes out of divisive politics in the subcontinent. Advani took pride in building an ideological party but the problem with ideology is that a purer version of it always threatens the establishment. That is what has happened. Modi’s fresh Hindutva is more appealing for those who like that sort of thing than Advani’s faded version.

But how effective has been Advani’s short-lived mutiny? I think it will be more effective than it is thought to be. Even though Advani withdrew his resignation a day after he sent it in, the act will live on. It has already been given life by the uneasiness with Modi expressed by the BJP’s most important ally, the Janata Dal in Bihar. And every time Modi will now come out in public, he will face the question: but what about Mr Advani’s concerns?

The old man’s revenge isn’t over in that sense.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 16^th, 2013.

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