New Delhi: Having buried him in the shadows of the party’s retirement bench, redundantly named as the “margdarshak mandal”, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has now decided to resurrect the senior BJP leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani by conferring him with the country’s highest honour, the Bharat Ratna.
Advani, the man who as party president in 1989 first incorporated the construction of a Ram Mandir at Ayodhya as one of the party’s agendas in its Palampur National Executive resolution, was recently both “invited and disinvited” at the temple’s grand consecration ceremony on January 22, 2024.
There could not have been a more suitable time for the Hindutva ideologue to receive the Bharat Ratna in a (new) India that embodies widespread feelings of uncertainty, fear and insecurity, the very foundation of which was laid by none other than Advani.
Fated to watch the fulfillment of his single-most significant political goal, the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya, on television screens, Advani at 96 can now recall his unparalleled role in driving the country towards sharp religious polarisation as his contributions have finally been acknowledged by his greatest mentee and successor, Narendra Modi.
Over the last few decades, the country’s highest honour has been reduced to an instrument for political messaging. While scientists, musicians, sportspersons and social reformers have received the honour from time to time, political dispensations at the Centre have mostly chosen to confer the award to ideologues of their parties.
But none may be as polarising as Advani, for he is regarded as a divisive political figure in his own country.
He is among those founders of the BJP who gave a clear and sharp ideological line to the saffron party from his days in the Jana Sangh, even when his party had mostly depended on stitching up anti-Congress alliances.
He perhaps played the biggest organisational role in transforming the saffron party into a mass organisation, even as it came at the cost of the country’s communal harmony.
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From adopting the Ram Mandir resolution in Palampur to piloting the majoritarian narrative in the country through his countrywide rath yatra, Advani built the party brick-by-brick along with former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, only to be sidelined by his ideological mentors in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in the end.
He is still the BJP’s longest-serving party president, having been at the helm of party machinery between 1986-91 for the first time, then between 1993-98 and finally a year-long stint in 2004-05. He was forced by the RSS to resign from the position after he courted controversy over describing Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a “secular” leader, doing a 180-degree deviation from the Sangh parivar’s and his own position.
The RSS, which had forced Vajpayee to appoint Advani as the deputy prime minister, repositioned its view on the senior leader.
Says senior journalist Neena Vyas, who has covered the BJP for over 30 years: “Advani’s resignation in 2005 was the beginning of the end of his political career. Although he was shunted out only in 2013, the BJP having lost the 2009 Lok Sabha polls with him as the PM candidate, he had lost face in the Sangh (parivar) ranks.”
Incidentally, Modi, who he trained and defended all his life, ended up as the one to push him into the “margdarshak mandal”. One may say that he reaped what he sowed.
In the 2004 Ranchi party conclave, Advani described the BJP as the “Chosen Instrument of the Divine” to rule India, in an immediate attempt to adopt hardline Hindutva at a time when the party was caught up in the dynamics of coalition politics, but in the long term conceiving the Indian state in a way that a country like Israel defines itself.
Advani’s statement as party president was perceived as undermining Vajpayee, who was seen as a moderate.
By then, Advani had earned himself the reputation of being an arch-rival of Vajpayee, the prime minister, in the party.
“Advani undermined Vajpayee multiple times. I can remember how he and his cohort stumped Vajpayee by scuttling the 2001 Agra peace summit called by him, recalls Vyas.
“Despite the Lahore Bus Yatra, Pakistan started the Kargil War. Yet, Vajpayee wanted to give India-Pakistan friendship a chance by inviting Pervez Musharraf to Agra for talks. A joint statement was practically ready but was undone by Advani and Sushma Swaraj at the end, leading to the failure of the talks,” she continued.
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In the run-up to the talks, Advani attempted to belittle Vajpayee by declaring a policy of the “hot pursuit” of terrorists across the Line of Control. Similarly, Advani made many attempts to drive out Brajesh Mishra, Vajpayee’s principal secretary in the PMO and the then-national security advisor, but failed.
The 2009 Lok Sabha election was his last chance to fulfill his ambition of becoming prime minister, but by then he had cultivated more enemies in the party than friends, with even his allies like Yashwant Sinha and Sushma Swaraj protesting against his description of Jinnah during his Pakistan visit.
In his desire to undercut Vajpayee, Advani almost staged a coup in the famous Goa National Executive meeting in April 2002.
Fresh off the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim riots, Vajpayee had almost decided to ask the then-Gujarat chief minister Modi to resign.
However, Vyas says that Advani got wind of it and sent Arun Jaitley to Gandhinagar to stymie the decision.
“Jaitley came with Modi in a place, and before Vajpayee could propose the idea of Modi’s resignation in the National Executive, Modi himself offered to resign. As planned, some executive members led by Advani vigorously resisted Modi’s proposal. Vajpayee sensed the mood and ended up supporting Modi,” Vyas says.
Advani was a darling of the BJP for a long time, but was eventually pushed into the shadows by none other than Modi after he came to power in 2014, in what can aptly be described as some sort of divine justice.
By 2010, Advani had reached the twilight of his political career. He had faced the 2009 loss, following which in an interview to the Indian Express, he came across as a subdued leader when he disowned even the Ram Janmabhoomi rath yatra.
He had written his biography by that time, in which he decried the demolition of Babri Masjid in what many believed was a shrewd way to bypass legal proceedings against him.
“Had I known how it would end, I’d have never gone to Ayodhya, but I’d still have gone to Pakistan,” he said in the interview.
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“That yatra may have impressed some, won me supporters and made my opponents angrier. But I recall that as a time of major education for me,” Advani added, while claiming that his family’s religious tradition “used to be Sikh rituals”, the holy book at his home being the Guru Granth Sahib.
The remarks on Jinnah had already offended a large section of his friends in the party, which perceived the comments as his desperation to be seen not as a divisive leader but a leader of all.
Senior journalist Kuldeep Kumar says that when Advani called Jinnah a “secular leader”, it wasn’t surprising.
“I find Jinnah and Advani close to each other. Jinnah proposed the two-nation theory along religious lines. He wanted a Muslim nation, while Advani and the Sangh parivar wanted a Hindu rashtra. Both draw inspiration from a similar set of beliefs and frame nations only along religious lines.”
Nonetheless, journalists who have closely interacted with Advani agree that he was an extremely polite and warm person, and never dodged questions.
“Advani would answer and entertain even his critics, which is so different from the leaders in the BJP now,” says Vyas.
“No one in the BJP articulated the BJP’s ideological line as clearly as Advani. He was never bitter in his talk, and maintained a healthy, professional relationship with journalists. He never refused to answer tough questions,” says Kumar.
However, he adds that Advani’s legacy will be remembered for the direction he gave to India through his polarising rath yatra.
“Advani played the most prominent role in normalising the divisions that you see in India today in all its crudeness,” Kumar says.
The Bharat Ratna to Advani has come at a time when India is gearing up for the Lok Sabha elections, with Modi as the larger-than-life figure at its centre.
Even in conferring the highest honour to his mentor whom he ruthlessly sidelined, Modi has drawn attention to himself once again. He has at once placated those in the Hindutva camp who were peeved at Advani’s absence in the Ram Mandir’s consecration ceremony that was anyway meant to be Modi’s solo show.
He has also conveyed to people that he is, after all, a judicious man who has resurrected Advani.
The prime minister has placed all his cards on the table. With a Bharat Ratna to Advani and to socialist icon Karpoori Thakur, he has declared the Ram Janmabhoomi-driven Hindutva as well as OBC politics as the BJP’s principal play in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
However, even a Bharat Ratna can’t help the 96-year-old Advani dodge becoming a mere pawn on Modi’s political chessboard.
