Rooted in prejudice

L.K. Advani. Nowhere in the 986-page tome does he rise above a narcissistically self-justificatory account of the events and developments that he shaped or participated in.-V. SUDERSHAN

By writing a self-justificatory autobiography, L.K. Advani has damaged his own credibility as the future leader of the National Democratic Alliance.

WHEN practising politicians write their autobiographies, the reader has a legitimate right to expect more than a merely anecdotal or platitudinously descriptive account of discrete events. Politicians might not reveal all that is relevant from the past because it does intrude into the present and the future but it is reasonable to demand some insight into what motivated them and how they see their individual initiatives in the context of the opportunities o ffered by the larger circumstances.

It is equally valid to expect critical reflection on the evolution of the parties and movements to which they belonged, and at least a halfway honest attempt at assessing their strengths and weaknesses even if their future triumph is declared inevitable.

One has to lower ones expectations in the case of ideologically driven leaders like Lal Krishna Advani, known for his hardline approaches, his admiration for Sardar Patel as a role model, his doctrinaire adherence to the Hindutva project, and his self-perception as a man of destiny who cannot confess to his weaknesses because his best is yet to come as Atal Bihari Vajpayee says in his Foreword to Advanis My Country, My Life (Rupa, Delhi).

Even so, Advani disappoints. Nowhere in this 986-page tome does he rise above a narcissistically self-justificatory account of the events and developments which he shaped or participated in. The narration is linear: there is continuity, and no change as the man and his project inexorably move towards self-realisation, much like the Hegelian Spirit. There is no standing apart from events, no attempt to analyse the social forces behind the political trends at work, no pause for serious contemplation, no room for self-doubt.

Not that Advani played a passive role in some of the most momentous and fateful developments in independent Indias history the Emergency, the consolidation of a conservative right-wing Hindu nationalist party in 1980, the Ram Janmabhoomi mobilisation leading to the cataclysmically violent events of 1992-93, the Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJP) ascent to national power in 1998, Indias crossing of the Nuclear Rubicon, the burial of Indias policy of non-alignment and its strategic embrace of the United States, and Indias worst episode of communal violence with state collusion in Gujarat.

If anything, Advani, more than anyone else in the Sangh Parivar, can take credit for igniting a huge social mobilisation around an identity-based issue entirely of Hindutvas invention, namely, avenging the ocular insult represented by the Babri mosque by razing it to rebuild a Ram temple, for whose prior existence at Ayodhya there is no proof.

Had it not been for the Ayodhya campaign, the BJP could not have mobilised the plebeian Other Backward Classes (OBCs) to add to its narrow upper-caste core-support, won 86 Lok Sabha seats in place of two, and moved to the political centre stage. Similarly, earlier, in the absence of the Emergency, and the Jan Sanghs insertion into the anti-Emergency movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan, it would not have gained the legitimacy that was so essential for its inclusion into the Janata Party the key to its rapid advance in later years.

Yet, one searches in vain in the book for an analysis of what made this possible including the historic decline of the Congress and the Nehruvian consensus, social churning, rise of identity politics, a burgeoning new middle class, and the spread of atavistic nationalism, which Hindutva shrewdly exploited. Why, there is not even a personal account of how Jayaprakash Narayan, with his extraordinary naivete and woolly Total Revolution idea, allowed the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh -Jan Sangh to penetrate his anti-Congress movement.

Nor does Advani narrate what roles he and Vajpayee played in the post-Emergency government, which was disproportionate to their factions strength and allowed it to capture crucial positions in what became its Long March through the institutions of the state.

The book is equally opaque on the strategies used by the BJP to stitch together the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) for instance, the compromises made to secure the Telugu Desam Partys support and its hard-sell of the nuclear component of its National Agenda for Governance, which it interpreted as mandating the May 1998 tests. These were significant tactical achievements, but Advani does not tell us how they were accomplished.

Advani is disingenuous in describing the rationale of the NDAs (or rather, the RSS-BJPs) decision to cross the nuclear threshold. Not only does he not explain why the promised strategic defence review prior to a decision to test was never undertaken.

He presents the decision as a straightforward corollary of the Jan Sanghs 1964 resolution calling for a nuclear weapons programme, thus totally erasing the specific conjuncture and circumstances in Indias security environment, which might warrant Pokhran-II assuming that Indias nuclearisation can be justified in the first place.

Advani eludes any reference to his infamously provocative statement of May 18 taunting and chiding Pakistan to conduct tit-for-tat tests by reminding it that the geostrategic situation had changed after Pokhran-II and that its policy of promoting cross-border terrorism in Kashmir would no longer be viable.

Advanis entire discourse on national security consists of banalities, beneath which lie social and economic illiteracy and a crude Pakistan obsession. The central (if unsupported) assertion is that the Kashmir militancy was always solely a creation of Pakistan, without any indigenous roots related to popular discontent and Indias repressive policies. Terrorism must be, and can only be, put down with force. There is no need for inclusive policies, for redressing the grievances that feed discontent, for healing. Advani foams at the mouth at the threats from Pakistan. But he fails to see the limitations, indeed the bankruptcy, of the NDAs approach of 1998-2002, of relying primarily upon the U.S. and its Western allies to mount pressure on Pakistan to meet them.

He shows no political comprehension of why Indias 10-month-long mobilisation of seven lakh Indian troops at the border after the December 2001 Parliament attack failed to deliver results.

Yet, within months of that mobilisation, Advani eagerly jumps on to the peace-with-Pakistan bandwagon. Despite skipping several steps in logic, he cannot explain how or why the material conditions for peace have suddenly ripened. Why did Vajpayee extend in April 2003 the hand of peace to Pakistan, barely a week after he ruled out such an overture while cross-border terrorism continues?

Although this indicates external pressure or change of strategy, Advani suppresses any mention of the proposed triadic alliance against terrorism, comprising the U.S., India and Israel, which National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra zealously advocated while speaking to the American Jewish Committee in May that year.

On sending troops to Iraq to stabilise its occupation, a proposal India very nearly conceded subject to clarifications about command structures during Advanis visit to the U.S. in June 2003, his claims are dubious. He says: Right from the beginning of the invasion, Atalji and I were firmly of the view that sending Indian troops was out of the question. The invasion was not justified. Nor was it in Indias national interests to support it.

However, reports from Washington contradict him. According to a June 8 statement by the Indian Embassy, when U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld raised the troops-for-Iraq question, Advani told him that the matter was under consideration of the government of India. Advani was quoted by the Aaj Tak channel on June 11 that those opposed to sending Indian troops were uninformed and gave their one-sided opinion. Western media, too, reported similarly.

Advani sheds no new light on his 2005 visit to Pakistan and his controversial remarks on Mohammad Ali Jinnah, which earned him opprobrium from the Parivar and ridicule from the secular parties and cost him his job as BJP president. He merely repeats what he said earlier about Jinnahs secularism and his August 11, 1947 address, which Advani interprets as defence of equality of all citizens in the eyes of the state and freedom of faith.

As argued earlier (Frontline, July 1, 2005), Advani is plain wrong about Jinnah. Even on a charitable view, a strange premise underlies his understanding of Jinnahs statement: it is perfectly legitimate to use anti-secular or communal appeals to come to power, and then proceed to build a nominally non-denominational state. This, of course, is fully in keeping with the BJPs strategy of using religious identities and violence as tools of political mobilisation to come to power. But only a perverse mind will call this approach secular.

Advani is silent on the sources of pressure for his resignation after these remarks, which came from his own proteges, some of whom (for instance, Arun Jaitley) now say they are fully satisfied with his explanation.

The crowning irony comes on page 829: One day, in the middle of 2005, I was told I should step down from the presidentship of the BJP by the year-end....

This he calls profoundly agonising, but refuses to say just who told him. This is of a piece with his thundering silence on the role of the RSS vis-a-vis the BJP and its interference in government, including its veto against Jaswant Singhs appointment as Finance Minister.

Advanis account of the Kandahar episode will go down as a classic case of prevarication and a compulsive desire to pretend that the BJP, with its worship of the Sardar Patel cult, would never compromise with terrorists when in reality it cut a deal with them exchanging hostages.

Nothing is more laughable than Advanis claim that he was unaware that Jaswant Singh was authorised by the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) to go to Kandahar and conduct the exchange.

Besides inaccuracies (for instance, the identity of the then U.S. Ambassador, and George Fernandes rebuttal, confirming Advanis presence at the CCS), this account poses a serious credibility problem. If the Union Home Minister was indeed unaware of Jaswant Singhs brief, he cut a very sorry figure. If the exchange was a collective decision, that speaks poorly of the BJPs claimed firmness in fighting terrorism. Either way, Advani, the pretender to Sardar Patels mantle, comes out with his political USP completely mauled. The BJPs allies are unlikely to come to its rescue on this. Worse, Advani has shot himself in the foot. If his intention was to use the book as a launching pad for the next election and put the Congress in a spot, he has succeeded in doing the opposite: showing up the BJP/NDAs weakness on an issue on which it boasted it was uniquely strong.

Even more damaging is the grotesque portrait that emerges of Advanis secularism. He is simply unable to rise above a narrow, divisive and religion-based notion of identity, or accept the freedom of religion, including freedom to propagate religion.

While he condemns Graham Staines killing and says some of my best personal friends are indeed Christians, he just cannot help contradicting himself: Conversion is a threat both to Hindu society and national integration and Hindu organisations cannot be blamed for protesting [a la Dara Singh?] against this gross abuse of the freedom of faith.

The most obnoxious part of the book pertains to the 2002 violence in Gujarat. Advani only admits minor administrative lapses and a few police excesses but firmly rejects the now well-established truth that the post-Godhra violence was premeditated and sponsored by the state.

He justifies his rejection of the demand for Narendra Modis resignation despite the mass killings and complete collapse of constitutional governance in Gujarat. Worse, he celebrates Narendra Modi as the most viciously, consistently persistently maligned leader, both nationally and internationally of the past 60 years and says my confidence in him has been fully vindicated.

The political meaning of this should be clear: Advani has already named Narendra Modi as his successor and thereby announced the BJPs further degeneration into hardline Hindutva.