Real persona of L.K. Advani

It emerges all too clearly in the BJP leaders book though in a manner and form he least suspected.

There may be such a thing as wanting to be President too badly.

Adlai Stevenson on Estes Kefauver, Time, April 6, 1956.

"In India a party based on ideology can at the worst come to power in a small area. It cannot win the confidence of the entire country neither the Communist party nor the Jan Sangh in its original form . I have already said that the Jan Sangh was initially built as a party based on ideology but slowly it departed from that course. The appeal increased to the extent the ideology got diluted. Wherever the ideology was strong, its appeal was diminished, L.K. Advani said in an interview to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh organ Panchjanya (Deepavali, 1980; emphasis added, throughout).

This has been the Bharatiya Janata Partys central problem ever since it was set up in 1980. Advani now admits in his book (page 38) that the Bharatiya Jana Sangh later became the Bharatiya Janata Party. Why, then, did it change its name at all? Instead, it claimed to be the true heir of the Janata Party founded by Jayaprakash Narayan in 1977 and adopted Gandhian socialism as part of its credo.

The Jan Sangh members of the Janata Party supported Morarji Desais formula, to prevent a split, in its national executive on April 4, 1980. It said: Every member of the Janata Party shall unconditionally accept and strive to preserve the composite culture and secular state established in our country and nation not based on religion. He shall not allow his membership of any other organisation to derogate from this obligation. It was defeated by 17 votes to 14, in favour of the executives restrictive formulation on dual membership. A mere two votes split the party. Two members who voted against the formula left the Janata Party. Dinesh Singh rejoined the Congress; Viren Shah joined the BJP. He was Governor of West Bengal.

Later, Advani denounced the concept of Indias composite culture and opted for Hindutva. Why did he, A.B. Vajpayee and other Jan Sanghis endorse Morarjis formula at all? It was drafted by the socialist Ashok Mehta, who, the book reveals, was keen to join the BJP (page 313).

There was a reason for the Jan Sanghs subterfuge. I saw an opportunity in the JP movement (1974) to significantly expand the Jan Sanghs mass appeal and support base across the country (page 189).

The BJP faces a dilemma dilute ideology or abandon dreams of power. It resolves it by resorting to deception. A steady decline in its fortunes created an identity crisis. Why not openly claim the Jan Sanghs baggage? The year 1986 presented an opportunity. On January 31, District Judge K.M. Pandey ordered the locks on the gates of the Babri Masjid complex to be opened. On February 25, the Muslim Womens Bill was moved in Parliament to override the Supreme Courts ruling in the Shah Bano case. On May 9, Advani replaced Vajpayee as the BJPs president. His Rath Yatra (1990) yielded immediate dividends for the party (page 802). But the crown eluded him twice. Belatedly, on November 11, 1995, in Mumbai, he offered it to Vajpayee who had a wider appeal. In May 2004, the voters smashed his hopes. The now or never situation made him desperate. Should he revert to Hindutva or project moderation? He tried both. Elected president on October 27, 2004, he revived Hindutva and the Ram temple issue. In 2005, he went to Pakistan and fell into a mess of his own making the Jinnah episode which obliged him to quit the office.

One day, in the middle of 2005, I was told that I should step down from the presidentship of the BJP by the year-end after the conclusion of the partys ongoing silver jubilee commemoration (page 829). Told by whom? He does not tell us. He was in Pakistan from May 30 to June 5. Evidently, the marching orders were given soon after the return, in the middle of 2005.

Advani owes it to the nation to reveal who it was who could order a president elected in October 2004 to quit in this summary manner. The party itself did not pass a vote of no-confidence.

His speech to the national executive in Chennai on September 18, 2005, suggests it was the RSS leadership; for, that was the first time he criticised it (page 942). Such lack of candour is typical. Advani is conscious of the image problem, but is hopelessly confused. He said on April 2, 2005, I continue to be what I am and I have always been. I would like the Partys image to change. On May 31, 2005, he assured Pakistanis I have been one of whose image and real persona are not very identical.

That real persona emerges all too clearly in his book though in a manner and form he least suspected. He knew, as every one does, precisely what his image was. Hence the BJP Minority Morcha president Shahnawaz Hussains appeal on April 1, 2007, to Muslims to ignore whatever happened in the past misgivings should be forgotten and a new chapter should begin.

Advani does nothing to remove the misgivings. Besides, they are not confined to Muslims. The dilemma which has confronted the BJP is not a Muslim creation. It arises from the nations rejection of the BJPs divisive and poisonous credo. The Hindu, in particular, is self-assured enough to treat with scorn the Sangh Parivar and Advanis invitation to acquire an inferiority complex and develop a siege mentality.

The book is a calculated effort in pursuit of Advanis desperate ambition to acquire an image which can facilitate his rise to power. It cannot help him for three reasons. His baggage of old is heavy; he does not discard it; and his techniques in debate only inspire distrust. A pronounced communal bias permeates the book. Advani nails his colours to the mast at the very outset in his Prologue: In 1942, when I had just turned fourteen, I joined the RSS, a nationalist organisation dedicated to uniting Hindu Society, across the dividing lines of caste, language and region, and bringing about Indias national renaissance on the basis of her cultural and civilisational heritage (page xxvi).

This is not the language of an Indian nationalist but of a Hindu nationalist whose concerns are confined to Hindu society. Nothing has changed. He yearns for a new image and there are some in the media ready and willing to help him acquire it. This, however, is the very same Advani who told the BBCs staff it would not be wrong to call it [the BJP] a Hindu Party (Organiser, August 5, 1980). On October 2, 1990, he complained that the secular policy is putting unreasonable restrictions on Hindu aspirations.

On November 19, 1990, he declared at Ayodhya, Henceforth only those who fight for Hindu interests would rule India. The aspiration remains; but reality injects calculation change the image to acquire a national appeal while retaining the communal agenda. Now that the author has had his fill of publicity before obliging TV channels, it is time that a serious appraisal of the book is made.

Advani has a Muslim phobia and it is expressed in strange ways. M.C. Chagla was always mentioned thus. Advani persists in calling him Mohammedali Currim Chagla. On the fiftieth anniversary of our Independence, he does not write about the nation but pens a diatribe against Muslims for the BJPs organ (BJP Today, June 16, 1997). They have a special obligation to recall the tragedy of Partition, purge from their minds the two-nation theory, bury vote bank politics, understand that Hindutva or cultural nationalism is not a communal concept, accept Ram, Krishna and others as symbols of national culture and support the Ram temple because Ram is a symbol of Indias culture and civilisation.

Revealingly, he was surprised that there was no Hindu-Muslim tension anywhere in India during the Kargil war (1999) and thinks that the mood of national unity was unprecedented. No such tension was felt during the Kashmir war (1947), Hyderabad police action (1948), or the 1965 and 1971 wars, either.

Censures of Jinnah for the two-nation theory (1939) and advocacy of Pakistan are well deserved. But they are characteristically selective. As far back as on October 21, 1909, Lajpat Rai said, The Hindus are a nation in themselves because they represent a type of civilisation all their own. (The Collected Works of Lala Lajpat Rai; Volume 4, page 159). In an article in The Tribune of December 14, 1924, he advocated partition of India on communal lines. Muslims to have the North West Frontier Province, Western Punjab, Sindh and Eastern Bengal in a clear partition of India into a Muslim India and a non-Muslim India.

V.D. Savarkar is the ideologue of Hindutva and Advanis hero on whom he lavishes praise in the book. His thesis was subjected to cool, rigorous analysis by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar whom also Advani admires in his work Pakistan or Partition of India (1946, pages 120-131). One understands better what Advani & Co. mean by cultural nationalism when one analyses Savarkars thesis.

In 1937, Jinnah converted the Muslim League into a mass organisation with independence as its goal. It was widely expected that after the elections Congress-League coalition would be set up in the Provinces. That did not happen. However, in 1937, at the Ahmedabad session of the Hindu Mahasabha, Savarkar said, There are two nations in the main, the Hindus and the Muslims in India. At its Calcutta session in 1939 he said we Hindus are marked out as an abiding nation by ourselves. He rejected the concept of a Territorial Nationality, that is, all born in India are Indians. The test is cultural nationalism. The concepts two-nation theory and cultural nationalism were first enunciated in 1923 in his essay Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? Ambedkar noted that the term Hindu was defined to exclude Muslims, Christians, Jews and Parsis and to include Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains (page130).

Jinnah asked for partition on the basis of his theory. Savarkar, Ambedkar noted, insisted on a united India but he would not allow the Muslim nation to be co-equal in authority with the Hindu nation. He wants the Hindu nation to be the dominant nation and the Muslim nation to be the servient nation (page 133). It would be a position of subordinate cooperation with the Hindu nation.

Jinnahs theory is dead; Savarkars theory is alive and kicking. It inspired the RSS and inspires the BJP to this day. M.S. Golwalkars Bunch of Thoughts (1966) has a whole chapter (x) on Territorial Nationalism, which he denounces. Hindu Nationalism forms the bedrock of our National edifice (page 135). This is the Hindu Nation (page 126).

None other than R.C. Majumdar of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan held that the Hindu Mahasabha was one important factor which was responsible to a very large extent for the emergence of the idea of partition of India on communal lines (Struggle for Freedom; page 611). Not the Mahasabha alone. Advani mentions with pride that there was no antagonism between the RSS and the Congress in Sindh those days. Many Congress families encouraged their young boys to join the RSS (page 5).

This supports the dedicated socialist Prem Bhasins view: A large and influential section in the Congress sincerely believed, even during the freedom struggle, that the interests of Hindu Indians could not be sacrificed at the altar of a united Independent India. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya and Lala Lajpat Rai had, for instance, actually broken away from the Congress and founded the Nationalist Party. (Janata, Annual Number 1998.) He was commenting on the ease with which K.C. Pant left the Congress to join the BJP.

Many a Congressman was a communalist under his cloak, Nehru wrote in his Autobiography. He told the All India Congress Committee on May 11, 1958, that the communalism of the minority is far more dangerous than the communalism of the majority. Not that he condoned the latter. But, as he later (January 5, 1961) explained, one was more easily identifiable than the other. When the minority communities are communal, you can see that and understand it. But the communalism of the majority community is apt to be taken for nationalism.

Advani calls for an honest debate but shirks it. He quotes supporters profusely, critics distortedly, denies the obvious and asserts the palpably false. Contrast his comments on Godhra with those on the Gujarat pogrom and you will understand his defence of Narendra Modi. Communal violence a strange euphemism for a pogrom supported by the state broke out in Gujarat after the mass (sic) killing of kar sevaks in Godhra in February 2002. The Gujarat government and, in particular, Chief Minister Narendra Modi attracted severe condemnation on account of the barbaric incident. Modi was being unfairly targeted. He was, in my opinion, more sinned against than sinning (page 842).

How many died in Godhra and how many in the pogrom? If even that could not move Advani, nothing else will. The minorities can expect no fair play from such a man.

His stand on the Staines brutal murders on January 27, 1999, is identical. He lauds Justice D.P. Wadhwas report and claims it won plaudits from all (page 747). Dr. M.P. Raju published a collection of seven essays, including this writers, which tore it to shreds. Among the contributors were Prof. Valson Thampu and S.P. Banerjee, former Director General of Police (Wadhwa Commission Report: A Critique; Media House, New Delhi). The only person who emerged with credit was Gopal Subramaniam, counsel to the Commission, who did his job fearlessly.

The Statesman reported on May 28 what the Central Bureau of Investigation thought of Dara Singhs links. He had campaigned extensively for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 1998 general elections. The CBI found that though Dara Singh was not a primary member of the BJP, RSS or the Bajrang Dal, he had a long, active association with the BJP and was deeply involved in many of its projects.

There were communications between the police and the government, before the crime, in which Dara Singh was described variously as an active member of the Bajrang Dal, the RSS, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the BJP. Advani certified: I know these organisations for a long time and they do not have criminal elements. A mass of material exposed the BJP-RSS linkage. Justice Wadhwa attacked the Minorities Commission, instead.

But it is on Indias composite culture, its pride, that Advani truly excels himself. He writes: The culture of any ancient nation is bound to be composite. But in our country, emphasis on the composite character of Indian culture is generally an attempt to disown its essentially Hindu content.

He is entitled to this view but not to misrepresent a scholar. He adds: Even though an outsider (sic) Donald Eugene Smith has taken due note of this and perceptively observed that, despite the composite nature of Indian culture, Hinduism remains by far the most powerful and pervasive element in that culture. Those who lay great stress on the composite nature of culture frequently minimise this basic fact. Hinduism has indeed provided the essential genius of Indian culture (page 861). But Smith qualified this by presenting another facet of equal importance which Advani omits.

He paraphrases and does not quote or provide the precise reference to Smiths work India as a Secular State (Princeton University Press, 1963).

This has an instructive background. On April 8, 1988, at the BJPs Agra session, Advani denounced the concept of composite culture, as also in an interview to The Telegraph (February 15, 1991). On both occasions he quoted from Smiths book rather disingenuously: Hinduism has, indeed, provided the essential genius of Indian culture, this cannot be denied.

These few lines occur in a balanced Chapter 13 on Hinduism and Indian Culture in Smiths book (pages 372-402). It touches a core issue in the debate on Indian nationalism. Smith began by mentioning One view simply equates Indian culture with Hinduism and Hindu culture . The Hindu communal political parties are the most vocal exponents of this view (page 375). He records the minorities concern and although spokesman for the minorities have stressed this view of a composite Indian culture, some of its strongest statements have come from Hindu national leaders. Gandhi refused to narrow his cultural heritage as an Indian. Indian culture he wrote is neither Hindu, Islamic nor any other, wholly. It is a fusion of all (page 378). Nehru agreed.

Smiths conclusions deserve to be quoted in extenso: Our task is now to evaluate these two opposing views of Indian culture adhered to in present-day India. Hindu culture or composite culture which view comes closer to the truth? If forced to choose between them, one would immediately select the latter. Indian culture is a complex pattern, a composite culture into which have gone many diverse elements, foreign as well as indigenous. To equate Indian culture with Hindu culture is factually wrong. However, a second statement must follow immediately, namely, that despite the composite nature of Indian culture, Hinduism remains by far the most powerful and pervasive element in that culture. Those who lay great stress on the composite nature of Indian culture frequently minimise this basic fact.

Caught up in their enthusiasm for the idea of cultural synthesis, and with the best of motives (usually the desire to strengthen communal harmony and national unity), they seem to suggest that the cultural fusion is of a kind which might have resulted from blending together equal quantities of the principal ingredients. This, of course, is simply not the case.

Hinduism has indeed provided the essential genius of Indian culture, this cannot be denied. Significant cultural synthesis has not taken place everywhere, with the exception of Christianity in the small state of Kerala, there is much less non-Hindu cultural influence in South India than in the North. Thus, while not denying the reality and importance of the composite culture, we must be prepared to deal with an Indian culture largely rooted in Hinduism. Those who equate Indian culture with Hindu culture can produce considerable evidence in support of their position, although that part of empirical Indian culture which they ignore or reject makes their equation factually wrong, the use to which their argument is put is frequently disruptive and anti-national (pages 378-9).

This is precisely what Advani & Co. have been doing. Hence his selective quote from this passage which, isolated from the rest, conveys a different thesis altogether.

Smith criticised Sardar Patel and Rajendra Prasads association with the restoration of the Somnath temple. The plea that the Deputy Prime Minister and the President were acting as individuals in their private capacities is not adequate justification for such activities, the influence and prestige of high office inevitably becomes associated with whatever they do in public. The failure to distinguish between Indian culture and Hindu religion is illustrated by the large stone image of Vishnu located at the entrance to the headquarters of the Inspector-General of Police in Bangalore (page 387).

He added: As far as the minorities are concerned, they are already very much disturbed over the tendency to identify the religious culture of the Hindus with the Nation. Few cornerstones of the State or local government buildings are laid without the performance of Sanskritik ritual by Brahmin priests (page 396). This was in 1963.

Now, 45 years later, the situation is far worse, thanks to the compromises by Nehrus successors. Smith concluded: The state should promote authentic and valuable aspects of Indian culture impartially, irrespective of the religious tradition with which they are associated. The partial repudiation of the Muslim contribution to a composite language is a serious lapse from secularism (page 402).

Where do all this leave Advanis pseudo-secularism and minorityism? This laboured effort was made because fundamentally he holds that they [the minorities] must accept India as their nation and must accept the culture here (September 30, 1990). But, if Advani could so confidently misrepresent for 20 years the author of a classic, what credence is one to put on his bare word on discussions in his presence? On March 28, a former colleague, George Fernandes, put paid to his attempt to dissociate himself from Jaswant Singhs trip to Kandahar: All Ministers were present.

On March 24, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) ally Farooq Abdullah angrily denied, with precise details, Advanis version that Vajpayee asked Farooq to decide whether to remain in the NDA or not following the Union Cabinets rejection of the State Assemblys autonomy resolution. To his credit, Dr. Abdullah allowed the issue to lapse (page 679).

Abdullahs disclosures establish that Advani, contrary to his denials, was actively privy to the release of hostages. As he refused to release the hostages, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) chief A.S. Dulat suggested that Farooq speak to Vajpayee, but, instead of the PM, Advani came on the line he just mumbled (Tehelka, April 5, 2008).

No book has received such a spate of denials and corrections as this. Who will trust him in the future? Advani received immense help in considerable research and in consultation with several people some of them are still in service. Former Home Secretary Kamal Pandey, former Chiefs of Intelligence Bureau (IB) Ajit Doval and K.P. Singh, and former Deputy National Security Adviser Satish Chandra receive his thanks. As do four journalists, a young researcher and party activist. If the author stumbles, it is because of his utter disregard for facts. He errs on personal recollections on matters of importance, on matters of record, and makes claims demonstrably untrue.

The second part of this article will list them seriatim with ample documentation.