Still in the race

Advani at the closing ceremony of the conference in Mumbai. - RAJESH NIRGUDE/AP

L.K. Advani makes it clear that he has no intention to bow out of electoral politics, and naturally his conflict with the RSS is not over.

ON December 31, while addressing the media conference at which he announced his decision to step down as president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Lal Krishna Advani etched out his future plans. Unlike former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Advani made it clear that giving up the organisational position was in no way the end of the road for him in electoral politics. On the contrary, he asserted repeatedly that he would continue to be the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament and would be the BJP's "face" in the next general elections.

The reference to himself as an "important face" of the party was repeated several times. He had been an "important face of the BJP" for a long time; the party as a whole had attached importance to his "face" even when he did not occupy positions like that of the Leader of the Opposition, he said. The context of such assertions was not lost on anyone. Left to himself, Advani would not have given up the party president's position. He was virtually forced to quit because of sustained pressure from the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS). The RSS started raising this demand as early as March 2005 after its all-India meeting in Mangalore. Advani, by and large rated as the BJP's most popular leader after Vajpayee, put up a stiff resistance. But the RSS finally got its way and Advani gave in to its diktat at the National Executive meeting in Chennai. The announcement in Mumbai was the conclusion of the sequence.

Many leaders and activists of the BJP and other Sangh Parivar outfits such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) had thought this submission to the RSS' will would be the end of an active political career for Advani. Former Union Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, seen as Advani's detractor within the BJP, had expressed this opinion openly. Indeed, he even demanded, while the silver jubilee celebrations in Mumbai were still under way, that Advani should step down as the Leader of the Opposition.

But on the same day, Advani rallied all second-generation leaders of the party at a special conference to oppose this demand and assert his credentials to continue in the position. The insistence on being an "important face" of the BJP on December 31 followed this show of support.

In practical terms, this assertion means only one thing - that the differences between the RSS leadership and Advani on how the BJP should advance its political and ideological positions in national politics are not over. Over the past year and a half, the RSS repeatedly stressed that the BJP had deviated from the Hindutva ideology at the cost of the Sangh Parivar's ultimate political goals and that as someone who condoned and promoted this deviation, Advani had no right to lead the party.

A conclave of RSS pranthpracharaks (regional organisers) in Surat in July 2005 stated this position in more or less clear terms. An official statement after the conclave "expressed serious concern over the ideological erosion, behavioural misdemeanour and violation of organisational discipline with impunity by some functionaries of a couple of like-minded organisations" and conveyed the "Sangh's reservations" to the "concerned people". Advani was, of course, one of the "concerned people".

Advani stood his ground. His point was that the time was not ripe for an all-out pursuit of the Hindutva agenda and that the BJP should continue to project itself as a potential ruling party in association with secular parties in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). This difference in perspective was reflected in other debates too, like the one provoked by Advani's praise for Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

The RSS felt that the NDA experiment had led to "ideological erosion, behavioural misdemeanour and violation of organisational discipline". Advani refused to accept that. Inaugurating the conference in Mumbai, he emphasised that the formation of the NDA was one of the most significant events in independent India's political history.

All the pointers, therefore, suggest that the RSS-Advani conflict is not yet history. It is not possible to predict at this juncture the forms that this conflict might take. But it is clear that Advani has the support of second-generation leaders like M. Venkaiah Naidu, Pramod Mahajan and Arun Jaitley. But many people in the Sangh Parivar feel that this support cannot be taken for granted and may not be a long-standing one, given the RSS' grip on the BJP. This uncertainty is perhaps Advani's biggest worry right now.

It would have been difficult to imagine in the late 1980s and 1990s, when the BJP was making steady gains in national politics, that Advani would one day fall out with the RSS. Indeed, that is a fate one would have associated with the less "Hindutva-oriented" Vajpayee. On several occasions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many Sangh Parivar leaders said that Advani, the original Ayodhya Ram mandir campaigner, should replace Vajpayee as Prime Minister for a more ideologically committed government. Ironically, in spite of inviting the RSS' anger, Advani's acceptance among secular politicians, including the BJP's allies, is not as high as Vajpayee's. According to an old-time Sangh Parivar activist, who has no association with the RSS or the BJP now, the RSS leadership is in the habit of defining roles for its activists and perhaps did not like Advani's tendency to overstep the role of an agitation leader and organiser.