L K Advani

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Listen to him - he might well be the Prime Minister after the next elections.

 

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Testament of an unrepentant nationalist
By PRASANNARAJAN March 14, 2008, India Today

Lal Krishna Advani is trapped inside an image. In the art works of professional demonologists, it is an image incompatible with the drawing room aesthetics of left-liberal India.

So, many variations of Advani continue to dominate and divide Indian politics. The nationalist who borrows his rhetorical wares from the black markets of mythology to win his argument with the present. The aggrieved Hindu who never stops returning to the imaginary sites of cultural vandalism.

The divisive mobiliser on the right whose lasting legacy is as a catalyst to the demolition of India’s secular edifice. The man who has sought the true meaning of genuine secularism, as against pseudo-secularism, at the mausoleum of the founder of an Islamic Republic. The hawk who pretends to have a heart. Post-Ayodhya, Advani has never been painted in pastels.
This project in demonisation by the self-righteous majority has not bothered him. That is what he says when you meet him at 30 Prithviraj Road, his official residence.

Well, as he walks into the drawing room, which is a pictorial celebration of his family values, you can’t miss, in spite of that avuncular affability, the confidence of a man who has already won the argument.

And he looks relieved: at last he has become the narrator of his life story. Perhaps, he has been waiting for this moment: Advani redeemed by himself. My Country, My Life (Rupa & Co., 980pp, Rs 595) is the memoirs of a political leader whose life runs parallel to the spasmodic evolution of independent India. It is the testament of one of India’s most misunderstood politicians—and the one who could be the next prime minister.

His first encounter with the idea of the nation happened when he, at 14, walked from a tennis ground to an RSS shakha in Karachi. A matriculate from the city’s St Patrick’s High School for Boys, he enjoyed books, movies and cricket. And for this English speaking, middle-class boy whose second language was Latin, enlisting as a swayamsevak was not a cultural rebellion.
He joined the RSS on June 20, 1942. “From that day till now, for 65 long years, I have remained a devoted, committed and proud swayamsevak of the Sangh.”

And it was Karachi that set the stage for another life-transforming encounter. Every Sunday evening in his last three years in the city, he would go to the Ramakrishna Mission Ashram to listen to Swami Ranganathananda’s discourses on religion and politics.

Their last conversation was about Partition and the role of Jinnah. “Swamiji, in particular, lauded Jinnah’s historic speech in the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947 and said, “The true exposition of the meaning of secularism can be found in this speech.” In a subconscious way, this last conversation with Swamiji was to play a decisive contributory role in my own remarks about Jinnah when I went to Pakistan in May-June 2005.”

At 20, he would bid goodbye to the city that initiated him into Hindu nationalism; almost a month after Independence, a BOAC propeller aircraft would take him to Delhi. Advani’s first yatra began as a refugee. In a partitioned India, there would be more adventurous journeys for the nationalist conditioned by the Sangh and the Swami. (Either of them won’t be there to protect him when he returns to have a rendezvous with a secular Jinnah.)
The formation of Bharatiya Jana Sangh by Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, a formidable mind, would mark Advani’s formal entry into nationalist politics.

“When I look back and ask myself what I learnt from various inspiring sources, the answer I get is this: from the RSS I received my grounding in nationalism and disciplined service of society; Deendayal Upadhyaya inculcated within me great idealism and a realisation of the need for purity and probity in public life; and from Dr Mookerjee I learnt the indispensability of value-based democracy as a vehicle for nation building.”

Those were the days of idealism. And politics was all about romancing the nation. It was the only rejoinder the nationalists could offer to the Congress. He could afford to be a conviction politician without being reduced to an ideological extremist.
The nationalist’s struggle against power reached a critical stage when the totalitarian temptations of Mrs G culminated in the declaration of the Emergency. The imprisonment of Advani and other “enemies of the state” made them the consciencekeepers of a country without justice.

My Country, My Life chronicles in anecdotal richness the origin, rise and the inevitable disintegration of the Janata Party, the first effective counterpoint to Congressism. Advani tells the story as witness and participant. The Janata experiment in power was a huge let-down. And the expulsion of Advani and other Jana Sanghis from the Janata and the subsequent formation of BJP set the first notation of bipolarity in Indian politics.

The party would, of course, grow beyond Gandhian socialism and integral humanism. It would need displaced gods as electoral allies. Advani, the quintessential organisation man, would semaphore them to the polling booth. BJP in power owed a great deal to the longdistance traveller of Hindutva.

In the wake of Ayodhya, the memoirist makes a great polemical effort to strike a balance between his individual sadness and the mass Hindu awakening: “A group of kar sevaks delivered their own verdict on some of the seminal questions of Indian history, both medieval and modern.

Ram or Babar? Genuine secularism or pseudo-secularism? Justice for all or always appeasement of some? Are Hindus to perpetually remain divided on caste, regional and linguistic lines or should they unite when fundamental challenges confront faith and nationalism?

It is not my claim that December 6 answered all these questions in the most satisfactory manner. But it did mark a day of Hindu awakening of truly historic import.” No one bothered to listen to his version of the truth then. He had already become a synonym for the savagery of the saffron. Ayodhya was a great hurt; in so many words, he vindicates himself, but without ceasing to be a Hindu who fights for his gods.

Still, the question remains: was BJP in power the happiest moment in his life? The book doesn’t provide a definitive answer. And that is not his intention either. Then remember that My Country, My Life is the autobiography of a man who has been defined not by power but by his struggle for or against power.

That is why Ayodhya and his audacious appraisal of Jinnah are much more engaging than his stint as a cabinet minister. For, BJP-in-power was essentially a Vajpayee moment, in spite of Advani’s hard work in mobilisation. His memoirs come to us at a time when he is no longer the proverbial number two but the singular leader of his party—and its prime ministerial candidate.
And the man who emerges out of the narrative is a refined reconciler who has the words and the intellectual means to be a philosopher king. We have not seen him before. Will the allies and grassroots colleagues elsewhere in the states recognise him when he steps out of the pages into the battlefield?

Some political memoirs are projects in mythmaking. This one is a declaration of independence from the mythology of Advani the smiling zealot. One book that transformed his life was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People. Never challenge others in an argument beyond a point, it taught him. With My Country, My Life, Advani is certain to win friends and influence India without losing the argument.

"My Country My Life" - The Memoirs of Lal Krishna Advani

 

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LK before he leaps
By VIR SANGHAVI March 25th 2008, Hindustan Times

Anybody who has ever interviewed LK Advani will know that he is an unusual Indian politician in the sense that he does not shy away from discussing issues. He is unusual also in that he is comfortable with ideas and happy to conduct an intellectual argument. If he has faults, they lie in his sensitive nature. He is remarkably thin-skinned for a politician, will often take needless offence and equally, will be easily and tearfully overwhelmed. Plus, he is reluctant to cause hurt. Rarely will he say anything bad about any of his colleagues even when the truth might do him more good than the evasions he sometimes resorts to.

Advani’s strengths and weaknesses are captured in his new book, My Country, My Life, (Rupa). It is a readable, rewarding and often racy account of his political career. Written from the heart, it is part-memoir and part-manifesto. But he pulls his punches. And so, his account of his time at the head of his party is only half-complete. Many of the mysteries of the last ten years are not solved and, frequently, we can only guess at the truth by what is left unsaid.

Even so, this is a better and more honest book than any recent political memoir, far better certainly than Jaswant Singh’s that covers some of the same ground. Advani may not be able to bring himself to always tell the whole story, but there are no lies here, only a few evasions.

So, while Advani is unwilling to go into details, we get some insight into the two relationships that have shaped the BJP over the last decade: the friendship (or not) between Advani and his old mentor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the relationship between the BJP and its spiritual parent, the RSS or, simply, ‘the Sangh’, as Advani calls it.

No matter how much the BJP’s leaders may try and break free of the stranglehold of the Sangh when it comes to the crunch, they all fall in line. This was demonstrated most clearly within a few days of the BJP’s victory in 1998. Vajpayee had decided to make Jaswant Singh his Finance Minister. The RSS disapproved of the choice. K.S. Sudarshan, its leader, called on Vajpayee and told him that the Sangh would not accept Singh. Though Jaswant was then Vajpayee’s closest ally in the party, Sudarshan’s view held sway and Singh was not included in the Cabinet.

Tellingly, Advani does not include this episode in his book and the RSS remains a shadowy player, lurking somewhere in the mists. Only once do we find evidence of its direct intervention. In June 2005, Advani visited Pakistan and controversially described M.A. Jinnah as ‘secular’. When his remarks set off a storm in India, he offered to resign. The BJP officially declined to accept his resignation. But in October that year, Advani resigned anyway.

Why did he quit? Here’s Advani’s version: “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...” Who told him this? Who has the authority to ask the BJP president to quit after his colleagues have passed a resolution supporting him?
The answer is self-evident.

Advani also records two instances that indicate the Sangh’s lack of enthusiasm for Vajpayee. The first is that in 1995, when he announced that Vajpayee would be the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, “some people in the party and the Sangh had chided me for making the announcement”.

The second dates to 2002 when the BJP was looking for a candidate to replace K.R. Narayanan as President of India. According to Advani, Rajju Bhaiyya, the RSS’s sarsanghchalak, asked Vajpayee to take the job on the grounds that it would be less taxing to his health. And, of course, it would get him out of the PMO.

The relationship between Vajpayee and Advani is much more complicated. Clearly, Vajpayee resented his former protégé’s rise and did not approve of all his policies. Advani concedes that Vajpayee “had some reservations about the BJP getting directly associated with the Ayodhya movement”, but argues that “Atalji accepted the collective decision of the party”. He is unwilling, however, to admit that Vajpayee resented his rise in any way. Most people believe that Vajpayee felt slighted when the BJP chose Advani over him to be Leader of the Opposition in 1991, and Advani has conceded, in private conversation, that, in retrospect, he should have insisted that Vajpayee take the job. In the book, he says, “I felt that Atalji should rightfully perform that role. But he too insisted that I assume the responsibility.” Which is true enough — Vajpayee was gracious in his public statements — but is hardly the full story.

About the BJP’s time in office, Advani glosses over the open rift between the PMO and the Home Ministry. He admits that he wanted Brajesh Mishra to give up one of his two jobs: National Security Advisor (NSA) and Principal Secretary to the PM. But he does not mention how divided the security establishment was between the NSA’s people and his own (IB Director K.P. Singh whom the PMO regarded as an Advani stooge and his deputy Ajit Doval, whom Advani lavishes with praise in the book). And Mishra, a key figure in the NDA government and in many of the events described in the book, hardly features.

On the big stories, we must assume that silence is confirmation. For instance, it was widely believed at the time that only Vajpayee, George Fernandes and Mishra knew about the decision to order the nuclear tests. Advani and senior members of the Cabinet were informed only on the eve of the actual tests. Advani does not admit this but, in a 986-page book, does not give any account of the decision to go nuclear. His narrative sticks to ideological arguments and to the day of the tests themselves. Why would he exclude the details of the run-up to one of the BJP government’s single biggest decisions if he was an active participant?
Similarly, Advani loyalists have long claimed that he was unhappy with the decision to release terrorists in exchange for the hostages on IC-814. I was editor of the HT at the time. On the day of the release, we were about to carry a story to this effect leaked by the Advani camp when, late in the night, news agencies carried Advani’s denial of the reports. We gathered later that Vajpayee had phoned Advani and asked him to issue the denial.

In the book, Advani says that he was “initially” against the release but later states that “the government most reluctantly took the option to minimise the losses”. Nowhere does he say that he changed his mind. Instead, he indicates that he went along with the principle of collective responsibility. In his recent interviews, he has suggested that he continued to be opposed to the release.
Despite this disagreement with Vajpayee and the admission of other differences — over sacking Narendra Modi and the timing of the election — the book sticks to the party line that Vajpayee was the boss and Advani his loyal deputy. There is hardly anything about Advani’s elevation to Deputy Prime Minister, about why it was done and why Vajpayee kept it secret from those close to him. Nor is there much about Pramod Mahajan who appears in the book as a rath yatri and then vanishes. We never learn why Advani fell out so completely with him or how he turned up as a key figure in the early Vajpayee PMO. Even when Advani criticises the BJP’s general election campaign (India Shining was a mistake, he admits as was his own phrase: “Feel good”), he is careful not to attack Mahajan’s hi-tech campaign which Vajpayee himself later criticised.

But then, that’s Advani’s style. He may spill the beans about his opponents (he confirms the rumour that Mulayam Singh Yadav did a secret deal with the BJP in 1999 to prevent a secular government from being formed), but when it comes to the BJP, the Sangh and to his own colleagues, he is the ultimate party man. He may be hurt, he may be upset — but he will never let the story go out of the Sangh Parivar.

"My Country My Life" - The Memoirs of Lal Krishna Advani

 

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[garibnawaz]

He is Popular in Pakistan too.

 

[was]

He is Popular in Pakistan too.

beacause he tryied to kill q.a muhammad ali jinnah

 

[daredevil]

beacause he tryied to kill q.a muhammad ali jinnah

L.K Advani is the one who called Jinnah as Secularist while visiting pakistan, he had bore the brunt of all other Nationalists for saying that.

So why didn't Pakistan govt. try him when he was a state guest the?.

 

[garibnawaz]

beacause he tryied to kill q.a muhammad ali jinnah

He visited Pakistan when he and his party was not in Power in India and General Musharraf was in Power in Pakistan.

Nobody arrested him. No Questions were asked.

Besides he never tried to Kill Jinnah. Unless u prove me wrong with facts.

 

[Super Falcon]

Dirty indian terrorist LK advani. he is responsible for shahdat of BABRI MASJID 16 years back

 

[daredevil]

Dirty indian terrorist LK advani. he is responsible for shahdat of BABRI MASJID 16 years back

Much much better than your Mr. 10%.

 

[Vinod2070]

I somehow find his conduct in opposition as too narrow-minded.

His not going to the all party meeting after the latest terrorist incidents, opposing the nuclear deal, opposing implementation of VAT earlier point to a worrying small mindedness that is not expected from a leader of his level.

They were all not because he had any objections to the issue itself, just for political expediency.