The Man is the Message

If the purpose of all religions in this world is the betterment of mankind, why then are some religions considered better than others? If the purpose of a political party is the betterment of the people they seek to serve, why is then the BJP proclaimed to be better than others? The answer, my friends, is not blowing in the wind. Therefore, here comes a New Testament of Indian Politics, a 986-page tome of self-tract by LK Advani, titled My Country My Life, where one can find answers to the most obtuse questions that riddle the Indian politics.

To a fantastically impressionistic mind, the book is an invocation to the ‘assimilative' Hindu soul of India. The only problem is that the book -- like Hitler's -- dresses up reductionist stratagems to view India in its belligerently nationalist prism as respectable projects. The rider is this book runs the risk of teasing out the chauvinistic/communal angst of a reader instead of mitigating it.

Advani's autobiography reads well, despite the glaring goof-ups. There is a flatness and linearity in narration that makes even a hare-brained reader feel comfortable. And for the most of his life, it has been so impeccably lived that you won't find a single blot or blemish save some minor distractions like the demolition of the Babri masjid, the Kandahar hijacking or the Gujarat carnage -- post Godhra killings. The book is an exercise in breathtaking self-deification mixed with dollops of naivety and righteous self-mortification (in cases of policy failures, in addressing the issues more expedient to the people). There is a -like halo hanging about the book; it gives the impression that this man or his party can do no wrong. As a result, runs riot and myth pervades history.

Advani has categorised his life in five broad phases. From 1927 to 1947, his life in Sindh - mainly in Karachi - constitutes the first phase. From 1947 to 1957, he worked in Rajasthan as an RSS

and activist in the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. From 1957 to 1977, he worked as a political aide to Vajpayee (who had been elected to the Lok Sabha for the first time) shifting base from Rajasthan to Delhi at the instance of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya, the main ideologue, guide and organiser of the Jana Sangh. From 1977 to 1997, he served greater organisational responsibilities in the hurly-burly of Indian politics. From 1997 to 2007, he had a major role in the governance of the nation (that includes his infamous ‘Jinnah' visit to Pakistan in 2005 following which he was ‘purged' from the BJP chief's post vis-à-vis a cold-blooded assault by top leaders of the RSS and BJP.)

It is instructive to see how Advani takes the usual diatribes against his party to task. Is the growth of ‘Hindu nationalism' a potential threat to the future of democracy, Indian secularism and the constitutional protection of India's minorities? Isn't the party that promised to put an end to corruption and create a value-based system itself a victim of the pathogens of caste politics and factionalism?

Such allegations are taken up to be smashed when Advani rambles on themes such as pseudo secularism, minorityism, cultural nationalism etc. He writes with passion and candour but one suspects that he lacks the sophistication to understand the merits of the more nuanced aspects of the role of religion in public life. Sometimes he suffers from selective amnesia.

Since the book is huge in scope and so all-encompassing, it is judicious to highlight some of his conclusions. Advani condemns Graham Staines' killing and boasts that "some of my best personal friends are indeed Christians". He says advisedly that conversion is a "threat both to Hindu society and national integration" but in the same breath pleads that Hindu organisations cannot be "blamed for protesting against this gross abuse of the freedom of faith". He does not subscribe to the view that the post-Godhra violence in Gujarat-2002 was premeditated and sponsored by the Narendra Modi-led BJP government, tacitly backed by the BJP regime in Delhi.

Nearly six months after Gujarat began to burn in 2002, Advani, then deputy prime minister, in a visit to London, described the Gujarat killings as "indefensible" and "a blot" on the BJP-led government. But no heads were made to roll beyond such passionate outpourings. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, justified the massacre saying that had Muslims condemned the Godhra incident enough, such a massacre in Gujarat would not have taken place. Vajpayee had reminded Modi of his , but was shy of taking any action against him. Advani even chose to give a clean chit to Modi claiming he has 'maintained' law and order in Gujarat effectively after the Godhra incident.

Advani terms the killings at Naroda Patiya and Gulberg Society (where Congress MP Ehsan Jaffrey and 19 others were charred to death by a mob) in Ahmedabad, Best Bakery in Baroda, Sardarpura in Mehasana as "reprehensible"; he admits that Godhra cannot justify the butchery but adds that Godhra may "explain' what happened after that. He asks "fair-minded" people to "contrast" the Gujarat riots with that of the anti-Sikh carnage in Delhi. The monstrosity of Gujarat has been well documented. It did prove the connivance of the police and administration, if not always in their role of exactly stoking up the carnage, but surely, standing criminally aloof where intervention was the crying need of the hour (or even being active or silent accomplices as the mobs went berserk). Hence, sample this: Narendra Modi, lest you so far thought him a monster, is actually a victim of a "vilification campaign".

On the subject of arguably the biggest blot on the NDA government -- the Kandahar hijack -- Advani's contention in the book and also during an interview aired on NDTV is that he was unaware of Jaswant Singh's plan to travel to Kandahar. This raises questions. This clearly appears as a bid to distance himself from one of the "weaker" decisions of the erstwhile NDA regime and thereby burnish his image as a ‘tough guy' and ‘Iron Man'. According to Advani, he did not know Singh would accompany the terrorists on the plane to Kandahar. He also said that he had been opposed to giving the terrorists a safe passage.

Jaswant Singh had handed over the terrorists to the hijackers and brought back 173 passengers (and 15 crew members) who had been held hostage in the ill-fated Flight IC-814 in December 1999. The Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), which met on the Kandahar hijack issue, registered all opinions before taking a final decision, and the Vajpayee government was also under tremendous "psychological pressure". Later, Jaswant Singh categorically stated that the decision to send him to Afghanistan was taken by the CCS and that Advani could have "forgotten" the meeting. George Fernandes, who was defence minister in the NDA regime, also confirmed Advani's presence at the CCS.

Since the final decision was the collective responsibility of the Union cabinet as a whole, it was rather unusual of Advani to round up the entire Kandahar episode, without much introspection, which was the hallmark of Singh's memoir . Former US Ambassador Robert Blackwill has also contested some of Advani's contentions, particularly his version that both discussed the Kandahar hijack issue. Blackwill said that the year being 1999, it was the Clinton administration in power in the US and he was "happily" at Harvard during that time.

"The Ayodhya movement also brought to the fore people's revulsion for pseudo-secularism, as practised by the Congress party, communist and some other parties, and projected my party, the BJP, as a spirited champion of genuine secularism." Advani considers demolition of the Babri masjid as synonymous with Hindu awakening and the ‘Ram Rath Yatra' as the "most transformational event of his political journey". Though he famously avers, all over again, that December 6, 1992, was "the saddest day of his life," he remains short of commenting if the act of vandalism was a sad denouement of his brand of mobilisational politics. He sounds insincere because he was sad only over the fall-out of the Ayodhya movement, not at his own role in provoking mob violence, anarchy and outrage across the country.

"The deeds of Mahmood Ghazni and Aurangzeb are alien to our ethos not because they were Muslims. After all, over ninety per cent of the Muslims in India have an Indian ancestry as they were actually Hindus who converted to Islam," says Advani. Surely, it is difficult not to see where he is getting at, in context of his justification for the Ayodhya movement. The struggle for the construction of the Ramjanmabhoomi temple, according to him, "became the symbol of the struggle between genuine secularism and pseudo-secularism". He argues that Ayodhya became a national issue following the enactment of the Muslim Women's (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill in 1986 by the Rajiv Gandhi government - after the Shah Bano case - which annulled the judgment of the Supreme Court ("a blatant act to appease the minority vote-bank").

May be. But riding high on the bitter feeling and capitalising on it, he chose to undertake the rath yatra, realising that if he were to "communicate the message of nationalism through the religious medium," he would be able "to transmit it more effectively and to a wider audience". On October 30, 1992, barely a week before the actual demolition, he averred: "No government in India can survive if it adopted an anti-Hindu posture and showed disrespect to Lord Ram."

Not even once did LK Advani try to capture the essence of Tulsidasa's that depicted Rama as a leader of the oppressed and exploited in a battle against the ‘most powerful oppressor and exploiter of his time'. While he draws upon Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul, who starkly reminded time and again that India was ravaged and intellectually destroyed by invasions that began in about 1000 AD by forces and religions "it had no means of understanding", he remains silent on a crucial issue: was the Ayodhya movement actually a move to disown our Islamic past?

It is true that the Incas or the native people of Mexico have never really got over their defeat by the Spaniards and Muslims still rue similar vandalism by the Mongols. But how could he be so smug in assuming that demolition of the masjid was the aspirational climax of nearly a billion Indians to correct an act of Islamic iconoclasm?

And though the redoubtable scholar Nirad C. Chaudhuri did condemn the Muslim invaders of India, upon Advani's visit to the writer's Oxford home, Chaudhuri was greatly disgusted with his ignorance of Sanskrit (knowledge of which, to Chaudhuri, was a must for one proclaiming to be the advocate of Hindutva) and his limited knowledge of India's history.

But the book stands on its own, for the courage of ideological conviction of its writer, though at times it looks skewed. It was Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya's concept of ‘Integral Humanism' (as a foil to MN Roy's ‘Radical Humanism') that the Jana Sangh adopted as its guiding ideology at the party's Vijayawada session in 1965. Advani learnt his "first lessons in patriotism" after reading VD Savarkar's <1857-The War of Independence>, though Savarkar made clemency petitions and pledges of ‘loyalty' to the colonial State. It was Savarkar who is thought to be the founding ideologue of the pernicious 'two nation theory', almost two decades before the Muslim League embraced it.

And it was no less a person than Sardar Patel, the ‘Iron Man' whose image Advani loves to cosy up and copy, who, on February 27, 1948, wrote to Nehru less than a month after Gandhi was killed by Nathuram Godse: "It was a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under Savarkar that (hatched) the conspiracy and saw it through." (Page 56, Volume 6 of Patel's correspondence, published in 1973).

Advani rightly recalls that it was Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee who led a massive nationwide satyagraha in 1953 against the non-applicability of the Indian Constitution in Jammu and Kashmir. He was arrested on May 11, 1953 for entering the state without a permit and detained in a house on the outskirts of Srinagar. Mookerjee died on May 23, under "mysterious circumstances". One expected Advani to shed more light on this.

The Emergency, the gradual unveiling of Indira Gandhi's paranoid persona and her imperious ways to stall the judiciary and the Press come out extremely well. JP's role and the wiliness of Charan Singh in destabilising Morarji Desai's Janata Party government are narrated with a pronounced tanginess. Interestingly, he recalls that in the formation of the Delhi Municipal Corporation in 1958, Jana Sangh made its first foray into alliance politics with, hold your breath, the CPI. A similar alliance was struck for the formation of the Samyukta Vidhyak Dal (SVD) government in Bihar after the 1967 assembly elections. It was the 1962 Chinese aggression, says Advani, that "uncovered the extra-territorial loyalty of Indian communists".

Advani introduces himself as a "goal-oriented practitioner of politics". However, he sounds unconvincing on why the BJP-led NDA was trounced in the 2004 parliamentary elections. Why, pray, there isn't any credible soul-searching on the debacle when apparently the going seemed to be so good for the BJP and RSS, especially with Modi's brand image glowing and India shining?

Read the book by all means. There are conclusions (no matter whether you like the person or the party) you will be in accord with. The prose is a bit stodgy and the book is indeed heavy. But here is a heavyweight leader, who, god-willing and destiny-proposing, might well become the prime minister of India next year. At just about 82 and still going strong. So we can suffer the reading.