Yes, indeed, Advani is just another politician

Let me own up and say that I am indeed rubbing my hands with glee watching the on-going self-destruction currently underway in the BJP.  The party has always run a sophisticated operation in couching its fundamentally communal agenda with empty rhetoric (“aaj paanch pradesh, kal saara desh,” “India Shining,” “mazboot neta, nirnayak sarkar“).  It is, indeed, heartening to see the Arun Shouries and Jaswant Singhs rip its underbelly out and confirming the fears of several Nehruvian liberals, including myself.

It was this thinking that led me to pen the following in  May 2009 posting, “Advani is just another politician“:

Advani is a tired and irrelevant politician notwithstanding his last-minute, desperate push for power this election. It is unfortunate that Advani was never able to translate his stature within the BJP to develop a consistent and unifying agenda that captured the national imagination as opposed to succumbing to near-term electoral compulsions. As a result, history will remember Advani as just another politician whose body of work was a series of non-issues, in particular the opportunistic use of Hindutva and its divisiveness.

 An implicit but unstated assertion was the Advani was no statesman but another power-hungry, ordinary politician.  This is highlighted in Neena Vyas’s report in “The Hindu,” where, among other things, she sheds light on how Advani flip-flopped on his “decision” (or indecision — so much for a “mazboot neta”) to step down following the rout in the May 2009 elections:

… RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said three things on record — that neither he nor any other RSS functionary asked Mr. Advani to stay on as Leader of the Opposition; that the RSS did not place any condition when it approved Mr. Advani’s projection as the prime ministerial candidate; and that Mr. Advani himself first decided to quit his position immediately after the Lok Sabha results came in on May 16, and again, himself decided to rescind that decision. Both those decisions were his own, Mr. Bhagwat said, clearly signalling that the decision to stay on as Leader of the Opposition was not taken at the instance of the RSS or even with its consent or approval. (emphasis added)

So, yes, indeed, “history will remember Advani as just another politician.”

Burying the “difference”

In the 1990s, the BJP was the “party with a difference” as it supposedly practiced value-based politics, internal democracy, and cadre-based organizing– all buzzwords that work well when one’s presence in Parliament is limited to a handful of seats. This was also the time when “intellectuals” such as Arun Shourie slowly gravitated to the BJP.

With the on-going saga within the BJP — Jaswant Singh’s expulsion over a book praising Jinnah and Shourie’s no-holds-barred interview — we can now officially bury the “party with a difference” tag. It is no more than another political party.

Shourie’s interview begs five comments:

1. If Atal Bihari Vajpayee is the leader with “moral authority” that Shourie fantasizes, he has wasted his years with the BJP.
2. Shourie was pained more with Vajpayee’s grief over the Gujarat riots than the riots themselves. He acknowledges his “inhumanity” in the same breath. I concur.
3. Vajpayee failed to get rid of Narendra Modi following the riots, presided over India’s largest intelligence failure culminating in Kargil, and squandered the opportunity to sign a key peace treaty with Pakistan by toeing the RSS line. What “moral authority?”
4. Advani apparently lied about “not knowing” of the Kandahar decision to trade terrorists for the hostages.
5. While Shourie’s comments against Advani’s BJP are probably justified, it also smells like a case of sour grapes. It is evident that Shourie was very close to Vajpayee, which probably never gelled with Advani and his coterie. This is perhaps a good time for Shourie to leave.

Sometime soon, hopefully, I would like to write a post entitled, “BJP. R.I.P.”