Advani in wonderland

Previous posts should reveal that we don’t think much of L.K. Advani.  Even so, we thought that recent events, in particular the growing dissidence and rejection of Advani’s leadership within the BJP, might have persuaded some reflection in the 81-year-old leader.  Our optimism was premature.  In an interview with the Economist, Advani resorts to such laughable assertions as the following:

1. No riots occurred during his 1990 Rath Yatra
2. Narendra Modi had nothing to do with the Gujarat riots
3. The Gujarat riots were no different from riots in other parts of India
4. He was pained at the demolition of the Babri Masjid (never mind that it happened in front of his eyes)
5. The 2009 verdict was not a mandate for the Congress

Even the Economist’s mild-mannered interviewer found these “hard to accept.”

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.”

Advani is just another politician

India Today is the doyen of news magazines in India that informed and educated a generation of citizens.  My political interests evolved and strengthened because of the magazine, which until the mid-1990s was arguably the sole arbiter of public conversation.

In the past decade, however, India Today buffeted by severe competition from Outlook has degenerated to reflect its predominantly urban, middle-class readership’s pro-BJP views.  This blog’s author, for one, cannot complain against partisan reporting but to have the nation’s first news magazine be reduced to a pamphlet is a different matter.

Another equally troubling, albeit subtler, problem is the magazine’s pretense that flowery but abstruse writing ignoring the facts of a case can alter reality or public perception.  This is evident in the magazine’s recent cover story on L. K. Advani, which may be found here.

Even the reporter S. Prasannarajan’s language — written to impress rather than express — cannot hide the fact that 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.