Not really a swan song for Advani

A quintessential organisation man, Advani, for all his shortcomings, remains the BJP’s best representative on the high table with the Sangh, the government and NDA allies. In politics, experience counts and is irreplaceable, writes Vinod Sharma.

Lal Krishna Advani has taken the Chair and Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley the stage in the BJP parliamentary party. But who’s the impresario?

HT Image

Act I of the unfolding BJP drama has been on expected lines — the RSS having its way in Nitin Gadkari’s elevation as party chief and Advani nominating Sushma as his successor in the Lower House. Much of what transpires hereon will depend on Nagpur’s terms of engagement with the new leadership and the direction in which it seeks to navigate the party.

Any return to the BJP’s basic agenda — of Ram Temple at Ayodhya, abrogation of Kashmir’s special status in the Constitution and the demand for a common civil code — will be politically excruciating, to state the least. The party put the contentious issues in deep freeze a decade ago to gain acceptability and concomitant power in a coalition arrangement in 1998.

From his exalted but largely ceremonial pedestal, Advani might have the opportunity to position himself as a relative liberal if the RSS makes Gadkari play the archetypal hardliner. The veteran charioteer isn’t any longer the political untouchable he was for anti-Congress secular formations in the immediate aftermath of the 1992 Babri mosque demolition.

He lost the 2009 polls as NDA’s and not merely the BJP’s prime ministerial choice.

“What happens in the BJP is its business,” said a JD(U) leader. But he forecast trouble if Gadkari’s advent was a precursor to the oft-heard “back to the basics” theme. The one person the JD(U) biggie expected to stand up and resist the RSS in such an eventuality was Advani. “He did it before in (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee’s company. He’ll now have to do it by himself for he alone has the seniority and the stature to confront, persuade or advice the Sangh.”

Is it not a tall order for the 80-plus Advani? “He has little to lose and a lot to gain to be judged better by posterity,” reasoned a young party MP.

He feared BJP’s near-total political isolation without the “reasonable restrictions” Vajpayee could make the
RSS accept — even if grudgingly — during the 1998-2004 NDA rule.

That Advani isn’t Vajpayee is evident from his lack of charisma and mass appeal that helped the latter put the RSS fringe under check. On the positive side, however, he has had success in rallying the feuding second-rung around Sushma and Jaitley’s leadership in the two houses of Parliament.

A quintessential organisation man, Advani, for all his shortcomings, remains the BJP’s best representative on the high table with the Sangh, the government and NDA allies. In politics, experience counts and is irreplaceable.

Is Nagpur listening?