Narendra Modi’s march continues as Advani gets in his own way
For a while now, strange stories about Lal Krishna Advani have circulated on Delhi’s political grapevine. Stories of how visitors to his house in Prithviraj Road are obliged to watch the latest documentaries made by his daughter before they can discuss anything political. Stories of how he has taken to bursting into tears for no reason. Stories of how he seems deeply embittered about life. Stories of how he surrounds himself with courtiers who praise him all day long and how this has led to him becoming more than slightly deluded about his future political career. I have listened to these stories with sadness because on a personal level I have always had the deepest respect for Advani. I was very touched that after my book Durbar came out at the end of last year he called me and told me how much he had enjoyed reading it. Even when I have been in total disagreement with his politics, as I was during his Rath Yatra days, I have never lost respect for him. Can I say this any more with honesty?
No, I cannot, and I feel bad admitting it because even as I do so, images of him as he once was drift before my eyes. I remember him as he was when he first became a Minister in the Janata Party Government in 1977. I remember him from travels on his various yatras and I remember once being on a small aeroplane with him when the pilot lost his bearings and it seemed for a while that we would never find the landing strip on which we were to land for an election rally. In the years that I have known him I have been impressed by his qualities of humility, integrity and decency. Qualities that are rare in Indian politicians so when he did what he did after the BJP’s decision at its Goa conclave to appoint Narendra Modi as head of its election campaign committee, I felt almost personally betrayed. I found it hard to believe that he could have gone out of his way to destroy the political party that he had led for so long.
And, for what? After one day of hysterical panel discussions on our news channels, and a few hours of schadenfreude in Congress circles, Advani took back his resignation letter and the story died. When political commentators sat down to examine the fallout of Advani’s resignation, what they mostly concluded was that he had done more harm to himself than to his former protégé, Narendra Modi. Since there is no retirement age in Indian politics, he will undoubtedly continue to be an elder statesman in the BJP and continue to be seen in the political arenas of Delhi but he will no longer be taken seriously. Meanwhile, the damage that he sought to do to Modi has been done to the BJP and instead of getting into campaign mode senior leaders will have to spend most of their time on damage control.
This will not be easy. Modi is hated by most journalists working in the national media so they have taken great pleasure in pronouncing that if he can have such a polarising effect within his own party, he will certainly destroy the NDA (National Democratic Alliance). No sooner did Advani take back his resignation letter than the English news channels began to speculate about when Nitish Kumar would withdraw the Janata Dal (United) from the alliance. There is the additional problem that most political pundits from academia are even more leftist than us hacks so they hate Modi even more than we do. They say this is because of what happened in Gujarat in 2002 but you only need to scratch a little to discover that beneath that veneer lies the real reason. They hate Modi most of all because he has been articulating an economic vision for India that is the direct opposite of the one that the Congress Party has followed for most of its years in power.
They hate the way in which he talks about aiming for a prosperous India instead of just one in which poverty removal is the goal. And, to demolish his ideas they spout so-called statistics that seek to prove that Gujarat has not done as well as Modi says it has. Any casual visitor to Gujarat cannot fail to notice the new roads and the new prosperity in the villages but academics rarely bother to travel out of Delhi so they base their opinions on information that they claim is from the Planning Commission. Modi’s political opponents choose to attack him differently by asserting as often as possible that he has been chief minister of a state that has always been prosperous so no credit should go to him.
Modi is the first major political leader since Jawaharlal Nehru who has articulated a clear economic vision. It is a vision that is almost the exact opposite of the one that Nehru believed in and it is this that attracts young people in our cities because it is a vision of prosperity in which he emphasizes governance rather than government. Indian businessmen are drawn to Gujarat exactly because he has succeeded in implementing his ideas in that state so that it has become a place that is investor friendly at a time when investors are fleeing our shores in search of friendlier climes.
To articulate his vision in the coming election campaign Modi will need the full support of the BJP’s workers and its organisational machinery. What Advani has managed to do, albeit temporarily, is to disable this machinery by creating the impression that there is a deep rift within it over the leadership of Modi. The truth is that the rank and file of the party is solidly behind Modi and it was because of this that the BJP’s senior leaders were forced to elevate him. If Advani had stood his ground and attempted to break the BJP the only people who would have gone with him would have been a handful of aged leaders who can barely win their own seats but now that he has taken his resignation letter back we will never know for sure. In any case, the damage he has really done is to himself. No longer will it be easy for ordinary BJP workers to see him as the patriarch that he has been revered as despite leading the party into defeat in two successive general elections in 2004 and 2009.