LK Advani: From leader to rebel in last eight years

NEW DELHI: For the last decade or so, senior BJP leader LK Advani has been at odds with the party he helped build from scratch. On Monday morning that reached its climax but just when did this distance start to build and become unbridgeable? In 2005, Advani as president of BJP took a trip to Pakistan. Here he planned to make a shift from the hawkish Hindutva icon, to a leader of a more Nehruvian mold.


In Karachi, he visited the mausoleum for Pakistan founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah and extolled the secular vision that Jinnah had for Pakistan and its denouement. The remarks set off a Sangh storm, with one senior BJP member calling up an Advani aide to know whether Advani wanted to fight elections in India or Pakistan. The RSS sent its senior organisation man Sanjay Joshi to the Delhi airport to demand that Advani take back his remarks. Advani refused, and was made to resign as party chief.

“That was the beginning of a trust deficit between Advani and the RSS, with the rest of BJP fast exposed as either unable or unwilling to take on the ideological mothership,” said a senior party leader. Dr Pralay Kanungo of JNU terms it as the day Advani’s authority started eroding. “Even Vajpayee was at odds with the Sangh, but in a different way. The RSS was shrewd enough to recognise his political potential, and he maintained a dignified silence on things he didn’t agree with them”.

Though Advani and the Sangh managed to patch up for Advani to be declared the NDA’s PM candidate, it was an uneasy alliance. Used to being the last word in the party, Advani found that deference to the Sangh had grown. In the case of Karnataka and the scams surrounding BJP’s first government in the south, Advani went public with his displeasure with the continuation of CM BS Yedyurappa, in contravention to the official stance taken by the party. He also spoke openly about BJP not inspiring hope despite the anti-incumbency against Congress.

“People are disillusioned with the Congress, but don’t find much hope in the BJP either,” he said at a party convention in Delhi. He blogged that the next polls, could throw up a non-BJP, non-Congress government at the Centre, not exactly fighting words. The RSS, as concerned as the rest of the party with electoral success had by then zeroed in on Narendra Modi as its big white hope.

In Goa, over the weekend the party and the Sangh made their choice clear, with no separate campaign committee for the state elections headed by Nitin Gadkari, as a face saver for Advani.

“The resignation is not a question of committees or these issues, it’s about the fundamental way in which the party at present is dealing with the RSS. Can you fix that?” Advani reportedly asked party president Rajnath Singh, when asked to reconsider his resignation. The answer wasn’t exactly what Advani would have wanted.