The Prime Minister and L.K. Advani have a special relationship.
L.K. Advani is finally getting the recognition he richly deserves—not so much from the people of India, but also more importantly, from his own party. What is also significant is the timing of the decision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to confer the Bharat Ratna on the party patriarch, coming as it does on the heels of Ram Lalla’s Pran Pratistha ceremony at the new Ram Janmabhoomi temple. The temple could not have happened without L.K. Advani’s rathyatra in the 1980s, which galvanised the entire temple movement. And also spurred the party electorally, taking it from 2 to 84 seats in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections.
Moreover, the Bharatiya Janata Party as we know it today can trace its origin to the Vajpayee-Advani duo, for they are in a sense the Founding Fathers of the BJP when it transformed from the Jan Sangh. They laid the foundation stones of the political party, and Advani especially groomed most of the Gen Next that came to power during the Modi era, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself. Apart from Modi, other leaders like Pramod Mahajan, Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj were groomed by Advani as were Venkaiah Naidu and Ravi Shankar Prasad. Even Smriti Irani joined the BJP during the Advani era.
The Prime Minister and L.K. Advani have a special relationship. Post the 2002 Gujarat riots, when the then Prime Minister, A.B. Vajpayee wanted to sack Modi, who was then Gujarat Chief Minister, it was Advani who argued against it. Later, however, in 2014 when the RSS and other BJP leaders wanted to project Modi as the PM face, initially Advani was against the decision, as he wanted another shot at being the BJP’s PM face. (He had one chance already in 2009 but lost to the UPA candidate Dr Manmohan Singh). However, when the rest of the party insisted, Advani gave way. And the rest, as we know it, is history.
That’s the thing about L.K. Advani. He has always been the backroom boy, the nuts and bolts man, but rarely the face of the party. In 1996, it was he who realised that if the BJP were to come to power it needed the moderate, more acceptable face of Atal Bihari Vajpayee to lead it, and was the first to suggest Vajpayee’s name as the party’s PM face. That gave him the moniker as the eternal yatri, one who was caught between destiny and destination.
He did get the consolation prize of being Deputy Prime Minister towards the fag end of the NDA government, but the main prize remained elusive. It was this that led him to make a desperate move and reinvent himself as he did with the “Jinnah moment”, when he went to Pakistan in June 2005 and lauded the founder of Pakistan as secular and “an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”. That reinvention did not go down either with the hawks in the Sangh Parivar nor even with the NDA allies, who did not buy this secular makeover.
But now, in the twilight of his political career, belated recognition has come his way, and the BJP patriarch can step into the limelight for the one last bow—for an acknowledgement that is richly deserved.