An image can be a ticket to power or a political trap. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s enigmatic image made him a Prime Minister for eight years. Lal Krishna Advani’s established image may not help him emulate Vajpayee’s example. Is Advani’s just released autobiography (My Country, My Life) going to supply an antidote to his supposedly alliance-unfriendly image?

Vajpayee has been “the right man in the wrong party” to parties and politicians that wanted to ally with him or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and save their secular identity as well. As a BJP ideologue and probably much of the “parivar” (the far right “family”) saw him, he was a “mukota” (mask) that helped him cobble a coalition with a parliamentary majority.

Advani, on the other hand, has not had such a fuzzy image to win him fair-weather friends. His has been a fixed identity of far-right firmness. If the media has called him “a Hindutva hardliner”, former BJP president Venkaiah Naidu gave him the title of Louha Purush (Iron Man) and the other party titan the less intimidating label of Vikas Purush (Development Man).

Over the past couple of years, however, Advani has been engaged in more and more image makeover attempts. For sometime, it seemed, the “Hindutva warrior” was trying to become another Vajpayee. He followed some deft moves designed to assure the far right that he had not deserted them. Currently, after his designation by the BJP as the Prime Minister-in-waiting, he seemed determined again to sport the halo of Vajpayee, now reportedly too poor in health to stage a political return.

Some otherwise astute observers assumed that the autobiography was part of this attempt. A prominent television anchor, in fact, asked Advani in an interview if this was not so. The leader did not deny his directly, though he deprecated the “obsession in a section of the media” with the issue.

This made the columnist not a little curious. Had Advani gone and done it at last? Had the man, whom one had seen wait at an airport reading American pulp fiction instead of a politically more correct Indian epic or a volume of Vajpayee’s poetry, decided to reveal his real self and not to pursue his politics of communal mobilisation between the covers of his autobiography? Had he shed his ideological baggage as too heavy to carry at the hustings as leader of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), including parties that want a Vajpayee-type coalition and their share of minority votes as well?

This and a hundred other questions made this columnist buy the book with his hard-earned money. Alas, I was short-changed. The autobiography, however, failed to reveal a startlingly new Advani. The attempt it represented was, actually, exactly the opposite of what some experts had expected.

Advani does not avoid the controversy over his tribute to Mohammad Ali Jinnah on Pakistan’s soil, which culminated in his resignation from the BJP’s presidentship in December 2005. “I have no regrets”, proclaims the chapter heading but what he has done over pages and pages on the worst trauma of his political life is to try and make abject amends. Says he: “I had only quoted from a largely-forgotten speech of Jinnah...I had done so after formally inaugurating, at the request of the Pakistan government, a project for the restoration of the Katas Raj temples...it was the first Hindu temple ever to be restored after the creation of Pakistan. I felt sad that some in my own ideological fraternity had failed to appreciate the significance of this event.”

The defence of the tribute to Jinnah as a trade-off for temple restoration comes as a fitting climax to the story of someone who had started off as a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the patriarch of the “parivar”, at the age of 14 and claims to have never faltered in his far right beliefs.

Advani has also been at pains to stress his differences with Vajpayee, even while paying fulsome tribute to the former prime minister. The two examples of “significant difference” cited in the book are obviously intended as tributes to Advani’s own record as a “Hindutva hardliner”. Says he:”He (Vajpayee) had some reservations about the BJP getting directly associated with the Ayodhya movement (which led to the infamous demolition of the Babri Masjid). But being a thorough democrat by conviction and temperament, and always willing to respect the consensus among colleagues, Atalji accepted the collective decision of the party.”

“The second instance”, he adds, “pertains to the time when communal violence broke out in Gujarat...the Gujarat government, and in particular, Chief Minister Narendra Modi attracted severe condemnation...the demand for Modi’s resignation raised by the opposition parties had reached a crescendo. Some people within the BJP and the ruling NDA coalition also had begun to think that Modi should be asked to quit. However, my view on this matter was totally different.”

As for Vajpayee, Advani recalls: “I knew he favoured Modi’s resignation. And he knew that I disfavoured it.” At one point, during discussions on the issue, Vajpayee reportedly said:? “Kam se kam isteefa ka offer to karte” (Modi should have at least offered to resign). Advani’s admiration for Modi comes alive in the description of a subsequent BJP national executive meeting (April 2002) where the Chief Minister said: “...I take responsibility for what has happened in my state. I am ready to tender my resignation.”

In Advani’s ecstatic words: “The moment Modi said that, the meeting hall reverberated with thunderous response from the hundred-odd members of the party’s top decision-making body and special invitees: ‘Isteefa mat do, isteefa mat do!’ (don’t resign, don’t resign) I then separately ascertained the views of senior leaders of the party on this matter. Each one of them, without exception, said, ‘No, he must not resign’. Some, like the late Pramod Mahajan (subsequently murdered, allegedly by his brother), were more emphatic. ‘Savaal hi nahin uth-ta’ (the question of his quitting simply does not arise)”.

Advani does not specify that Vajpayee fell in line again, but has indicated in the book promotion interviews that Modi, in his view, must be the party’s next prime minister-in-waiting.

Advani also speaks, if only indirectly, of a more serious difference with Vajpayee. After talking of his visit to Washington as India’s Home Minister in January 2002 and taking credit for demanding US assistance in getting “global terrorist” Dawood Ibrahim deported to India from Pakistan, Advani says he “started facing hurdles” in this regard on his return.

“When (Colin) Powell came to India, I was unpleasantly surprised to know that I was not among the Indian officials meeting him. The PMO’s (Prime Minister’s Office) explanation, from what I gathered, was that since I had met the US Secretary of State only ten days earlier in Washington, there was no need for me to meet him again. It bewildered me.” This is widely seen as an allusion to the role of then National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra, considered close to Vajpayee.

The future Prime Minister’s Office, the book suggests, will play a very different role on issues similar to Ayodhya, Gujarat, or “global terror”, if the shadow prime minister’s status acquires official substance. Advani’s autobiography should sound an alarm.