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as an effort to win a "lifetime achievement award"
rather than a faithful autobiography. I totally disagree with
such flippant assessments. My problem arises more from the
fact that I have known the author intimately starting 1989,
making it particularly challenging to be objective. However,
I found myself occasionally disagreeing with some of his formulations
particularly on the subject of secularism, on which he has
expounded at length at various stages in the narrative.
Advani is extremely sensitive to his media image as a hardline
champion of Hindutva and goes to great lengths in this book
to try and disabuse the notion. He expresses pain at the way
the media deliberately overlooked the nuances of the BJP's
and his own expositions on the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. Insisting
that there is nothing remotely communal in his philosophical
understanding of the Indian nation and, despite the savagery
accompanying Partition that uprooted him from his native Sindh,
he has never borne ill will towards Muslims or Pakistan, Advani
makes a full-throated attempt to project himself as "genuinely
secular" as opposed to his "pseudo-secular"
critics.
Those like me who have interacted with him for years would
vouch for that. In the nearly two decades of association I
have not heard him even casually slip into anything that can
remotely be termed anti-Muslim. Accompanying him through eastern
Uttar Pradesh to Ayodhya in that fateful first week of December
1992, I repeatedly heard him appeal to the Muslim leadership
to be considerate towards the deep-seated Hindu belief that
Bhagwan Ram was born at the place where "a dilapidated,
disputed structure now stands". He would fervently assert
that if only the Muslim leaders would relent, BJP volunteers
would respectfully relocate the Babri Masjid to a nearby site
and construct a Ram Mandir that existed on the spot where
Babar's general, Mir Baqi, constructed a mosque.
I was present, along with Swapan Dasgupta and a few other
journalists, on the terrace of Ram Katha Kunj where the BJP-VHP
leadership was assembled on December 6, 1992, appealing to
unruly kar sevaks to descend from the structure's domes.
I vividly recall meeting Advani in the evening after the
structure had been demolished. He sat alone in a ground floor
room with only a flickering candle for company. Characteristically
wringing his hands in despair he bid farewell to us, urging
we exercised caution on the return journey to Lucknow. By
then, news of the Kalyan Singh Government's dismissal had
arrived and the leader of the most spectacular mass mobilisation
India has witnessed since Independence was anticipating arrest.
"This is the saddest day in my life," he told us,
admonishing someone who suggested that the "deed"
could politically benefit the BJP.
I recall driving back to Delhi next day, stopped on the
way by exultant crowds shouting "Jai Shri Ram" and
"Saugandh Ram ki khaatey hain, Mandir wahin banayenge".
On December 7 evening, I wrote a report titled "Control
room that had no control" in the Hindustan Times, whose
Associate Editor I then was. To date, I insist it was the
only faithful report of what the BJP-VHP leadership did in
trying to avert the denouement, without success. But that
article marked the beginning of my own vilification by a section
of media colleagues belonging mainly to the Leftist persuasion.
If, however, I were Advani I would not have bent backwards
to answer this vilification campaign and the canards spread
to demonise him as a closet Fascist. At many points in the
book, I got the impression that, deeply stung by this unfair
portrayal of his persona by sections of the media and academia,
Advani tries a little too hard to put the record straight.
As he himself explains in earlier chapters of the monograph,
Sardar Patel was similarly lampooned "mainly by Communists"
for his resolute championship of the nationalist perspective
and for frequently cautioning Nehru who pursued hopelessly
faulty policies over Kashmir and China. But that misconception
about Patel has not changed even 55 years after his death:
Communist historians are an incorrigible lot.
Advani skillfully brings out the visceral hatred Nehru had
of the RSS and Jana Sangh, which conflicted with Gandhiji's
overt appreciation of the RSS's patriotic role. Advani points
out that Gandhiji addressed an RSS gathering a few days before
his heinous murder. The Mahatma even blessed Syama Prasad
Mookerjee, insisting on his induction into Nehru's first Cabinet
and telling Mookerjee, "Patel is a Hindu-minded person
in the Congress and you are a Congress-minded person in the
Hindu Sabha."
Indeed, the initial chapters of the book make fascinating
reading because of Advani's extraordinarily sharp memory,
which enables him to recall minute details of national events
and the trying circumstances in which the Jana Sangh functioned
in its early years. He has faithfully recounted remarkable
anecdotes relating to his childhood and early youth in once-tranquil
Karachi, his travails (and long travels on camelback in Rajasthan
as RSS pracharak) as a Sangh activist and later, as assistant
to Vajpayee.
He also details events and dialogues that shaped his own
intellectual understanding of India through interactions with
Guruji Golwalkar and more significantly Deendayal Upadhyay
-- men whose contribution to the making of modern India has
been so cruelly distorted by Communist and fellow-traveller
pro-Congress commentators.
I need not go into his description of life in jail during
the Emergency and circumstances leading to the rise and fall
of the Janata Party -- an unwieldy experiment that, in hindsight,
was predestined to fail. Advani has also harshly recalled
the next, equally short-lived, Janata experiment under VP
Singh, whom he does not hesitate to categorise as a hypocrite.
These narratives have particular relevance to understanding
how and why the Congress monolith gradually crumbled, eventually
leading to the formation of the first viable non-Congress
alternative in the form of the BJP-led NDA.
I was particularly struck by his recollection of the Jana
Sangh's first foray into alliance politics with (hold your
breath!) the Communists. In the Delhi Municipal Corporation
elections of 1958, the Congress won 27 seats, Jana Sangh 25
and CPI 8. The CPI agreed to back the Congress in the House
of 80 if Aruna Asaf Ali was made Mayor. This happened, but
the alliance collapsed in a year and the Jana Sangh entered
into a deal with the CPI, agreeing to share the Mayor's post
on a one-year rotational basis (we thought the Mayawati experiment
of 1997 was the first rotational arrangement!). The CPI-Jana
Sangh alliance stood the test of time, Kidar Nath Sahni succeeding
Aruna Asaf Ali as Mayor after the first year of the deal.
Of course, the CPI also joined various Samyukta Vidhayak
Dal Governments in several States, some headed by Jana Sangh
leaders, after the Congress's rout in North India in 1967.
And later, it is well known that the CPI, CPI(M) and BJP supported
the VP Singh regime from outside, sharing a fortnightly dinner
with Janata Dal leaders by way of an informal coordinating
committee meeting.
Advani uses these examples to highlight his party's political
flexibility, pointing out that the BJP has grown because from
its Jana Sangh days it never fell into the "untouchability"
trap. Every such alliance only helped the party expand further,
eventually resulting in its emergence as the alternative pole
of Indian politics and the country's second-biggest political
party.
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