The Hindu : The Advani problem

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Thursday, Aug 21, 2003

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The Advani problem

By Harish Khare

Mr. Advani's loyalty has never been in doubt; the problem is of an ambition unfulfilled.

THREE DAYS ago, on the first day of the no-confidence motion debate in the Lok Sabha, Lal Krishna Advani put in an amazing performance before a national audience. He was fielded as the lead speaker from the Government side and his job was to display a veteran parliamentarian's wares. Instead, his friends and admirers watched in surprise as he reduced himself to quoting approvingly Arun Shourie and Amitabh Bachchan. It was perhaps understandable that the Deputy Prime Minister should have relied on the evidence of a junior ministerial colleague to make the Government's case. Mr. Advani has given little evidence so far of understanding economics and predictably got easily swept off his feet by Mr. Shourie's syrupy polemics. In any case, he has always been prone to be impressed with those who can make clever use of the English language. Mr. Advani is entitled to his admiration for Arun Shourie.

But Amitabh Bachchan? It is this actor who gets quoted by a leader whose acolytes tout him as the brightest strategist, a swadeshi visionary and the most original desi thinker since Deen Dayal Upadhayaya.

Admittedly, anybody can have a bad day at the office. More than an indifferent parliamentary performance, there was more unhappy news for Mr. Advani. The latest India Today-ORG Marg survey reveals that only three per cent of voters think that he "will make the best Prime Minister.'' Here the Deputy Prime Minister has company; the Samajwadi Party leader, Mulayam Singh Yadav, and the Nationalist Congress Party boss, Sharad Pawar, also secure three per cent approval ratings. The Deputy Prime Minister is only a point above the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Mayawati, and the former West Bengal Chief Minister, Jyoti Basu. He is way behind the Congress leader, Sonia Gandhi, who got a 25 per cent approval rating. He trails way, way behind his own leader, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who notches up a 37 per cent preference rating.

It is possible for the Advani acolytes to argue that Mr. Vajpayee's 37 per cent vote is basically a "BJP" support constituency and once the Prime Minister is not there on the scene, this "atal constituency" would naturally and automatically transfer its affection and allegiance to the Deputy Prime Minister. It is this calculation that keeps Mr. Advani going.

It also means that the crucial structural problem at the core of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) arrangement remains intact: how to accommodate Mr. Advani's entirely legitimate prime ministerial ambitions in the current configuration of personalities and political parties. He knows it, as does everybody else in and out of the BJP, that as and when the regime change takes place it will also be a time of generational change; after an 80-plus Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the party cannot possibly be settling for a nearly-80 Lal Krishna Advani. The problem, then, can be further redefined: how to accommodate Mr. Advani's prime ministerial ambitions when there is no prospect of Mr. Vajpayee retiring from the scene? This is the crux of the existential crisis at the heart of the ruling coalition, and it has hobbled the NDA regime with unhappy consequences.

It was about a year ago that Mr. Advani was elevated as Deputy Prime Minister. He heads any number of the Group of Ministers (GoM); sometimes he gets to preside over the BJP parliamentary party; he has an Air Force plane available to him for travelling around the country; and, in the capital, roads are closed for him, a la the Prime Minister. Yet, all these trappings still do not make Mr. Advani a Prime Minister. For example, he acted during his Washington visit, like the heir apparent, making many American policy-makers believe that he could swing the "troops for Iraq" decision. Frustration piles upon frustration, with no solution in sight.

A year ago when he was designated as Deputy Prime Minister, Mr. Advani argued that Mr. Vajpayee had merely formalised an informal power equation and in the process the Prime Minister had given the lie to all those ugly rumours of differences between him and his deputy. Ingenious but not credible. After all, rumours of differences between him and Mr. Vajpayee were doing the rounds because the Home Minister had prime ministerial ambitions; the differences persist because those ambitions remain unfulfilled. To be fair, Mr. Advani does try to play the loyal deputy. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad and others, in fact, accuse him of having become the Prime Minister's loyal follower. Mr. Advani's loyalty has never been in doubt; the problem is of an ambition unfulfilled.

In fact, in recent months the country twice witnessed how unfulfilled ambition created difficulties and had firmly to be dealt with. First, it was the BJP president, Venkaiah Naidu, who was pressed into service to come up with the "twin-mascot" formulation; when the Prime Minister was out of the country, Mr. Naidu was assigned the job of proclaiming that since the party was doubly blessed with a Vikas Purush (development man, that is Mr. Vajpayee) and a Loh Purush (the iron man, that is Mr. Advani), therefore in the next Lok Sabha elections the party would seek votes in the name of these two giants. The ploy was so obvious that for once the Prime Minister had to give up his reticence and had to publicly "fix" his deputy.

The second time it was Mr. Advani himself who made a direct move by talking of "early elections," all in the garb of an ill-thought "synchronisation" of all Lok Sabha-Assembly polls thesis. Mr. Advani's prime cheer-leader, Mr. Naidu, picked up the hint and went to town about early elections. The calculation was that the leadership chess-board would probably get re-set after an election. It was again left to the Prime Minister publicly to disown his deputy; at a BJP rally in Jaipur, Mr. Vajpayee put an end to all such talk of early elections by declaring that the Lok Sabha polls would take place as per the schedule.

Yet the problem persists. The Government remains divided at the core; most Cabinet Ministers, especially those from the BJP, find themselves having to figure out the Advani putsch time-table; some of them have learnt the cost of making the mistake of believing that Mr. Vajpayee's political demise was only a few weeks away. Individual miscalculations aside, coherence and competence have deluded the Government; it is a different matter that this built-in structural weakness has been palmed off as a commendable collective decision-making. Witness, for example, the Advani-blessed delay in the matter of disinvestment in the "strategic" oil sector; a needless waste of three months in a crucial area of governance.

But the trouble is that in this standoff, there is going to be no winner and no loser, as the two principals have got used to resigned tolerance and accommodation. Mr. Vajpayee is no saint, nor so disciplined a swayamsevak that he would opt for `sanyas' the moment the RSS bosses asked him to move over. On the other hand, Mr. Advani cannot get rid of the "charge-sheet" opprobrium in a hurry; no amount of explaining (in terms of a `glorious' Ayodhya movement) will change the fact of legal entanglements. A charge-sheet is a charge-sheet.

The voters can take care of the problem by simply ensuring that the NDA is not in a position to form the next government; should the BJP fail to cross the 150 benchmark in the Lok Sabha, it would be curtains for Mr. Vajpayee and then Mr. Advani can easily assume the mantle of Leader of the Opposition and live happily ever after to fight another prime ministerial battle.

If the NDA comes back to power, it will largely be because of Mr. Vajpayee's popularity, which gets translated into a value-addition of five to six percentage points to the BJP's electoral support base. Once the electorate has had its say, can Mr. Vajpayee be relied upon to hand over the baton to his dear deputy? Or can Mr. Advani count on those very forces and individuals which got him elevated as Deputy Prime Minister to tell Mr. Vajpayee to make way for the younger man? It is this built-in but unresolved dichotomy that will continue to torment the Centre.

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