Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday announced the decision of the government to confer Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award, on LK Advani. The prime minister underlined that Advani is “one of the most respected statesmen of our times, while his contribution to the development of India is monumental”. The decision of the government has come close on the heels of the consecration of the idol of Ram Lalla in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh.
Advani, 96, was deputy prime minister in the council of ministers headed by the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He was also a Union Minister for Home Affairs. While Advani had a strong presence in the Vajpayee Cabinet, the BJP patriarch is widely credited with single-handedly turning Indian politics on its head by giving mortal blows to the politics of secularism.
In recognition of the contributions of Advani, the Modi government is possibly acknowledging that the BJP patriarch wrote the script of Indian politics on which the incumbent prime minister built the grand edifice of the saffron outfit to command dominance in Parliament and several states. Modi arguably built his image of ‘Hindu Hridaysamrat’ based on the grounds laid by Advani through his ‘Ram Janmabhoomi Yatra’ from Somnath to Ayodhya.
With the consecration of the idol of Ram Lalla, Advani saw the fulfilment of his ‘mission’. His articulation of ‘pseudo-secularism’, a mainstay in the political currents of the 1990s, also saw fulfilment with the advent of Modi, as now the rivals of the BJP have, to a great extent, pushed to the backburner the past practice of appealing to Muslims during elections, fearing the Hindu backlash. By conferring on Advani the Bharat Ratna, the prime minister is further appealing to the emotional quotient of BJP workers in a poll year.
While Advani was an RSS ‘pracharak’ in his early years, he took his political plunge in the national capital and only entered married life on the exhortations of the leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS). The ‘Atal-Advani jodi’ of the BJP brought the party to power in the tumultuous years of coalition politics. Advani was the Hindutva poster boy, and thus he had to cede space to Vajpayee to lead the first BJP-led NDA government at the Centre owing to coalition compulsions, as the BJP's allies didn't want a hardliner in the PM's post.
But Advani was the saffron guardian in the Vajpayee government who kept a hawk eye on all areas of governance while being credited with sending back former Pakistan President General (Retd) Pervez Musharaff disappointed from the Agra Summit in 2001.
Advani is one of the founders of the BJP as well as the foremost builder of the party. His knack for spotting talent is legendary, and the leading lights of the last two decades of politics such as PM Modi, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitely, Rajnath Singh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Vasundhara Raje, Raman Singh, and others attest to his organisational leadership skills. Indeed, the only blemish was that Advani fell out with the saffron worldview of Pakistan by speaking favourably of Mohammed Ali Jinnah while on a tour of that country.
(The author is a senior journalist based in New Delhi. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.)
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