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Advani is the man to watch

Lal Krishan Advani has never hidden his admiration for Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Free India's first deputy prime minister, but at least in one aspect he will not want to emulate the latter.

Unlike the Sardar, or the other five deputy prime ministers since then -- Morarji Desai, Y B Chavan, Charan Singh, Jagjivan Ram and Devi Lal -- Advani will want to break the hex and go on to become prime minister.

Not a bad ambition to nurse, and nor will Advani be the only one harbouring it. Every politician, whether at the municipal, taluka or parliamentary level, must surely be driven by the hope that someday, he will make it as the country's chief executive -- aspiration, after all, being second nature to human beings. But what set the home minister apart from his tribe was that his was not an idle nurturing of an impossible dream. Ever since he single-handedly powered the Bharatiya Janata Party from a mere two MPs in the 1984 Lok Sabha to the pre-eminent position it came to occupy post-Congress, he could not remain content with merely the second most important job in the country.

The route he took to achieve the impossible -- the rath yatra -- may not have pleased the purists; it certainly did not please the ragtag bunch of regional allies who refused to play ball the first time the BJP emerged single largest party, in 1996. By the time the next election came around, in 1998, everyone had changed -- the BJP, which agreed to bury its divisive agenda, and the allies.

The choice of Vajpayee over Advani reflected, and suited, this changed environment. At best, his tenure as party president had been lackluster. And, by the time the Babri Masjid campaign came to a head, he had more or less decided upon a less stressful life, as evidenced in his famous jaayen to jaayen kahaan? interview to a periodical around that time.

It is strange how fate takes the most reluctant, unprepared individual and thrusts upon him an office that thousands hanker after. Witness P V Narasimha Rao and H D Deve Gowda before him. Advani may have been the BJP's man of destiny, but Vajpayee was fortune's favourite.

In any other political party, this was a sure recipe for revolt, split and the like. In that sense, both Advani and Vajpayee represent the last of a dying generation of politicians who place party interests above the individual's. Perhaps it comes with being associated for most of their lives with an organization which had little chance of coming to power, so abdication came naturally to them. Contrast them with contemporary members of the same party like Shatrughan Sinha, Sahib Singh Verma, Keshubhai Patel et al making their preferences for office public, and you know how corrupting power can get.

Four years is a long, long time in politics. Friends become foes, adversaries join hands, and principles are modified if not jettisoned. Thus, the same allies of the BJP who resisted Advani's pre-eminence in 1998, 1999 and in 2000 have now all come around to accepting his virtual coronation.

Has the BJP changed in these four years? No. It still remains committed to its basic agenda, and it is only a question of time when the old chestnuts are pulled out once again.

So why have the allies changed? Is it because they have been lulled into a comfort zone by their years in office? Or are they just too concerned with their own survival in the next round of elections to bother about anything else? Perhaps, but there is another reason too.

Which is that the BJP has been too smart for its allies. It thought nothing of conceding the battle to win the war -- and while the allies have rejoiced at winning in the short term, it has played for keeps. There have been a couple of allies -- like the Telugu Desam Party -- who have seen through the BJP's gameplan and chose to remain comparatively unsullied by sitting out of the government. But the others have compromised their position -- perhaps even their votebank -- by going along with the BJP without demur.

Is the Sonia Gandhi-led Congress an option? Unlikely. At least the BJP's allies seem to think she stands no chance at the hustings, facing against the BJP. If they ever felt she was a vote-winner, the roles in the 13th Lok Sabha would have been reversed long ago. And the BJP knows it, and is acting from a position of strength.

The contours of the next election are clearly before us. As in 1999 Vajpayee would have preferred a post-war (or near-war) election, but that was not to be, probably because the saber rattling with Pakistan was never meant to go all the way. And just as well. While a near-war is fine, an all out war won't not have any full stops. And conventional wisdom has it that body bags and vote seeking don't always go together.

The injection of comparative youth in the BJP vide Venkaiah Naidu, Arun Jaitley; the appointment of Vinay Katiyar as party chief in Uttar Pradesh; the proposal to send Uma Bharti to Madhya Pradesh -- all of it are accompaniments to Advani's elevation. Together, they indicate a new assertiveness that puts an end the namby-pambyness of the Vajpayee era. And judging by Naidu's reaction to the home minister visiting party office once a week the party is gung-ho about these changes.

Certainly, the BJP will fight the next general election under the National Democratic Alliance banner -- with the usual give and take of allies, some of who will go, to be replaced by others. But it will not be the BJP of 1998 and 1999 which went to the electorate a little apologetic about its past. What the BJP will seek is a majority on its own, on the basis of its performance in office, so that it will not be trammeled by its allies whose interests it does not always share.

The BJP has also virtually signaled who its prime ministerial candidate will be for the next Lok Sabha election which are technically more than two years away. That is enough time for Advani to appear to shed his image of a hardliner and cloak himself with acceptability. Enough time to convince the allies of his bona fides. And enough time to gain acceptability.

But one doesn't have to wait that long to see if the changes are working on the ground. There are any number state elections -- including in MP, Rajasthan and Delhi -- before the general election that will indicate which way the wind is blowing. Or if the BJP will reap the whirlwind for its past.

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