Advani – victim of his ambition 

The confidence motion adopted by the Lok Sabha has done more than putting the 123 nuclear agreement on rail. It has freed the UPA of the Left and given more freedom to the Prime Minister but it has contrary to expectations resulted in putting the Leader of the Opposition in poor light. It has also catapulted Mayawati as a major contender in future. 

The jury is still out if the drama of the three BJP parliamentarians who flashed wads of thousand rupee notes on the floor of the Lok Sabha had done it as a ploy to postpone the vote or was it a genuine attempt to bring focus on the degenerated politics of the day. By then it was obvious to observers that the UPA was most likely to win the confidence vote and it was also clear that the political agenda had veered away from the grasp of the BJP. It was this party that would have gained most from a postponed vote.

By then it was also known to the whole country that its politicians and elected members had other priorities than working for the welfare for those elect them. The rot in the quality of the politics had already been exposed in the nineties and not just by that infamous JMM bribery case but by the kind of blatantly communal politics played by the BJP. The rot in fact had started much earlier and was first sought to be pinned when late Rajiv Gandhi called for freeing politics from the hold of the power brokers. He had failed and was also ultimately a victim of the power of those brokers. But simultaneously the BJP had found the Ram Mandir agenda and under the leadership of Lal Krishna Advani it had found its way to the center stage of politics riding the Ram Rath.

It had in 1989 reached the center stage but not the corridor of power that it aimed for and that is where the party continued to use the communal card further. The divisive politics of the BJP which was as unscrupulous as the politics of the then Congress to stay in power had really set the stage for what the country witnessed during the confidence vote of UPA. These are inter related as while the MPs have been accused of indulging in corruption with impunity because of the cover provided to them by the Supreme Court judgment in the JMM bribery case the stalwart of the BJP and the real architect of BJP’s march to power earlier, Lal Krishna Advani displayed excessive hurry to fulfill his ambition of becoming the Prime Minister of the country.

It needs to be remembered that when the BJP was reduced to a single digit party in the parliament after it had a brief and fruitless liaison with Gandhian socialism under the leadership of Atal Behari Vajpayee it was Advani’s aggressive posturing of Hindutava agenda that set it on the road to power. But since leading a party to power on a divisive agenda among the disillusioned people is one thing and becoming a Prime Minister of as complex and diverse a country as India is another, he was asked by the wise men who control BJP to wait and make way for the more acceptable figure of Atal Behari Vajpayee. Thus many believe that he suffers from the effects of thwarted ambition.

Thus when BJP did come to power Advani was relegated though his and his radical supporters ego was some what assuaged by elevating him to the post of Deputy Prime Minister. The shock decimation of the BJP in 2004 apparently paid put to the ambition of this stalwart. Meanwhile time has been flying and he is not getting any younger. He understands that and therefore there is nothing very surprising when some of his actions suggest that he indeed is a man in a hurry.

One only needs to look at the manner in which BJP in general and Advani in particular have treated Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh. Collectively they seem to be suggesting that the office which Singh holds legitimately belongs to Advani and he is a squatter. It has been difficult for them to accept that while the likes of Vajpayee and Advani have spent a lifetime roughing out with the people in the akhara of democracy, Dr. Manmohan Singh has been handed the office by Sonia Gandhi for he is too docile not to do her bidding. This explains why he has been dubbed by Advani sometimes as the weakest and at others as the most nikamma Prime Minister.

After suffering these barbs for four years the Prime Minister finally alluded to them in his speech that was not allowed to be made but was tabled in the house. It was then that he also said that Advani had made three unsuccessful attempts to topple his government and when he added that he should be changing his astrologer the Prime Minister was linking the three attempts to the fact that in his eighties Advani knows he has very little time and hence the hurry to become the Prime Minister!

The mild mannered that Prime Minister Singh is he could not have twisted the knife more cruelly. It is difficult to say if the remark has deeply hurt Advani but what it has done is that his naked ambition now has been exposed. Not just by the remark but the manner in which the whole issue of the confidence vote was handled by Advani.

There is no denying that on the eve of the tabling of the confidence vote the stock of UPA was extremely low. Not only was there uncertainty about winning but also the burden of having to take support of parties that were not reliable. In addition the spiraling inflation and increasing cost of living had become so back breaking that the aam adami the mainstay of the Congress was believed to have been alienated from it. In case the government fell and elections were held in the near future there was little chance of the UPA coming back to power.

Advani was heavily banking on these factors. He was preparing for the next election and then becoming the Prime Minister. His whole speech in the Lok Sabha suggested this. The confidence motion had been placed on account of the nuclear agreement with the USA but all the he said was that the NDA would renegotiate it. The rest of the speech was devoted to all those subjects, including the controversy raised over the land transfer to Amarnath Shrine Board, that were likely to become a poll issue if it was to be held in the near future.

What he had not bargained for was the possibility that the government might actually survive. In that case there would be no possibility of an early poll and who knows if the same favorable conditions would prevail next year or not. The fact that the opposition had become restive and intolerant on the second day of the debate was the first indication that there was something wrong with the calculations of the opposition. This explains the ruckus created by the BJP and the BSP till finally the dirt really hit the roof of the Lo Sabha.

When the three MPs of the BJP rushed to the well with a bag and notes of currency none knew of what was actually happening but as Advani later told the media, the trio had apprised him of the alleged bribery and he had given them the permission to stage that shameful drama in the Lok Sabha.

It is this single act of the three BJP MPs and the fact that they were actually permitted to do what they did by a person who was a serious candidate for the job of the Prime Minister that gives an insight into that man. It not only does not inspire confidence in the man but also leaves him open to the charge that has also been referred to by the Prime Minister in his reply that he is a man in hurry to be the Prime Minister. Considering his age not many would be disinclined to disbelieve this.

The accusation of attempt to bribe the MPs is now with the Speaker as it should have been in the first place. Reports suggest that the Speaker Somnath Chatterjee confronted the BJP stalwart with the question as to why he as a person who had held the office of the Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of India not think of asking his MPs to report the matter to the Speaker instead of putting the democracy and the country to shame. Advani is believed to have said that the events moved so fast that he did not have any control over the circumstances.

If this report is correct then it is a serious matter as it suggests that here is a man who has been projected as the Prime Ministerial candidate by the leading opposition who does possess the leadership qualities that control the pace of the events around him and who allows his self to be overwhelmed by the pace of the circumstances. This is the man who will be holding the right to exercise the discretion of using the nuclear weapons. He is, in other words suggesting that there is a possibility that in a situation of crisis he is more likely to allow people around him to push and jostle him into taking a stance that is against his better judgment.

It would be preposterous to suggest that with the vast experience behind him Advani did not know the consequences of the drama of flashing wads of notes. He knew fully well the damage it would cause to the institution of democracy and parliament and yet when apprised of the events he allowed the non entities to hold the center stage. The question is why?

Could it be possible that by that hour the BJP and its leaders were fully aware of their inability to muster enough votes against the motion? Is it possible that having made futile attempts to win votes had by then focused on doing a sting operation so that whenever there was an election they stood on a high moral ground? Having suffered the consequences of their own Bangaru Laxman they wanted to use the same weapon to decimate opposition and hence the hobnobbing with a television news channel. It is now also known that every detail of the drama had been carefully choreographed so that as the debate moved towards its climax the flashing of wads of notes and the airing of the sting tapes took place. However, there has been a disconnect between the two and the full picture will emerge only when the facts are known.

However, these events do reiterate that the party that was doing all this has an octogenarian leader who believed that these events would lead to his achieving the life long desire of becoming the Prime Minister. There is no other explanation for his willy-nilly going along with the game plan of those who had little respect for democracy or its institutions and who after weighing the pros and cons opted for the limelight of the cameras rather than the dignity of the House. Advani might say that the circumstances moved too fast but the fact is that he allowed them to overwhelm him because he him self was the prisoner of his over vaulting ambition. History will show that he is not the first person to have thus succumbed to ambition with unpleasant consequences.