India

End of the line for Advani, next stop ‘Sanyas’?

Won’t be PM candidate in 2014

After a crushing defeat by the Congress, BJP sources are indicating that their Prime Ministerial candidate LK Advani is likely to take “Sanyas” (retirement) from active politics.

Advani has proposed to quit as the leader of opposition after the results but the party is trying to persuade him against this decision. Talking to media persons, former BJP president Venkaiah Naidu neither confirmed nor denied whether Advani will lead the party in Parliament saying that, “he will keep on guiding us.”

It is almost certain that Advani will have to shoulder the responsibility of the debacle as the whole campaign of BJP was centred around him with the slogan “Mazboot Neta-Nirnayak Sarkar” (Strong Leader, Decisive Government).

Advani’s high-tech campaign through all the major websites to woo young voters of India is also seems to have been rejected.

There is not much resentment against Advani in the party as senior leaders Rajnath Singh and Narendra Modi even went on to project him as the party’s PM candidate in 2014 elections also during the poll campaign.

With age not on his side, it seems people were not either. Verdict 2009 seems to have dashed the prime ministerial hopes of BJP’s ‘iron man’ forever.

The 15th Lok Sabha election was arguably his last attempt to get the nation’s top job in the twilight of his nearly five-decade-old political career, after being in the shadow of Atal Bihari Vajpayee for long.

Advani – the “symbol of the BJP’s ideological battle” as some in the Hindu rightwing fraternity call him – may be the clear winner from his Gandhinagar constituency but lost the bigger fight that he, his family and party members heavily invested in.

With the rival Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) staging spectacular wins, it may well be the end of the road for Advani, whose Somnath to Ayodhya-Ram Janmabhoomi movement had put the right-of-centre party into political reckoning.

It was Advani who had taken charge of the BJP’s Hindutva campaign, with the Ayodhya movement culminating in the destruction of the Babri mosque in 1992 and putting the party in the political reckoning within less than a decade of returning just two MPs in 1984.

But he lost the script somewhere in the compulsion of coalition politics that catapulted Vajpayee – the party’s moderate face – to the post of prime minister, with Advani as the number two.

His later attempts to reposition himself into the secular mode left the BJP leader with no clear identity of his own, some say. It started off with his 2005 Pakistan visit where he praised Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

In his new avatar, Advani, who also put the cause of the Ram temple on the backburner, spared no effort to reach out to every nook and cranny of the country, travelling more than 60,000-odd km, braving the sweltering heat with temperatures hovering around 40 degrees celsius.

The octogenarian even lifted weights and pitched himself in cyberspace. His backroom boys worked round the clock, while the BJP leader also found time to interact with young and first-time voters on his website.

Advani made a strong case for himself by his continuous tirade against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, calling him weak and subservient to Congress president Sonia Gandhi. But it didn’t work.

“This is clearly a vote for Manmohan Singh, who is clean, capable, educated and intelligent; no other leader, including Advani, has these qualities. Advani lost it for the way he attacked Manmohan Singh, the way he behaved right through the campaign,” says Pai.

The BJP’s advertisements pitched Advani as a ‘Loh Purush (iron man)’, or tough leader, with pictures of him showing his fist.

“Advani is a symbol of the BJP’s ideological battle,” said Tarun Vijay, former editor of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) mouthpiece Panchjanya. “There’s no question of the end of the road for Advani or anybody. The BJP is not an individual centric party.”

But his being projected as the prime ministerial candidate does not seem to have cut much ice with voters. Some sections of the BJP privately said a younger leader like Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi could have probably helped the party do better.

However, party general secretary Arun Jaitley said: “Advani was the NDA’s face and this has not affected the party’s overall performance.”

He clearly failed to recreate the magic of Vajpayee who straddled the political spectrum like a colossus. On Saturday, with the party’s debacle, BJP president Rajnath Singh said the party missed Vajpayee in the elections.

And now Advani may not get another chance.