This week saw the latest little act of mutiny from L.K. Advani, who finds himself on the margins of the party he built. He was kept on tenterhooks for days in which rumours of Narendra Modi taking his Gandhinagar seat were not countered by the BJP’s new high command (comprising Mr Modi and two subordinates, Arun Jaitley and Rajnath Singh).
Mr Advani then objected and, according to reports, refused to attend the selection process. He asked to leave Gujarat for Madhya Pradesh. It was at this point that his issue was finally addressed. He was named the candidate for Gandhinagar. Mr Advani’s humiliation was made complete by the next morning’s reports which clarified that he was not actually given that option.
What was the problem with Gandhinagar? The fact is that Mr Modi never wanted to contest from there. Its margins are not as safe as he likes.
The only elections Mr Modi has contested from have been in Maninagar, possibly the BJP’s safest Assembly seat in India, where he wins with some three-fourths of the vote.
The safest parliamentary constituencies in Gujarat are Surat and Baroda . The only third option for Mr Modi was Ahmedabad East. This did not include his Assembly constituency of Maninagar, which falls in Ahmedabad West, now a reserved seat after delimitation.
Given this clarity about his own seat, it is quite heartless of Mr Modi to have kept poor old Mr Advani hanging for as long as he did, but that is the way the man functions. The other thing is that Mr Advani was increasingly uneasy about Gandhinagar and wanted to go to Bhopal. This was not because he feared defeat (it would be a staggering blow to Mr Modi himself if Mr Advani lost from a safe seat in his domain). It was because Mr Advani knows that Gujaratis will be hostile to him. A refugee from Sindh,
Mr Advani has no home constituency as such and thought of Gandhinagar as his refuge. He knows the Gujarati voter well and how the BJP was built in Gujarat, not through the genius of its current Chief Minister.
The BJP took Gujarat over decades, starting with the work of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Jana Sangh, which got less than two per cent of the vote when it began contesting on the Hindutva platform in the 1960s.
The party built its constituency in the state with immense patience and by adding on a few percentage points in the popular vote through the 1970s and the 1980s. It was Mr Advani’s Ayodhya gambit that finally won Gujarat over to the BJP. Gujaratis responded to the communalism of Mr Advani’s message as no other state did and the Congress has not won an election in that state, or come close to winning it, after the Babri Masjid was pulled down.
The last time the Congress won a majority in Gujarat was, in fact, in 1985. So it will be difficult to convince Mr Advani that Mr Modi is the magic ingredient for his party in that state. Mr Advani also knows a thing or two about charisma built through a divisive and communal appeal. It was his own stock in trade till he decided, a few years ago, to moderate his image.
It is not easy to feel sympathy for Mr Advani, and in a way he is responsible for his situation. It was Mr Advani who saved. Mr Modi from being sacked when Atal Behari Vajpayee wanted him to step down for his managing of the riots of 2002. And through all the years that Mr Modi built his image at the cost of others in the Gujarat BJP, Mr Advani was silent. Today it is his turn.
