Bharat Ratna well deserved for BJP icon Advani
When the news of socialist leader Karpoori Thakur being conferred the Bharat Ratna broke, many in the BJP wondered how long would it take for party stalwart Lal Krishna Advani to be among the recipients of the highest civilian award of the nation. At 96, Advani is among the oldest surviving leaders in the party’s pantheon and decidedly its tallest. He was one of the co-founders of the BJP who pivoted the party that was at its lowest ebb at just two MPs in 1984, to capturing power at the Centre.
That was one of the multiple pivots Advani was instrumental in right through his long career. The wait for the announcement ended last Saturday when Prime Minister Narendra Modi put out a social media post revealing the conferring of the award on his mentor. It came less than a fortnight after the consecration of Ram Lalla’s idol in Ayodhya at the Ram Janmabhoomi.
When VHP’s temple agitation was flagging in 1990, it was Advani who infused new life into it by launching a Somnath to Ayodhya rath yatra, pivoting it into a mass movement. The yatra made him the face of the temple struggle and possibly marked the emergence of Advani, the hardliner. By the end of the yatra, he had transformed into a charismatic and articulate mass leader.
Despite being at the helm of the BJP, he named Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the party’s prime ministerial candidate in late 1995, realising the latter had superior skills at cobbling together an alliance when elections kept throwing up fractured mandates. That was another pivotal moment as he shed ambition for pragmatism. Among his notable interventions was the spiking of a half-baked Indo-Pak peace accord during Gen Pervez Musharraf’s summit talks with Vajpayee in Agra. It was also his solid support to Modi within the party following the 2002 Gujarat riots—when the rest of the leadership was ranged against him—that saved the latter’s chief ministerial chair.
While the PM’s chair remained elusive, his parliamentary interventions were insightful. However, the last pivot he sought to make to shed his hardline image when the party had seemingly plateaud in 2005, boomeranged as he described Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah as secular. It created a leadership vacuum that was later filled by Modi. The rest is history. The Bharat Ratna is a fitting award for a life lived well in the service of the nation.