Radio Pakistan is a very popular program “Punjabi Darbar” informs its listeners about the truth. Their expose of Mr. Advani is apt, supberbly researched and well done.

L. K. Advani’s “My Country, My Life” – The Old Man and the Void

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more – Macbeth

J. G. Frazer mentions in his book The Golden Bough that among the tribes the chief or a potential head had to go through great physical and mental prowess in order to prove his ability to sacrifice himself for the life of the group. The process was demanding and very few would dare venture to be a king. In fact even a ruler with divine stature as Ram himself abandoned his wife to satisfy street gossips and later during the famed Aswamedha Yaga (a sacrifice that involves a symbolic horse) unknowingly fought his sons to prove that he is worthy of being a king to his people.

In this country leaders are measured by their ability to make wholesale sacrifices of common people with nothing ever happening to them. The more the sacrifice of the person-on-the-street the more admired and worshipped is the leader. Look at those empty characters in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and their perennial river dispute. It looks like they’re two completely different nations separated by an iron curtain. The kingdom mentality continues with Kannadigas versus Tamilians. They’ve absolutely no consciousness of a third entity called ‘India’ to which both of them belong. It is traitors like these who would rather waste public resources fighting for their petty egos instead of solving disputes peacefully that gave India to the British.

The three ghosts of past, present and future give Scrooge, who would more easily part with his soul than with a penny in The Christmas Carol – a short and sweet novel by Charles Dickens – the opportunity to make the difference. In Tolstoy’s story “Where love is, there God is” the Lord comes to Martin the cobbler as he promised but in the form of the needy, the lost and the deprived. “Martin, Martin, I am He” says the voice in the vision to the poor cobbler touched beyond words that all those faces towards whom he had shown kindness were none other than the Lord himself. Then the striking last line of the story: “Martin was lost in an ocean of infinite joy.”

Advani is neither Scrooge who is in a position to change his life nor Martin who can look back and say that it was the divine or Madhava he had served in the form of the human or Manava. My first and rather sticky memory of Advani goes back to the late eighties. I remember a man, one of those mediocre kinds who can never be wrong, telling me that if you heard Advani speak, you would want to kill every Muslim in this country. Such is the passion with which the man speaks, he added. This statement was vindicated by riots upon riots – violence matched with greater violence, the ugly tremors of partition echoing through the eighties and nineties – culminating in the BJP forming a government – thus institutionalizing sectarianism in this country right into the new millennium with the Gujarat pogrom of 2002.

Wen I was younger I believed in the myth that Indians were a nonviolent people who would never go to the extent of bringing to power a party as dangerously right-wing as the BJP. Today I know for a fact that we’re as much capable of evil as the fascists in Nazi Germany, the bigots in the United States who voted the Republican Party headed by George Bush Jr. for the second time, and the armies of Genghis Khan and his grandson Hulagu that did not spare the dogs and cats let alone people of towns and cities they devastated.

Then comes the book My Country, My Life by none other than Advani himself about a year before the general election of 2009. Not very surprising for an aspiring Prime Minister to write a book about his life! I never bought the image of the soft Vachpayee and the hardliner Advani. Parents and managers know this oldest trick in the book of the carrot and the stick. One plays the soft image and the other the hard one – while both have exactly the same agenda which is to run the party as efficiently as possible and get hold of power. Vachpayee played the carrot and Advani the stick.

There’s a brilliant scene in the movie Sholay when Jai (Amitabh Bachan) goes to talk on behalf of his friend Veeru (Dharmendra) for Basanti’s hand in marriage to the old aunt – the unforgettable “mausi” played by Leela Mishra. Jai gives a tongue-in-cheek description of his friend Veeru who drinks, gambles and goes to dancing girls but still happens to be essentially innocent. That description aptly summarizes the “softness” of Mr. Vachpayee. Everything is happening under his nose but his focus seems to be in other places. Soft or no soft he is morally responsible for all the wrongs that occurred under him. The Gujarat pogrom happened under Vachpayee. How does that make him soft? To look the other way is actually a greater crime. Vachpayee is a bigger criminal than Narendra Modi in my view. In Pareto’s theory of circulation of elites, foxes replace lions and lions take the place of foxes depending on the situation. The reign of the cunning is complemented by that of the strong. But, what Robert Michels calls “The iron law of oligarchy” continues.

Advani made the BJP what it is which became a force to be reckoned after he took over as party president in 1984. There is little doubt as far as that is concerned. From being reduced to two parliamentary seats in the election following Indira Gandhi’s assassination the BJP eventually became the leading party of the NDA that ran the government for a full five-year term from 1999 – 2004. Really ordinary sitcoms like Ramanand Sagar’s “Ramayan” and B. R. Chopra’s “Mahabharat” which gave consistency and wholeness to a story told in countless different ways across the Indian subcontinent gave a sense of being Hindu – an ontological status and not an existential one based on choice in response to a historical context – to the average person-on-the-street. Advani had the cunning and deviousness to figure out the pulse of the average Hindu who dreams to be a global phenomenon.

The Hinduism espoused by someone like Gandhi which imbibed all the best influences from other religions was always a threat and something to be challenged by the Sangh Parivar. Advani knew that. He was not alone in knowing this either. The role of other parties like the Shiv Sena, once upon a time supposedly a friend of Hindus but today anti-North Indian irrespective of whether Hindu or Muslim need not be minimized. I don’t like to attribute more than what is essential to individuals. A whole historic framework was being created after the emergency to counter the pseudo-secularism of the Congress with Hindutva an ideology that gave manhood back to the Hindu male and promised to restore the so-called Indian culture to its pristine state before being contaminated by the influence of other religions such as Christianity and Islam.

If the Congress was half as secular as it claims to be the BJP would never have been possible for the reason that real secularism does not stand on vacuum but on the platform of social and economic equality. Where the latter do not exist secularism is a hollow phrase. The Congress Party goes on and on like a broken gramophone record harping about its secular credentials. Just to give an example: Shanker Dayal Sharma was the President and P. V. Narasimha Rao the Prime Minister of India in 1992. They could’ve stopped the demolition of Babri Masjid and prevented the symbolic catastrophe that humiliates Muslims to this day. Ideologically Narasimha Rao and Shankar Dayal Sharma were hand in glove with the B.J.P. Rao is the Congress version of Vachpayee – duplicitous in a subtle way while appearing to be ‘soft.’ All of them are equally guilty of the destruction of the mosque. Similarly I blame Narayanan who was the President of India when the Gujarat pogrom took place. He could’ve done much more as the President of India. Indian politics has always been rightwing is my thesis. The communists are no saints either. I’m sure that the servants who clean the toilets in the Congress and BJP quarter also clean the toilets in the Communist quarters. The beauty of Indian politics is that no one is fundamentally different from the other.

The BJP as a party including leadership and cadres is a morally vacuous one. It’s a party that has perfected mob-rule through sheer use of numbers – our herd is bigger than yours kind of a thing. This observation applies to the entire Sangh Parivar. They stoop to anything for power – from distorting Hinduism to calling Jinnah secular. They’ve nothing to offer to this nation except hate and more hate. In the BJP equation of things: to be anti-Muslim is to be a patriot; to be anti-Hindu is to be a traitor. Anti-Hindu here means anti-caste system and anti-communalism and embracing diversity or difference. The truth is that anti-any other person simply out of prejudice is treachery whether Hindu or Muslim. What SIMI or Students Islamic Movement of India does is terrorism but what the VHP or Vishva Hindu Parishad does is not? Both are equally guilty of dividing the country as far as I can see.

To undo the destruction caused by colonialism will take hundreds of years provided we’re in the right direction which is to make self-reliance and the possibility of a creative life to each Indian a national goal. As far as I can see, we’re in the opposite direction. Instead of spending money purchasing weapons from western crooks we need to adopt and implement a population policy on a war footing.

At eighty Advani is not exactly what we would like to call young at heart. But with the cold calculation of the Grand Inquisitor he aspires to be the Prime Minister of this country. To those lacking in conscience the past is no different from the future. The whole thing is a game and more than that a charade. As a leader Advani has done all he could possibly do to salt those terrible wounds of partition and divide this country even further. Muslims are as poor and as alienated as ever before. Every rule in the book applies to Muslims when they’re on the wrong but when men like Modi and Thackeray and Advani and their goons do wrong they are rewarded with party positions, chief ministerships and possible prime ministerships.
The ghost of the future will someday meet Advani to show him the price of his words, a price that was paid by the poor and the illiterate – whether Muslims or Hindus – who perished for no fault of theirs in the communal violence that engulfed this country except that they had the misfortune of being born poor. In the utter emptiness that a man is left with at the end of his life words are meaningless. The second part of the title is right: my life. It is indeed his life. But the first part, my country, no! This country does not belong to Advani – never did and never will.http://prakashkona.sulekha.com/blog/post/2008/04/the-old-man-and-the-void-l-k-advani-s-my-country.htm

 

 Here is another article on the subject.

Chandigarh, Apr 12 : Former Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani is the new target for the “Punjabi Durbar” programme of Radio Pakistan. Advani is being accused for relations between India and Pakistan turning acrimonious during the NDA regime.

Pakistan Radio in one of its “Punjabi Durbar” programme alleged that his fundamentalist approach and policies were responsible for relationship between the two countries becoming bitter.

Advani, whose praise for M. A. Jinnah got him into trouble with a section of the Bharatiya Janata Party four years ago, is also being held responsible for the ruling BJP-Akali Dal alliance not working for the betterment of the people of Punjab.

Turning down the allegations, Tarun Chugh, President of the Punjab unit of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha said: “The Pakistan Radio’s programme Punjabi Durbar always tries to create bitterness.”

“They will never succeed in their attempt to infuse hatred and separatist values among us. People in Punjab know that India is progressing ahead very fast, and the future belongs to it. Pakistan Radio is just trying to ruin the image of Advani,” he added.

Talking about allegation that the Punjab Government was not taking care of its people, Mandeep Singh Manna, Akali Dal youth leader said: “The government is providing adequate number of jobs to youth here. Punjab Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal is doing a lot for the state’s development.”

While the propaganda programme of Pakistan Radio has been generally ignored in the past, the latest allegations against the BJP-Akali Dal government have provoked harsh response from Punjabi youth.

It has been pointed out that the Punjab Government has been regularly launching various programmes to generate employment and make youth self-reliant. Several non-governmental organisations have also been encouraged to support these programmes.

In addition to all schemes and programmes, the Punjab Government’s Centre for Training and Employment of Punjab Youth (C-PYTE) trains unemployed youth to help them to get jobs in the Army, para-military forces and industrial establishments. The Centre has made efforts to instil in them discipline, spirit of national integration and dignity of labour.

The Training and Employment Centre of the Punjab Government has also been coaching the youth to help them joining technical training in various Industrial Training Institutes to help them undertake self-employment.

The schemes of the State Government has achieved commendable results in helping the young people develop skills, instilling in them discipline and work culture. (ANI)