Why Adwani met the Waterloo in 2009

Why Advani lost 2009 election for Prime-Ministership?

Mr L.K. Advani had as good an image among the lay masses as Narendra Modi has today. However he lost the prime-ministerial opportunity on two consecutive opportunities 2004 and 2009. In 2009 debacle required a hard effort by him to lose votes, how?

There were things he should have done but he did not do. Then there were things he should not have done but he did. Some of these are:

1. He should have announced that Narendra Modi would be his Home Minister, if the BJP was sent to power. People were fed up with terrorism and they wanted a tough person to tackle the menace of terrorism.
2. He should have announced that K.P.S. Gill would be the National Security Advisor.
3. He should have kept himself away his four pillars of failures namely Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj and Annant Kumar. These four were not seen as good people even by the BJP’s voters. Rajnath had no commitment to the casteless politics, something which Advani Ji had followed and nurtured in the party working with casteless people of the previous generation like Krishna Lal Sharma etc. Rajnath Singh’s pro-OBC mentality (“OBC only can send to power”) and in this mentality his attempts to woo Mulayam Singh was not liked by the BJP voters who came mainly from the upper castes.
4. People of India did not like these four people. Other faces in his team which did not inspire the voters included, Vijay Kumar Goyal, Malhitra, Harshwardhan etc murda-type personalities.
5. Advani had expelled the people who had any mass base. Uma Bharati, Madan Lal Khurana were out. Govindacharya was out of politics. Subrahmanyam Swami was out. Arun Shourie was out of purview for any ministerial considerations. In fact he was not even given ticket. Jagmohan was invisible. So the people who could inspire people were not visible in the team of Advani.

Advani was now known by the company he kept. The hate for the people in his closest company gradually got transformed into the hate for Advani Ji. Because of his over reliance on the four leaders, he gradually eroded much of his own authority and strength and ceded them to these four. Now he derived power from these four, although initially these four had derived power from him. But these four were no mass-leaders.

A personal level opinion survey done by me has shown that the BJP-without-Narendra-Modi did not have a good image in the minds of public even in 2014, and the Congress would have won if NaMo had not arrived in the arena and these four had remained the main face of the party in 2014 elections. The people surrounding Advani were considered corrupt and power hungry. It was found that Advani was often too weak. He showed his strength to expel Khurana, or Uma Bharati or Jaswant Singh. These were honest people and commanded respect of the masses. However Advani could never take any action against his own four supporters.

Advani did not show any strength against Mukhtar Abbas Naqwi when he gave the infamous “lipstick, powder” statement during the Mumbai terrorist attack. Had Advani expelled him from the party for his “insensitivity”, his public image would have gone much higher.

When Raj Thakare was attacking the Biharis in Mumbai, Advani did not open his lips against this, although the Congress gave statement against this. The active pro-OBC politics which Rajnath was pursuing had alienated the upper castes in UP. Advani did not do anything to curb Rajnath’s senseless castist politics. This caused much damage to BJP support base.

However, the image of the BJP got transformed when the signal was given that Narendra Modi will be the next Prime-Ministerial candidate.

Narendra Modi was seen as a man of paurush, a valiant person. He is seen as a human-lion, something like the image of nara-simha. Such a man was needed to cure the Indian corrupt politics and bureaucracy. People did not see much strength in Advani.

People wanted change—change in system, change in mechanism, change in laws. Modi could deliver these.

Had Advani surrounded by this “coterie of four” come to power, nothing would have changed. For future, bad BJP people like Sushil Modi etc need to be sorted out and better people placed even in the states if Narendra Modi wants to fulfil the promises he has made to himself and his mother—to take India to the number one place in the world.

The BJP of Pre-Narendra era had failed to show its intention to bring about any institutional change in India. The Anti-Defection Law was brought about by Rajiv Gandhi. The Right to Information law was brought about by Sonia Gandhi. These two have proved to be the biggest hurdles to the political masters of India in their berserk behaviours.

On the other hand, the old BJP when in power enacted the Constitution Amendment Bill to neutralize the Supreme Court’s order quashing the reservations for OBC in promotions.

We can remember that Bajpayi’s government criticised the Supreme Court for passing the directive to the Government for introducing the electoral reforms and for making the criminal politicians in-eligible to fight elections. Supreme Court had taken initiatives for reform in the electoral system which brought criminals to parliament and to power. But Bajpayi govt preferred to humiliate the court on the floor of the Parliament by stating that the Supreme Court had crossed the Lakshaman Rekha. On several occasions, Supreme Court’s arms were twisted by the BJP government. These all incidents, and many more happened brazenly when BJP was in power, gradually convincing the masses that the BJP was no better than the congress.