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Why Advani's Emergency fears sound less a lament, more a threat

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Nadim Asrar
Nadim AsrarJun 19, 2015 | 17:20

Why Advani's Emergency fears sound less a lament, more a threat

LK Advani's new-found love for India's democracy notwithstanding, his interview to Indian Express is one of the most alarming things to happen in a post-Modi India. Alarming, not only because it once again raises the spectre of the Emergency - another word for "dictatorship" in India - by Advani claiming that the institutions of the state are not strong enough to withstand another Indira Gandhi-like onslaught on them, but also because it reads, menacingly enough, more as a threat than a warning.

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Hindsight is a deceptive tool in the hands of the politicians. In an era of short public memory haunted by the 24x7 cacophony of breaking news on television, one forgets that the same Advani once stringently defended his protégé when the demand to sack Modi for, among other allegations, severely undermining democracy in Gujarat as the state chief minister in 2002 was raised. Bharat Ratna former prime minister AB Vajpayee too wanted to sack Modi for his alleged patronage of the massive violence that swept through the state, but it was Lohpurush Advani who threatened to break the BJP if he did so. 

Advani may have been a prominent soldier of the anti-Emergency agitation in the '70s along with a large section of the then Jana Sangh (BJP's earlier avatar), but it was what he helped found once it was over that changed the history and the nature of Indian democracy forever. The forces that he laments are stronger now were equally strong in the 1980s and early 1990s when an infant BJP started pursuing a politics of hatred and hegemony of the majority. And that early movement, now synonymous with Advani and Vajpayee, has only found a new landmark with Modi at the helm.

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Therefore, when the BJP veteran, in an act of rare honesty, invokes the contemporary leadership as "weak" and hence "not to be trusted", isn't he doing exactly what the friends of the BJP have been accusing the opposition parties and secular public opinion of, which is refusing to move on from 2002? Why is Advani calling the 56-inch-chest leadership, which has come to power on an unprecedented mandate ever to a political party in the last 30 years reducing its opposition to a glitch in Lok Sabha, weak and untrustworthy? What is the current leadership's weakness?

It is not difficult to answer that question. And which is where Advani's fears conflate with his own demons. Modi is how Advani perhaps realises the inherent failure of his exclusivist, chauvinistic dreams. Modi is perhaps Advani reincarnate, with the mentor now fidgeting with what he sees in his mirror. Margdarshak Mandal musings that clearly raise more questions than they answer.

Last updated: June 19, 2015 | 17:20
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