By Atul Cowshish New Delhi (Syndicate Features): Perhaps no other political party in India has been able to manipulate the media to its advantage the way the Bharatiya Janata Party has. The party of Ram Bhakts and Super Patriots can take more credit if it is accepted that the majority in the dominant English language media in the country claims no affinity with the saffron party. If anything, most of them swear by secularism and like to flaunt their liberal character, not hesitating to refer to the BJP as a ‘fascist’ and communal party.
Based on the above postulations it can be said that the BJP Lauh Purush (Iron Man), L.K. Advani had rehearsed well all the moves before and after the release of his ‘autobiography’, My Life My Country. It was probably timed with elections in mind. But it was certainly timed to ensure that not only the book attracts widest possible notice but also to ensure that Advani will remain in the headlines for the crucial days ahead. It may be that apart from Advani, the publisher’s own PR department had worked well to make the book launch an important marketing effort before the next parliamentary polls.
As a veteran of media management Advani can hope that the fall-out from these ‘headlines’ tilts in his favour. The elections can come at anytime in the next 12 months. His repeated chants of the last four years about the ‘imminent fall’ of the government at the Centre will finally prove to be true!
The book launch provided him a perfect platform to display his masterly PR act. It was a remarkable coincidence that just after the release of his book he was hopping from studio to studio to give interviews to a host of TV channels—all in one day. His object was to clear the air, so to say, about the negative publicity that he had attracted. To create a better impact additional help was mustered by roping in a blue blooded BJP stalwart, ‘Lord’ Jaswant Singh, and some of the many BJP prime ministers-in-waiting. It was perhaps the measure of his skill at handling the media that in most of these interviews Advani faced hardly any problem in presenting himself as anything but an aggressive, combatant Hindutva champion who revels in sniping at opponents by twisting facts, ranging from the country’s freedom struggle to efforts to build bridges among the different communities.
It was left to Jaswant Singh to give a BJP coat of paint to the country’s freedom struggle denying in the process that the Mahatma Gandhi-led Congress made any positive contribution in driving the British off from the subcontinent. Advani proclaimed himself as the only sane or sober voice in the political jungles of India, accusing the Congress leadership of treating the BJP as an ‘enemy’!
His and his party’s non-stop diatribe against the Congress and all other ‘secular’ parties is too well known to lend credence to this absurd claim of Advani. As for Jaswant Singh’s spin on the freedom struggle, well, that should not come as a surprise considering that he is part and parcel of the feudal system that was at best lukewarm to Mahatma Gandhi and the freedom struggle.
According to some reviews of his book, Advani’s 1000-page magnum opus has failed to lift the veil behind the many mysteries within the BJP. He trashes the talk of any differences with Atal Bihari Vajpayee but anyone with any familiarity with the Brahmin-dominated Sangh Parivar will know that it would have been impossible for Advani, a Sindhi, to place himself above Vajpayee, a Brahmin, at any stage.
He is supposed to have devoted a chapter on the Babri mosque demolition, which many will trace to his Rath Yatra. It was the ‘saddest day’ of his life—a discovery he made only in front of foreign journalists and on his visit to Pakistan. The BJP does not think it needs to express any regret over the Babri demolition—or, for that matter, over the Gujarat pogrom. Does the book throw any light on what did he do to avert events of that ‘saddest day’ of his life?
And it was Pakistan again that led to another astounding discovery by Advani—that Jinnah was a great secularist. Of course, now we know that his observations on Jinnah were ‘twisted’—as they always are whenever a politician says something that harms him or her politically. To this day the Sangh Parivar finds it obligatory to distance itself from his remarks on Jinnah. Indeed, there is one leader very close to Advani, the Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, who excels in denigrating Pakistani leaders, including its founder. Yet, Advani has now endorsed Modi as the best man in the party to ‘succeed’ him.
While in Pakistan, Advani had acquainted himself with the problems faced by the Hindu minority in Sindh and adjoining areas in Pakistan. But he has nothing to say about them. Equally he has no justifiable explanation for the decision of the NDA government to send Jaswant Singh, foreign minister at the time, as escort of the Pakistani terrorists who had hijacked an Indian Airlines plane late in December 1999.
Advani has disclosed that the US was unwilling to pressurise Pakistan to extradite Dawood Ibrahim to India when he had made that request soon after the terrorist attack on Parliament in December 2001. Would he accept that it showed the NDA government of which he was such an important part and which had nudged very close to Washington, was not only ‘weak’ but had also failed to get help from Washington on matters crucial to India’s security? The Lauh Purush’s iron fist is on display only when he sits in the opposition.
He made sure that the book release would become a high voltage newsy event and an impressive PR exercise. The book release function itself, with former President, APJ Abdul Kalam as the principal guest, was given the look of glitter with the presence of an assortment of film stars, a constituency assiduously cultivated by the BJP alone till Samajwadi Party’s Amar Singh sought to spread the magic of his party’s rustic appeal by capturing the heart and mind of Bollywoood’s numero uno star, Amitabh Bachhan.;
Undoubtedly with some effort by the publishers, excerpts from Advani’s book swept across the entire media. The matter that appeared before the formal release of the book helped aroused curiosity with hopes that Advani would make some ‘sensational disclosures’. After the release when these hopes proved, as was to be expected, unrealistic, the publicity efforts shifted at building up the image of the Iron Man for taking up the job he has been so impatiently waiting to grab.
So, what are the great qualities of the Iron Man that make him the most ‘natural’ choice as the country’s prime minister? One, he has been a rare politician who always believed in party discipline that required him not to challenge the supremacy of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. No one needs to question him on that even if some think that he did so in an oblique manner by proclaiming himself as Deputy Prime Minister during the BJP-led NDA rule. Advani was looking for the right opportunity to nudge past an ailing Vajpayee. (Syndicate Features)
