Nothing succeeds like success, and nothing damns you like failure. Success, especially in politics, hides blemishes, even unforgivable ones. Failure, on the other hand, not only inflates and embellishes them, but also invents non-existent sins. Worse still, it sometimes invites eager obituary-writers.

A case in point is the recent spate of commentaries in the media adjudging that the political career of L K Advani, under whose leadership the BJP lost the 2009 parliamentary elections, has now well and truly ended. ‘Goodbye, Mr Advani’, said a cover story in India Today, adding, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Man Who Built the BJP’. “A grim old man who is desperately struggling to postpone his own political irrelevancy.” “Out there, as the banished and the sidelined ask questions about his leadership, his integrity and honesty, his lies and tricks, he has no words to defend himself.” After this denigration came the verdict: “There is no recovery (of the BJP) as long as he remains the highest deity. He is the one who stands between decay and renewal.”

Today I am no longer with the BJP, and no longer an aide of Advani. Nevertheless, I am pained to read such premature obituaries of him.

The BJP lost the elections on account of many reasons, and Advani himself, as the party’s prime ministerial candidate, has not rejected his primary responsibility for its defeat. Indeed, nobody who was associated with the party’s election campaign, this columnist included, can disown their individual and collective responsibilities for the debacle. The BJP’s second successive defeat in a parliamentary election has naturally pushed it in the throes of turmoil. Its woes got worsened by a thoroughly avoidable, unjustifiable and bizarre blunder committed by the top leadership in the form of summary expulsion of Jaswant Singh over his book on Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Jaswant Singh’s subsequent diatribe against both Advani and the BJP gave Advani’s obituary-writers more ammo. Since Advani himself has chosen to remain silent on Kandahar, the cash-for-votes episode and his own stand on Jaswant Singh’s expulsion at the parliamentary board meeting in Shimla, he has invited upon himself a lot of unjustified criticism. However, when true facts are known, unbiased observers will surely see Advani not as a liar and a trickster, but as someone who, with all his costly mistakes, still possesses rare virtues in politics.

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