Leader of Opposition Lal Krishna

Advani, named the BJP and NDA’s prime ministerial candidate for the next elections, chose Jabalpur, the country’s geographical centre, to kick off his campaign. He tells VARGHESE K GEORGE that he has “a very pragmatic approach to life and politics” but “if hardliner means being decisive, then I would not mind being called one”.

Lose an argument than a friend, is a value that L K Advani says he had imbibed from early teens after reading Dale Carnegie’s book on winning friends and influencing people, presented to him by Rajpal Puri, RSS prant pracharak in Sindh in the early 1940s. Advani has won many friends and enemies alike in his political activism spanning six decades. More significantly, he has won many an argument — you first heard about ‘pseudo secularism’ and ‘minorityism’ from Advani.

He transformed Hindutva from a theological discourse to mass politics but Advani had to step back for Atal Bihari Vajpayee when the saffron caravan reached Raisina Hills. With Vajpayee fading away, Advani is both the charioteer and the commander; he’s both the mukh and mukhota for the Sangh Parivar. Lal Krishna Advani launched his prime ministerial campaign from Jabalpur, the country’s geographical centre, last week.

Advani is 80 and there aren’t many who call him ‘Lal’ nowadays. “My wife and a few friends from the old days still call me Lal,” he says. Globalisation, economic reforms, regional parties and terrorism have changed the syntax and grammar of Hindutva from the days that Advani set out on his first Rath. He does not admit that much, however. “The emphasis has always been on culture. Those who did not want India to advance tried to instil an inferiority complex among its people by producing literature tarnishing India and its culture,” he says. Hindutva politics partly reacted to this. On a wintry morning, Advani was engrossed in The Case for India, a book that made Will Durant unpopular among imperialists, recently reprinted after long gap by a Mumbai publisher.

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