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.

Swadeshi, cow protection, rejection of technology in favour of village implements etc have been streams of Parivar politics. When NRIs flock to campaign for Modi who wears Armani frames and the Indian middle class relish their global consumer tastes, how has the Parivar politics changed? “Swadeshi has never been about rejecting foreign goods for us. It was so during Gandhiji’s times but that version is not relevant now,” Advani says.

Opposition to computers was only a trade unionist agenda within the Parivar, he explains. Swadeshi, then or now, certainly involves rejecting a foreign leader though. As early as 1986, Advani had acquired a digital diary and in 1989, he was photographed with it during a BJP session in Mumbai. “Is this Swadeshi?” the caption screamed out on the front page next day. These days Advani carries a Nokia E 61i, fully-loaded and jazzy. “But only to make calls. It’s always kept off,” he says before one can ask for the number. Every now and then his daughter Pratibha reads out SMSs. In 1990, Advani visited Seattle to learn about the software boom. “I used to tell socialists about the futility of opposing English. India’s surge in software is because of the advancement we made in English,” he says. Swadeshi found a mention in passing in Advani’s printed speech at BJP national executive last month.

Advani is not too sure if he is a hardliner. “If hardliner means being decisive, then I would not mind being called one. But otherwise, I have a very pragmatic approach to life and politics,” he says. He’s right when he recalls that pragmatism has been a trait of Parivar politics since the beginning — from the days Deen Dayal Upadhyaya aligned with Socialists to Advani himself first allying with Shiv Sena, then Janata Dal, then Left and subsequently all sorts of regional outfits. But the softer side of Advani is often visible — when he is caught with his eyes moist or even tears rolling down. “I get emotional on good news and bad news,” he admits.

Relating with colleagues as members of the family is also part of Advani’s RSS grooming. He admits to falling for people with relative ease. “There are occasions when I thought may be I could have handled this person differently. People who I have been most soft to have often been the harshest towards me” He refused to give examples, but one can think of many. “But everyone has positives and negatives. I have to trust people for the positives that they have,” he says. Sangh has always made individuals subordinate to the cause of the organisation, but Advani admits this has changed. “The emphasis on leadership is a result of mass media revolution. Communicating the ideology to large numbers become easy when you project an individual who has been perceived by the people as an embodiment of that ideology.”

Advani himself is the chosen one. He is as active as ever and doesn’t tire easily. Recently he had to attend a party programme in Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu. He left Delhi at 6 am, landing in Chennai at 9.30 am. He took another flight to Tirunelveli and went straight to the state council meeting. He then posed for nearly 200 photographs with workers before addressing a public meeting that ended at 8.30 pm.

He drove 160 km and reached Madurai by 2 am, and was ready for a darshan at the Meenakshi temple by 6 am. It was then back to Chennai and Delhi by night. Next morning, he was back at Delhi airport at 6.15 am to fly to Bhopal. “Frugal eating,” he offers the only heath tip. Press further, he says: “A morning walk in the backyard.”