| All we know is that he lost his mother when he was thirteen and his father was a businessman (who took Advani's grandmother to Kaashi when she was eighty) and led a quiet life in one corner of Gujarat after India's partition. He has dismissed in just a few pages how he gave up celibacy (an RSS pracharak is not expected to tie the nuptial knot), accepted a journalistic assignment with Organiser and settled down to a more traditional householder's life by marrying a girl from Bombay. We know he was a good student in his school in Karachi, but we do not know the actual thinking process that he went through before deciding to join the RSS while he was still in school, except that he was influenced by his friend and lawn tennis partner, who one afternoon left a game mid-way to join an RSS meeting. |
| The style he chose may be largely responsible for creating such dissatisfaction among readers. Though neatly divided in five distinct phases, Advani's autobiographical account suffers from a serious flaw "" meandering. While talking about how attracted he was to Swami Ranganathananda's discourses in Ramakrishna Mission in Karachi, he would stray into describing who Ranganathananda was and what great work Ramakrishna Mission has done by jumping several decades in time and drawing references to his later days in the government or as a senior BJP leader. Such meandering has happened at the cost of not explaining how he evolved into one of India's most durable political leaders experiencing almost all the important turns of India's post-independent history "" including the imposition of the Emergency by Indira Gandhi in 1975, the formation of the Janata Party government, in which he was a minister, and the launch of the Ayodhya movement that helped his party to wrest power at the Centre in 1998. |
| The reference to Ranganathananda is significant. Tucked away in one corner in his detailed account of the Ramakrishna Mission leader, Advani explains how Ranganathananda had indirectly influenced him to give Jinnah the secular tag that he did during his controversial tour of Pakistan in 2005. Similarly, while outlining his little-known views on economic issues, he debunks the "India Shining" story, riding on which his party had tried to win the 2004 general elections and failed. It is true that the book has already made waves for the various revelations Advani made on the handling of the Kandahar crisis. But there are quite a few more such nuggets of information that will give the reader a better understanding of why Advani is often seen as a leader thriving on political opportunism. |
| This is also evident from his recounting of the Ayodhya movement, which he considers as among the most important turning points in his political career. While he rightly exposes the Congress leadership's ambivalent approach to secularism (Rajiv Gandhi's volte face on the Shah Bano case has come in for appropriate criticism and Narasimha Rao's hypocrisy as well as complete inaction on the day of the demolition of the Babri mosque on December 6, 1992, has been exposed), his own approach to the Ayodhya movement appears no less confusing. He feels "sad" over the demolition of the mosque, but he makes no attempt to hide his satisfaction and joy over the large Hindu support (including some police officials in Uttar Pradesh) to the Ayodhya movement that clearly fanned communal trouble all over the country. |
| Advani believes that he is a follower of genuine secularism, while all other political parties and their leaders subscribe to "pseudo-secularism" to exploit political vote-banks. At one point in the book, he writes that "this clash between pseudo-secularism and genuine secularism manifests in different ways even today ... I dare say that the future of India depends much on the outcome of this struggle." His diagnosis may be correct, but he fails to establish if his brand of politics can help resolve this conflict. |
| MY COUNTRY MY LIFE |
| L K Advani Rupa & Co xxxvii+986 pages, Rs 595 |
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