| Within three weeks of that interview, Venkiah Naidu has quit the presidentship of the party and Advani, now 76 (to turn 77 in three weeks), has been installed as president. |
| The day after this happened, a party colleague who is blessed with a corny sense of humour called on Advani with a tin of Chyawan Prash "" the ayurvedic potion that is supposed to have the property of keeping one forever young. Advani was unimpressed by the gift. |
| However, he smiled when his daughter Pratibha woke him up that morning with a cheery "good morning Doctor", handing him a copy of a newspaper that said: "Dr Advani takes over". |
| A doctor is what the BJP seems to need most these days. Advani was unable to say 'no' when Venkiah Naidu explained to him why he was no longer able to carry on as president. |
| Apart from his own health problems and those of his wife, it was apparent to everyone that with Naidu as chief, the BJP wasn't getting anywhere. |
| It isn't that Venkiah's reign was a total write-off "" after all, he did help in sculpting victories in the Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan Assembly elections. But running a party after a Lok Sabha defeat is not easy. |
| Uma Bharati's rebellion against her party president because she believed he was trying to curb her ambition was the latest symptom of a party gone sour and it took the intervention of an alarmed Advani to bring about a rapprochement. |
| The Maharashtra elections brought their own set of problems for Venkiah Naidu. Pramod Mahajan was so confident no one knew Maharashtra better than him that he wouldn't allow anyone to mess with his turf. Mahajan may have been generous enough to admit that the defeat in Maharashtra was his sole responsibility. |
| But let no one forget that he ran the Maharashtra campaign as his sole responsibility as well, something that brought no comfort to Naidu as president of the party. |
| Clearly, insubordination and defiance of authority are two problems Advani is not going to have. He has been a party man all his life. There is no one in the party "" Atal Bihari Vajpayee included "" who knows the BJP organisation better than Advani. |
| This means that not only does he know the individuals who comprise the party collective, but also the structure of the party and which man is best suited to what job. |
| If you're a BJP member, Advani might not like you but he will always know what you can bring to the party "" whether you're Narendra Modi or Pramod Mahajan or Yashwant Sinha. |
| No, the challenge for Advani does not lie in running a defeated and demoralised BJP. It is more complex than that. In the politics of the BJP, the overriding clout and authority used to rest with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). |
| With the generational change in the RSS and the expansion of the BJP's base, that relationship has undergone mutation. It is the management of this mutation that is Advani's biggest challenge. |
| Consider the growth and development of the BJP in its various incarnations. One phase when the BJS/BJP's acceptibility deepened and intensified was the period between 1974 and 1977 when, despite deepseated suspicions and reservations of the party, Advani persuaded cadres to accept Jayaprakash Narayan's leadership of the people's movement against the Emergency. Dominated as it was by veterans like Balasaheb Deoras, the RSS too was persuaded by Advani to join the movement. |
| How crucial this was, time was to tell. For instance, if the BJP is anything in Karnataka today, it is entirely because of the organisational mobilisation during that period. |
| The RSS didn't like it but bowed before it. The exposure "" and scrutiny "" of a people's movement helped the BJS/BJP expand and grow. |
| Similarly, during the negotiations with Jan Morcha led by V P Singh from 1987-89, Advani argued with his party and the Sangh that in order to get anywhere, it was important to bat on the side of public mood, putting the Hindu agenda away for the moment. |
| Just as with JP, who had actively disliked the political passivity of the Sangh and had criticised it in the past, also with V P Singh, the RSS was not particularly enthusiastic about Advani's project. But because of their affection and assessment of his capabilities, they went along with him. |
| But that was then, when leaders like Prof Rajendra Singh, Bhaurao Deoras and H V Seshadri were dominant influences in the RSS. Today, the gap between the branches of the Sangh like the VHP and the BJP is an open secret. |
| Sometimes the Sangh supports the VHP, sometimes the BJP, in an effort to maintain balance in the family. |
| Advani acknowledged the extent of asymmetry in the relationship recently when a reporter with the same name as VHP chief Ashok Singhal asked him whether the BJP was all set to hit two seats in the Lok Sabha again. "Is your name the source of your inspiration" Advani asked him amid laughter. |
| Advani may not like it but he cannot be unaware of the charge that the VHP is laying against him "" that Venkiah's move to step aside for him was a fait accompli presented to Venkiah Naidu, that the presidentship was a coup engineered by Advani and that this coup will go the way of all coups "" in the destruction and end of the BJP. |
| Those who know Advani will reject the theory out of hand because they know that he is incapable of such manoeuvring. That this has gone around at all is the size of the challenge that Advani is presented with. |
| With the loosening up of the BJP on the one hand, and the weakening RSS control of the family on the other, Advani will have to bridge many gaps all at once. Because the man has no ego when it comes to party and Sangh, only a man of the stature of Advani can re-build the house that is threatening to come down. |
| If secularists think the danger of communalism has been defeated, they should wait until the Sangh structure collapses. The real danger to Indian democracy will be then. Deny it as you might, Hindu mobilisation is here. What to do with it, is the question Advani faces. |
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