Shishya learnt well, guru stayed master

Radhika Ramaseshan
Senior journalist

There’s nothing sacrosanct about a "guru-shishya" relationship, although the Hindu tradition has vested the bond between the teacher and the tutored in holy raiment. The relationship has upended several times. However, the association between Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani as they voyaged from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and thence to the BJP was birthed and nurtured in more genteel times. That's why it endured despite the subterranean differences between Vajpayee and Advani that showed up in peculiar ways at times. Perhaps, the reason why the relationship was largely durable was because Advani began his political career as a Vajpayee aide when Vajpayee won his first Lok Sabha election from Balrampur in 1957.

In his autobiography, "My Country My Life", Advani chalked up his "advanced experience in political organisation, political strategy and leadership" to the years spent as Vajpayee's understudy. The duo put its combined expertise at realpolitik to use and gained control over the Jana Sangh. When a founder, Balraj Madhok, whose dominance was enormous in the initial years, wanted to expand the Jana Sangh's arc and pull it out of the RSS's shadow, ironically Vajpayee put his foot down. Madhok lasted as president for just a year. The party president's post was shared equally by Vajpayee and Advani thereafter before the Jana Sangh merged with the Janata Party. 

The awe Advani held Vajpayee in never dissipated. The pair shared a place in Old Delhi, Vajpayee served up "khichdi" whenever Advani fell ill and they watched Hindi films together. It was an unequal relationship that transformed surely but subtly when the RSS dumped Vajpayee's genre of "Gandhian socialism" after the BJP's rout in the 1984 elections and embraced hardcore Hindutva personified in the campaign for a Ram temple on the site of Ayodhya's Babri mosque.

Vajpayee and Advani did not think alike on the project. When Vajpayee was approached to lead a "yatra" from the north that was to converge in Ayodhya, he absented himself, citing an official foreign tour. Advani jumped into the Ayodhya campaign spiritedly after factoring in the political dividends it could fetch for the BJP. Despite the veneer of "normalcy" in their association, it was obvious that Advani, who pulled in crowds wherever he went, had gained an upper hand. He packed the BJP organisation with his cherry-picked men and women. 

The imbalance was visible in Parliament where the BJP's numbers began to grow. Advani was the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha from 1989 to 1991 when Vajpayee was a Rajya Sabha MP. Vajpayee contested the 1991 elections from Lucknow and won. The BJP presumed that being the most senior leader, he would become the Leader of the Opposition, but surprisingly the RSS wanted Advani for the post. It believed that the electoral gains that the BJP notched were because of the success of the Ram temple campaign that Advani spearheaded. 

It's a testimony to Advani's wish to avoid a confrontation that he gave up the LoP's post for Vajpayee midway in July, 1993 after which Vajpayee continued until May, 1996. When it was time to name the BJP's PM candidate in 1995 before the next Lok Sabha election, Advani announced Vajpayee's name, much to the chagrin of BJP hardliners and the surprise of others. By then, a reluctant RSS figured out that to lead a coalition, Vajpayee with a "moderate" image would be more acceptable to potential allies than Advani. 

Vajpayee's place at the apex of the BJP's hierarchy was stable again. The difference was that while Vajpayee fed off the myth that he could do only right, that no wrong would singe him and he could ignore the Sangh when it suited him, Advani's forays into multi-tasking flopped, which was proved by the ignominy that followed his Jinnah commendation in Karachi.

Advani briefly set right the asymmetry when he was appointed the Deputy PM, reportedly against Vajpayee's desire, in June 2002 ostensibly to "straighten out" the government's functioning. In reality, Vajpayee was considerably weakened by the 2002 Gujarat violence. His efforts to replace Narendra Modi as Chief Minister were foiled by the BJP. 

Advani loyalists saw a window of opportunity to flag the issue of his leadership against Vajpayee's and hyphenated the two men in a "loh purush-vikas purush" (development man-iron man) equivalency. The idea was floated when Vajpayee was abroad. Furious after returning from a three-nation tour, he punctured the trial balloon with his famous retort that although he was neither "tired nor retired", he was ready to hand over the leadership baton to Advani before the next elections. Advani was embarrassed into silence. 

A semi-fiction in the BJP was that whenever there was "trouble" on the Vajpayee-Advani front, Advani's wife Kamla intervened by herself reaching out to Vajpayee and hosting him to a "Sindhi khadhi-rice" meal where the ice was supposedly broken. The families got on well and when Kamla passed away, the first caller was Namita Bhattacharya, Vajpayee's foster daughter.