Lal Krishna Advani, former deputy prime minister and veteran BJP leader, has reached the highest point of his life’s career as the country’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on February 3, 2024, that he will be awarded the Bharat Ratna, the country’s highest and most prestigious civilian award, making him the fiftieth person to received the award since its inception in 1954. Considering the fact that only 50 individuals have so far received the Bharat Ratna Award in the last seven decades, one can safely assume how prestigious the award is and what kind of personality and achievements it takes for any individual to become a recipient of it. While announcing the award, Narendra Modi hailed LK Advani as “one of the most respected statesmen of our time” and acknowledged his “monumental contribution to the development of India”.
The contribution of LK Advani in the progress and evolution of modern India may be enormous and endless. But when I, as a student of history, reflect on the life and career of LK Advani, I can only think of one moment that history had offered to him to steer the course of the Indian subcontinent which, had he accepted, could change not only India but the entire South Asia for better. And that moment came in 1990 when he and his associates and tens of thousands of his loyal supporters were planning to organize a country-wide Ram Rath Yatra to campaign for the construction of Ram Mandir at Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh.
The making of LK Advani from being a victim of partition, as he was uprooted from his beloved home in Sindh, to becoming one of the most consequential and influential politicians in modern India; his rise to prominence was no doubt a story of inspiration, and at the same time a symbol of divisive and communal politics that had brought undue discord among different religious communities in the country.
The moment that changed Advani and the whole of India forever came on September 25, 1990, when he began his Ram Rath Yatra from a place called Somnath in Gujarat and journeyed towards the east where it was proposed that once the yatra reached Ayodhya religious rites would be performed in the site of an already existing Mosque to paved way for the construction of Ram Mandir. Although the plan did not materialize with the arrest of Advani in Bihar, it went on to create the worst communal situation in the country since India’s independence in August 1947.
The LK Advani’s Ram Rath Yatra in 1990 and the subsequent years of communal conflicts and violence and the eventual demolition of Babri Masjid Mosque changed the secular fabric of India. His famous/infamous declaration during the yatra, “Mandir wahin banayenge, usko kaun rokega, kaun si sarkar rokne wali hai?” (We will build the temple, and who will stop us, which government can?) is still etched in the memory of India. His declaration was a source of pride and confidence to some and a matter of fear to many others.
And this Advani’s Ram Rath Yatra of 1990 is where the question of “if” comes to my mind. I am convinced that at this moment history has offered Advani a better alternate yatra to undertake. What if, instead of taking the yatra from Somnath towards the east, LK Advani decides to take the journey towards the west to his birthplace, Sindh in Pakistan? And what if the purpose of his yatra was not for the construction of a temple by demolishing a mosque but instead for healing the wounds of partition and bringing reconciliation among three South Asian nations – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh that was torn apart by the disastrous partition of 1947? If he was so confident that no power on earth could stop the will of the people to build a temple at the birthplace of Lord Ram, he should remember that no power could also stop him from taking a historic journey to his birthplace in Pakistan to reconnect to his roots, and with the message of brotherhood and communal harmony. This kind of journey towards the west, had it taken, could set the stage for the ushering of a new era in the relation between India and Pakistan, and bringing normalization in their relations.
The partition of India had caused so much harm to the people of South Asia at large, and as such the relations between the three South Asian nations remain far from being normal to this day. Many people may want to work for reconciliation and healing in South Asia, yet they don’t have a place and standing enough to do so. Only a few like LK Advani along with his life background, who command enormous followers/supporters across the region and whose words matter to the society and nations, can try and work to bring South Asia together. Unfortunately, he had refused to contemplate this opportunity that history offered to him. Instead, he had chosen the option of waging a campaign for the construction of a temple by way of replacing a mosque which only widens the communal divide among different religious communities in India.
It was only in 2005, 15 years after his Ram Rath Yatra and one year after his party lost the general election, that he might have realized the lost opportunity that history offered to him. He had gone to Pakistan with the hope that he could do something to help normalize the relations between India and Pakistan. But history perhaps doesn’t offer opportunities more than once. It was too late for Advani. His Pakistan visit in 2005 only scripted his downfall, and among others, his decision to visit the tomb of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the architect of Pakistan, and pay homage to him received serious backlash from his supporters in India. He then proposed that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh should jointly celebrate/observe in 2007 the 150th anniversary of the 1857 Revolt where the Indian subcontinent in unison had fought the colonial power. But there were no takers to his proposal and no such joint celebration took place.
A Bharat Ratna Award for LK Advani should be a final grand send-off for him by the party that he had built as the curtain came down on his more than seven-decades-long eventful career as a politician and public leader, beginning from his days as a young RSS volunteer during pre-partition India to eventually becoming a deputy prime minister of India. But for the last decade since the emergence of a new iconic leader in his party, Narendra Modi, who had relegated him to the position of no-relevance, a virtually-sidelined LK Advani must have been spending his time looking back to the memory of the 1990s where history had offered him to undertake a historic journey for bringing an emotional, physical and possible territorial re-integration of South Asia, and which he had refuses to take.
Dr. Nsungbemo Ezung
Wokha Town
