Friday, May 16, 2008, Jamadi-ul-Awwal 9, 1429    

“My Country My Life”

Sultan M Hali

LK Advani’s book “My Country My Life” is a 954 page memoir of Mr. Advani’s life, his political career and his impressions of events and happenings. It makes fascinating reading, not for what he has depicted but for what he has chosen to omit selectively. Contemporary history is replete with hate campaigns led by Mr. Advani against Muslims, his reprehensible role in razing the Babri Masjid to build the ram temple in its place, the so called Rath Yatras, his promotion of Narendar Modi, the butcher of Gujarat, his crimes against humanity…the list could go on and on. I recently found an independent account by Professor Ilyas Dhami, a Vietnam Veteran and Professor Emeritus in USA, who has not only met Mr. Advani and supped with him but also commented on his book in his letter to Ms. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker US House of Representatives. His letter is available on the internet.
Professor Dhami, in his critical review of “My Country My Life”, terms it as Hindu Talibanization in India. The erudite professor says: “His autobiography ‘My Country, My Life,’ confirms my worst assessments and conclusion of dinner at Washington DC in June, 2003. Reading it doesn’t validate the Vajpayee foreword’s blurb that it is authored by an ‘outstanding leader whose best … is yet to come.’ I believe, Mr. Advani emerges as someone whose time has already passed. His ideas and politics lack relevance for most Indians who want an open and just society free of discrimination of grounds of birth or religion who long to be emancipated from poverty, and who are yet to enjoy real, substantive democracy. He disappoints me terribly. His book is compulsively self-justificatory. May be he suffers from internal strife? It also reveals some obsessions: ‘Hindu India’s’ centuries-long victim-hood, prejudice against efforts (e.g. Gandhiji’s) to forge a citizen-based identity independent of religion, and blind faith in ultra-nationalism leading to Maha Bharat-Vand-e-Matram-Hindustan and India’s emergence as a Great Power. Even in the book’s best part, on the Emergency, Mr. Advani doesn’t rise above petty, person-centric polemics. He shows no understanding of the deeper causes of the structural crisis of governance of that period.
He condemns Indira Gandhi for saying that ‘the nation is more important than democracy’ and for invoking ‘the foreign hand’ to violate civil liberties. Yet, it is the BJP-led NDA, which established the Commission to Review the Constitution-expressly, but unsuccessfully, to promote presidential government. His own party is distinguished for placing the nation before democracy. As home minister, he attributed the Kashmir unrest wholly to Pakistan no local resistance. Mr. Advani closely observed, of played a role in, some momentous events – the Emergency, the Ayodhya mobilization, the 1998 nuclear tests, and India’s worst state-sponsored terrorism, in Gujarat. But there’s no self-critical reflection on these. He has pioneered and invoked Hindu Talibanization.
The book doesn’t once mention the RSS’s (Rashtriya Swayamsevk Sengha-a Hindu Fundamentalist Part) interference in governance, which became starkly visible when it vetoed Mr. Jaswant Singh’s appointment as finance minister. Mr. Advani also hides the rationale of the 1998 nuclear blasts. He presents the decision as a straightforward corollary of the Jana Sangh’s 1964 pro-Bomb resolution! Mr. Advani always advocated a matching answer to Pakistan’s ‘threats’. But the doesn’t explain why India’s 10 months-long post-December 2001 mobilization of 7 Lac troops was no answer. The book contains outright lies too. During Mr. Advani’s June 2003 at a meeting earlier in Washington DC in my presence, he assured us that India will send troops to Iraq. But now he says sending troops was ‘out of the question… right from the beginning...’ His whole conversation is recorded on tape in the Pentagon.
However, India did agree to this in principle. A June 8, 2003 statement by its embassy in Washington quotes Mr. Advani as saying ‘the matter (is) under consideration…’ He also told Aaj Tak New York Indian Radio and News paper that those opposed to sending troops are ‘uniformed,’ with a ‘one-sided opinion.’ Mr. Advani’s account of the Kandahar, Afghanistan episode is a white lie. I was at the CentCom. DOHA at that time so I am very familiar of the whole show. He repeatedly claims the BJP wouldn’t compromise with ‘terrorists’... when it was exchanging hostages with them. He says he was unaware that Mr. Jaswant Singh was authorized by the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) to do so. This is contradicted by every available account, including Mr. George Fermandes and the fact that know. This gravely damages Mr. Advani’s USP as Loh Purush (Iron Man). If he was unaware of Mr. Singh’s brief, he was unfit as Home Minister, if he was party to the CCS decision, which demolishes his claimed resolve to fight terrorism either way, he loses. Mr. Advani’s grotesque ‘secularism’ never rises above religion-based ‘us’ and ‘them’ categories. He condemns Ahmedabad’s Killing, and repeats the cliché, ‘some of my best friends are Christians”. But reverts to crass Hindutva, terming conversion ‘a threat… to Hindu society and national integration.’
The most nauseating part of the book to me concerns the Gujarat Mr. Advani rejects the settled truth that the post-Godhra violence was state-sponsored. As a proof he narrates two instances in right there, Mr. Advani. But for every such example, there are probably 10 instances of unprevented murder, including the dismembering-alive of former MP Ehsan Jafri. Mr. Advani admires infamous Chief Minister Modi as ‘the most viciously, consistently and persistently maligned leader’ anywhere Mr. Modi logically emerges as his successor-shamefully for the BJP.
Mr. Advani wanted to use the book as an election launching pad and embarrass the Congress. He even gifted Ms Sonia Gandhi a copy to score a PR point internationally; he has sent his books to President Bush. Dick Cheney and most of US senators and congressmen. He doesn’t know my critique will reach them even before they open the initial pages of his book ‘My Country, My Life’ All he has successfully done is expose his own pettiness. He is champion of Hindu Talibanization in India. His hatred for Musallmans will remain in his system for ever. We must watch out.”