Advani the party man or Singh the economist?

LK Advani might become prime minister next month. What kind of a leader will he make? Let us examine his qualifications. Born in 1927 to a rich family living in a Parsi neighbourhood of Karachi, Advani is from the Amil caste of merchants. In his autobiography, My Country My Life, he tells us “as far as I can remember, I stood first in every class till matriculation” and “when I completed my matriculation, I had just turned 14”.

Post-mortem: Do you want him as PM? Amit Dave/Bloomberg

But at DG National College, Hyderabad, Sindh, he fails to get a degree in five years. His Lok Sabha résumé mentions an LLB from Bombay University, but does not say when he got it. His autobiography’s 986 pages do not mention this degree, or his attending this college, at all.

Forced out by Partition, Advani becomes an RSS worker. He spends years in Rajasthan’s villages, where he is “scared of one thing: tapeworm”.

This is because, over the years, he sees many people with the painful exit wound this worm would make on its way out from their legs. He writes about this at length, showing that his fear, for himself and perhaps also for the villagers he served, was real. But he does no research, else he would have learnt that it was not tapeworm but guinea worm.

On a visit to Chittor fort, he is “pained to see thousands of idols of Hindu deities broken and defaced by intolerant Muslim invaders”. Such experiences “were bringing about a strange transformation within me”.

Then, for seven years, till 1967, Advani is a journalist at the RSS journal Organiser, where he writes film reviews.

His writing is lazy and he leans on clichés and stock phrases. He describes a criminal as “dreaded gangster”. He uses too many adjectives and likes hyperbole. He calls Indira Gandhi’s Emergency the “darkest period in Indian history”, but then reports its years wrong in three places (pages 259, 266 and 270).

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I edited newspapers for 10 years and I can place Advani as a journalist immediately. He would not have risen beyond middle rank.

He says Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence People would “clearly rate as one of the five or six life-transforming books I have read so far”.

After a brief term in Delhi’s municipal council, because of his RSS connection, Advani is nominated to the Rajya Sabha. Jailed with other opposition leaders, Advani comes to power in 1977.

His life’s first executive job comes to him at 50 and he becomes minister of information and broadcasting.

This lasts two years.

In the 1980s, he finds his cause at Ayodhya. He begins a campaign, but does not understand the nature of India, and what his movement represents.