For so long, he was the long-distance traveller in mythology, struggling to bring back his displaced god to the right side of the nation. He was the charioteer who revived the ancient grief of the Hindu, and the most effective mobiliser in the politics of resentment. He was the nationalist with an argument, never scared to name the enemy, imaginary and real, within and without. When India had its first right-wing party in power, it was a triumphant moment for the force that he was. The promised land was ephemeral, the journey would continue, and the man himself would become a pathetic parody of his old self. So he changed course, took the history route and chose the unlikeliest of destinations to redefine himself-and to unravel his own legend. In Karachi, as the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party rhapsodised over the secular credentials of the founder of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, he was striking at the very fundamentals of his party.

PICTURE SPEAK

SHOCK TREATMENT: Advani has struck at the ideological foundation of the Sangh Parivar

It was a sight the BJP-or the Sangh Parivar-couldn't comprehend: hardcore Hindutva's commander-in-chief desperately seeking Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the author of two-nation theory, to make himself softer. A brain-dead party still wallowing in defeatism may have rallied behind the leader after the initial shock, but L.K. Advani has declared war on the party he was supposed to reconstruct from the wreckage of Elections 2004.

Advani has turned his own private crisis into an existential struggle of the party. For, the most persistent yatri of Indian politics has consistently failed to reach his desired destination. He was the proverbial No. 2, struggling in private in the overwhelming shadow of a leader who was larger than the party. While A.B. Vajpayee soared as the human face of Hindutva-the Dubcek of Hindu nationalism-Advani was miserably losing the acceptability test. The uncharitable portrait of Advani as a ruthless practitioner of the politics of hate was something he thought he didn't deserve.

Today Vajpayee is a passive patron saint and Advani is the maximum leader waiting for his appointment with history. So, why not try to be an Atal and reserve a place in the mass mind as a nationalist statesman, the wise man of the East? The compulsion was understandable, but he chose the wrong venue and the wrong company. You don't have to go all the way to Pakistan, even if you are a compulsive yatri, to renew your nationalist perspective. And Jinnah? True, as was quoted in almost every academic screed on Pakistan, he wanted the newly independent state to be one with equal rights. Such a Pakistan didn't happen.

Jinnah was the one who made it an eternal impossibility. Before the sophistry of the westernised liberal, there was the proto-Islamist who institutionalised religious hate by advocating a state for the Muslims, independent of the incompatible Hindus. This from his speech at the Muslim League convention in Lahore in 1940: "Very often the hero of (Hindus) is a foe of the (Muslims) ... To yoke together two such nations under a single State, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and the final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a State." Partition owes a great deal to the "secular" vision of Jinnah. And BJP's nationalism owes a greater deal to the memory of Partition. Can Advani, the nationalist who in the past refused to compromise on ideology, afford to repudiate the parivar values of the Sangh?

That is what he has done, the first subversive step from an aspiring leader-with-a-difference. Still, the party has to beat a hasty retreat from Jinnah's mausoleum and return to home truths. BJP is neither new nor contemporary, and it has long ago ceased to be a party with ideological distinction. The reason is leadership, or may be the lack of it. To become new or contemporary, it has to do a lot more than picnicking in history. It requires ideology as well as ideas. How did Bill Clinton become the New Democrat? How did Tony Blair become the leader of the New Labour? They sought out ideas, and they read the zeitgeist correctly. Today's BJP can't even communicate with the 21st century India. It doesn't have a counter-argument on politics, economy or culture, all controlled by the left of the centre-and that is not the story of the right elsewhere. It doesn't even have a vocabulary to communicate with the post-Partition generation. It is losing both history and the future, and the present is so uncertain.

Inevitable as the leader has taken refuge in delusion. Whatever happened to the great organisation man, the mighty builder of the nationalist apparatus? Blame it on power. After his migration from struggle to power, Advani was not willing to take a return trip. Even after the humiliating rebuff of E-2004, he maintained a comfortable distance from reality. Surrounded by rootless panegyrists whose political constituency didn't extend beyond the party office, he was presiding over the disintegration of the organisation he once built. As the battle within intensified, the party was fast losing the battle beyond, in the heartland, its natural habitat. Ideological confusion is matched by organisational crack-up. Chosen by the collective desperation of losers, Advani was expected to be active at the reconstruction site of the party. He was elsewhere. The journey to Pakistan was his grand gesture, though he did not take a bus, in spite of his aspiration to be a pirated edition of Vajpayee.

Renunciation, in Indian politics, is the most favoured route to absolute power. Advani played it out to perfection. In retrospect, it was a declaration of his own indispensability. It did work because BJP can't think beyond two old men. The party apparatus, however moribund it may be, is controlled by his proteges. He knew that he would be the arbiter, with more freedom and little responsibility. It was presidential coup of a different sort. Still, Advani rearmed doesn't mean BJP reborn. The party may not have courted Jinnah in spite of Hail-the-Leader solidarity, but the party won't abandon a leader who has divided the House of Saffron. He has taken the party from the right side of history to historic nowhere. In effect, what happened was not the rehabilitation of Jinnah but an act of self-deception and diversion by a leader at a loss.

It is the bathetic moment in the evolutionary story of L.K. Advani, who, even at 79, is not at ease with his own political identity. He wanted to acquire one quick and cheap, that too from the black market of history. It may still not suit him. Then there will be another journey.

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