Profile : Riding the Crest of India’s Hindu Revival : Lal Krishna Advani may gain from his party’s resurgence to national prominence.

NEW DELHI — The domestic terminal was nearly deserted when the dawn flight from Bombay touched down Saturday morning, carrying the man likely to emerge as the most powerful face on India’s political landscape after the conclusion this week of the nation’s prolonged and painful parliamentary elections.

There were none of the adoring crowds that had mobbed Lal Krishna Advani, hung on his every word and showered him with flowers and confetti of saffron dozens of times during eight straight days of nonstop campaign rallies. The last had ended at 2 that same morning, just a few hours before the balding 63-year-old candidate ambled through the New Delhi arrival hall, carrying his own battered suitcase.

There were only his wife and his future daughter-in-law waiting quietly inside the terminal to welcome him home for a brief visit--just enough time to change clothes and rest for a bit--a tiny island of peace before Advani set off on yet another tour of this vast and troubled land a few hours later.

Such is life, it seems, at the crest of the Hindu revivalist wave that this man and his Bharatiya Janata Party have ridden to political prominence. It’s a wave that critics in this overwhelmingly Hindu nation charge is threatening the safety of India’s 100 million minority Muslims; one that stands to radically alter the political shape of all of South and Southeast Asia.

And yet, as he arrived for his brief weekend respite, the man who would be ruler of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ram rajhya --ideal kingdom--if it emerges early next week as winner of these elections hardly appeared the raving, fanatic Hindu fundamentalist that his detractors have portrayed.

When Hindu airport porters fell at his feet outside the terminal, Advani’s snow-white whisk-broom mustache turned up with quizzical embarrassment. He shrugged uncomfortably when startled passers-by shouted greetings and words of support. And, during an interview with The Times in the back seat of his old, Indian-made Ambassador car on his way home, Advani expressed frustration and occasional anger at the fascist, fundamentalist image that has been carved out for him amid the unprecedented religious polarization and carnage that is India today.

“I’ve battled against authoritarianism wherever I’ve seen it all my life,” Advani said, his voice croaking and cracking after hundreds of campaign speeches. “I spent 19 months in prison because I was opposed to the Emergency (two years of authoritarian rule under former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi).

“You judge me not by what my adversaries say about me. You judge me by my track record,” Advani insisted. “I wish someone were to point out to me anything from my manifesto, constitution, utterances, statements, anything that can be pinned down as being indexes of fascism. . . . Where is the authoritarianism? Where is the fascism? These are trite and stereotyped words of political abuse. And, because everyone uses them, therefore they do stick. What can I do?

“And then, people meet me, talk with me, discuss with me and find that this is not correct. So then, they think I’m clever.”

Clearly, the leader of India’s fastest-growing political cult is more than just clever. He and his party colleagues, among them shrewd strategists from virtually every sector of India’s professional and intellectual elite, have, in just a few years time, carefully crafted a national movement that has taken India by storm.

Using powerful symbols of Hinduism and a highly disciplined, grass-roots organization called the Hindu Revivalist Movement, Advani and his followers have used the election campaign as a clarion call to unite their diverse and often-anarchic nation around the religion of 83% of India’s 840 million people.

The crusade has struck deep chords among India’s burgeoning middle-class, largely Hindu businessmen and entrepreneurs drawn not only to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s promise to end a litany of affirmative-action quotas, but also to its rightist economic policies, which call for sweeping privatization and free trade in a country now sagging under the inefficiency and bureaucracy of four decades of socialism that began under Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister.

Even before former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a suicide bomber at the height of the election campaign on May 21, Advani and the co-leader of his party, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, were mounting a strong challenge to Gandhi’s long-ruling Congress-I Party for national leadership. The Bharatiya Janata Party won 88 of the 545 seats in Parliament during the last national elections in 1989, up from just two seats five years earlier. And every prominent political analyst in New Delhi had predicted that Advani’s revivalists would do far better this year.

In the first few days after Rajiv Gandhi’s death, most of those same analysts rewrote their equations. They calculated that there would be a sympathy wave mirroring that of 1984, when Gandhi and his Congress-I were swept to power with a large majority in the wake of his mother’s assassination. But the traditionally dynastic party leadership was spurned in its efforts to draft Gandhi’s reluctant widow, Sonia, to take his place, settling instead on a nondescript, compromise candidate to lead it into the delayed final poll.

And now, with the Gandhi political dynasty clearly over and the Congress party’s leadership ranks in disarray and no clear national figure at the top, the pundits of Indian politics say the Hindu revivalists have yet another arrow in their campaign quiver--the same slogan of stability that Gandhi had espoused from podiums throughout the country until the last day of his life.

It might be just enough to push Advani and the revivalists into power next week. At the very least, the pundits say, Advani will emerge as the leader of a potent opposition that is so cohesive and committed that it will alter the course of the nation even if it falls short of a simple majority.

At the center of this political force, the pundits agree, will be the staid and grandfatherly Lal Krishna Advani, a religious migrant who fled Karachi when the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 to form predominantly Muslim Pakistan.

A journalist by profession, Advani was actually educated in Catholic schools. In contrast with his fundamentalist image, he performs few Hindu religious rites. Until recently, he even ate meat, contrary to orthodox Hindu vegetarian codes.

“I’m a person who believes in religion,” he said, as the conversation continued in the back seat of his Ambassador over horn blasts and traffic snarls. “I believe in God. But I am not a ritualistic person . . . .

“Very often when you talk of a devout Hindu, it could mean a person who doesn’t do anything unless he first goes through pujas (prayers), visits the temple and all that. Well, I am not like that, though I do respect a person who is ritualistic.”

Advani more than respects such devotees. His party’s crusade is built largely upon their dedicated support, their fervor and, now, the party hopes, their ballots--a Hindu voting bloc such has never before appeared during India’s 44 years of independence. The centerpiece of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s campaign, after all, is a promise to remove a five-century-old Islamic shrine on what Hindu religious leaders claim is the birthplace of their Lord Rama, who most Hindus regard as a god, and to construct a Hindu temple on the spot.

So potent is the temple controversy that it has triggered Hindu-Muslim riots that have left thousands dead nationwide. The issue also helped drive Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress-I from power in 1989, then undermined the coalition government headed by Vishwanath Pratap Singh that took over until earlier this year.

Advani and other Bharatiya Janata Party leaders contend that the temple in the northeast Indian town of Ayodhya and the party’s call for ram rajhya are symbols needed to promote unity and nationalism in a nation crumbling under terrorism and secessionist revolts. But they have spawned the sharpest criticism from those who assert that Advani and his party are trying to drive the nation back thousands of years and ultimately destroy the constitutional safeguards for all religions, which formed the basis of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s vision of a nonviolent, secular India.

Advani counters that Congress-I and V.P. Singh’s Janata Dal (Peoples Party) are actually “pseudo-secularists” out for the traditional Muslim bloc vote--a form of political exploitation that he contends is far more reprehensible than the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Lord Rama campaign.

“For millions in the country, Ayodhya is a religious issue,” Advani said. “But my party has taken so much interest in it because I bracket it with other issues like the uniform Civil Code, Human Rights Commission, Minorities Commission”--references to various institutions set up to enforce India’s mandatory quota system for minority religions, low Hindu castes and native tribes. “And, on all these issues, the stand my party is taking is very logical and rational. All the other adversaries have taken a different stand, purely for considerations of electoral expediency.”

What about his thousand-mile trek across India to Ayodhya by chariot last year, spreading his party’s gospel and attracting hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims to the controversial site? Didn’t that endanger Muslims?

“It’s absurd,” Advani said, stressing that Muslims have been largely unharmed in the three states where his party has been ruling with a majority for the last two years. “I am confident that if the BJP comes to power, within a couple of months the Muslims will be happy,” Advani said.

And would he be happy?

Clearly, victory would mean the fulfillment of a personal mission. Advani has been a life-long activist of the highly disciplined Hindu Revivalist Movement, which forms the backbone of his party. And yet, there is something disarming and convincing about his insistence that he doesn’t want to be prime minister--a job he certainly would inherit if the party wins--and especially not now, when the Indian nation is facing its worst-ever economic and political crises.

“Frankly, even though some may think that it’s an answer I have been giving just to evade the questioner, the fact is that we have been fighting this election not on the basis of any personality, but on the basis of policies and programs,” he said.

Advani, who nevertheless remains the Bharatiya Janata Party’s top choice for prime minister if it wins an electoral majority, contends that party co-leader Vajpayee is “more suitable for the job. He’s more cut out for it--not I . . . .

“I wouldn’t say temperamentally I am a person who enjoys mobs and huge masses of people,” Advani went on as his car neared the driveway of his modest brick home on a small, suburban New Delhi residential street now teeming with dozens of heavily armed police guards and sharpshooters. “I would prefer to be in a quiet corner with a book of mine, or watch the theater. That is my nature. But, well, I’ve become used to it.”

And what book would he like to have with him in that quiet corner?

“Well,” he said after a long pause, “the latest book that I have been reading is Alvin Toffler’s ‘Power Shift (Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century) .’ ”