An Avatar of Hindu Strength

He came to India as a Hindu refugee during the carnage of partition, fleeing the new Islamic nation of Pakistan when the subcontinent was divided along religious lines in 1947.

More than four decades later, he rode a “chariot” named for the god-king Rama across 6,000 miles of India, drawing millions of new disciples to a Hindu revivalist call. The journey thrust him onto the national stage--and left thousands dead in rioting in the months that followed.

Today, Lal Krishna Advani stands at the pinnacle of power in a nation newly flush with nuclear capability. He has become one of India’s most powerful and, critics say, potentially dangerous men.

In fact, some political analysts say that Advani, India’s interior minister and national security chief, has emerged as more powerful than even Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in the weeks since their government fulfilled Advani’s years-long pledge to detonate an atom bomb in the name of a Hindu nation.

Advani, after all, is Hindu nationalism in India.

At 70, the articulate elder statesman has become a lightning rod for critics of his now-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, which equates Hinduism with nationalism in a country where more than 120 million Muslims also live.

Advani has been cast by Indian secularists, Communists and other critics as authoritarian--even fascist--and a religious fundamentalist, which his track record suggests he is not. He has been jailed for inciting religious riots that killed at least 2,000 despite having preached consistently for nonviolence and religious harmony from the stage.

He still faces criminal charges from the religious bloodshed of December 1992, when throngs of Hindu zealots, inspired in part by Advani’s chariot ride, used sledgehammers, axes and crowbars to rip down a 16th century mosque in the town of Ayodhya that stood in the way of a temple to Rama--and shoved Advani aside when he passionately appealed for them to stop.

“Some people have the impression that Advani is more extremist, that he belongs to the radical fringe of our party,” said K.R. Malkani, a member of Parliament who has known Advani since the early 1940s. “He most definitely is not.

“Advani doesn’t mince his words. He says what he means and means what he says. And what he says, he does. Advani is a man of great conviction, but I wouldn’t call him an extremist.”

Advani’s roots are decidedly upper-middle class: the son of an affluent shopkeeper, the pupil of English convent teachers and the student of Western law professors during the waning years of the British Raj. They taught the values reflected in the lucid, gentle tones of thousands of speeches and manifestoes as he crafted an agenda so clear, so consistent and now so compelling for this nation of nearly 1 billion that it has become an agenda for the nation itself.

That Western pragmatism combines with Eastern spiritualism to define Advani. Recently, however, Advani has alarmed the West with harsh rhetoric.

Just days after India shocked the world in May with its five underground nuclear weapons tests--fulfilling a promise that had been in Advani’s party manifesto for more than a decade--he drew harsh criticism from here to Washington for a few simple phrases.

Comments Criticized by Pakistan and U.S.

At a news conference, Advani linked India’s proven nuclear capability to the conflict in Kashmir--the northern region claimed by both India and Pakistan that has been the flash point for two of their three wars and has been racked by an insurgency that kills hundreds every year.

“Islamabad should realize the change in the geo-strategic situation in the region and the world, roll back its anti-India policy, especially with regard to Kashmir, and join India in the common pursuit of peace and prosperity in the land,” Advani said, directing his words to leaders in the Pakistani capital less than two weeks before they tested their own nuclear devices.

Then, in what Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called a direct threat, Advani added: “Any other course will be futile and costly for Pakistan.”

Opposition leaders in India bristled. One labeled it “nuclear saber rattling” with potentially “dangerous consequences.” Another questioned whether Advani was seeking a neighborhood nuclear war. And the U.S. State Department expressed clear alarm.

Spokesman James P. Rubin said in Washington that Advani’s tough words “seem to indicate that India is foolishly and dangerously increasing tensions with its neighbors and is indifferent to world opinion.”

Just who is this balding, soft-spoken man with a whisk-broom mustache, owlish glasses and control over a nuclear arsenal?

For all his hard-edged image, Advani is a study in humility. He still appears awkward in crowds and readily admits that he dislikes them. He says he prefers a good book--”A Tale of Two Cities” or a John Grisham novel. His latest passion: surfing the Internet, which has taken India’s upper classes and political elite by storm.

“You judge me not by what my adversaries say about me. You judge me by my track record,” Advani said during the 1991 election campaign that was a landmark in his party’s ascent to power.

“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.”

Seven years later, Advani’s closest aides and friends say his views remain unchanged, although he gives few interviews to the foreign media these days. One recent morning, as a multitude of bureaucrats, businesspeople and Hindu swamis swarmed outside his modest New Delhi home awaiting a few minutes with the interior minister, an aide explained that his boss has little time or patience left to try to change his image abroad.

But those aides and independent political analysts say the ideology, vision and personality that have made Advani’s image are noteworthy for their consistency through the decades.

“The middle class trusts Advani because they know exactly where he stands,” political analyst Amitabh Mattoo said. Comparing Advani to the prime minister, he added: “Advani is more intelligent. He has thought out his views more clearly. He’s much more consistent in his vision, which means he’s much more dangerous if he’s wrong.”

Not even Advani’s harshest critics question his intelligence or his command of language--English and Hindi alike. Co-workers from his seven years as a journalist in the 1960s, writing for the organ of the party that later became the Bharatiya Janata Party, recall his gift for both words and ideas.

Even Balraj Madhok, who claims he was Advani’s political mentor before Advani led a “conspiracy” that ousted him, recalled: “Advani was a brilliant draftsman. But I didn’t find him a very good field worker. He was a delicate type of man.

“Advani comes from an affluent family. He’s a soft man. He’s a nice man. I like him. But I fear he can be used by other people and not even know he’s being used.”

That, in fact, appeared to be the case in the Rama temple movement, which catapulted Advani and his party onto center stage in Indian politics--but which, at the same time, fueled the orgy of destruction at the Ayodhya mosque by many whom Advani inspired.

Advani masterminded the campaign as a device to promote both his party and national unity, creating an ingenious tapestry of spiritualism, nationalism and hope so powerful it united much of India as never before. The message embraced high-caste millionaires, middle-class businesspeople and hungry peasants in a single nationalist shroud.

But just as Advani used the image of Rama to popularize his party’s vision of a united Hindu nation, so too did more extremist Hindu groups. Despite speeches notable for their moderation, in which Advani vowed that this Hindu nation also must nurture its large Muslim minority, time and again Hindus and Muslims killed each other in riots that broke out soon after Advani’s procession left town. Police arrested him before the procession reached its end in Ayodhya, where more were killed in the days and months ahead until, finally, the mosque was torn to bits in 1992.

Political analyst Mattoo is among those who believe that Advani has learned from the past.

“The greatest strength of Advani is he generates that strong sense of activism. And yet, I think he now has the prudence not to institutionalize a lunatic, radical posture,” Mattoo said, adding that Advani’s recent comments on Kashmir were “an unfortunate exception.”

Longtime Hawks on National Security

On the nuclear issue, Mattoo said the decision by Advani’s government to test the weapons was in no way influenced by “the loonies who are on the margins of the BJP. It’s not the lunatic right-wingers who have shaped India’s nuclear policies. It’s the scientists.”

What is more, Advani and his party consistently have been hawks on the nuclear issue and in all matters of national security.

The BJP’s 1996 manifesto, which was so much the product of Advani and his ideology that analysts here have dubbed it “the Advani Doctrine,” clearly states that a BJP government will “reevaluate the country’s nuclear policy and exercise the option to induct nuclear weapons.”

“Though the BJP stands committed to a nuclear-free world, we cannot accept a world of nuclear apartheid,” it proclaimed.

Enshrining Advani’s personal views on the subject, the document pledged that his government would refuse to sign any of the international agreements on proliferation of missile technology, nuclear testing or weapons-grade nuclear materials. It also vowed to expedite India’s medium-range missile production, upgrade its conventional weapons systems, strengthen intelligence gathering and introduce a new generation of combat aircraft.

“We believe that proactive diplomacy, especially defense diplomacy, coupled with adequate preparedness of our armed forces, is the key to securing our frontiers against aggression,” Advani’s manifesto declared.

Such policies clearly have contributed to Advani’s hard-line image, which several of his party’s leaders cited in explaining why the man who has been the BJP’s driving ideological force chose not to become prime minister.

Although it is the largest-single parliamentary bloc, the party failed to win a clear majority in this year’s elections. It governs in a delicate and diverse coalition, and lawmaker Malkani conceded: “Some of the other parties are allergic to Advani. . . . They do see him as a hard-liner.”

The coalition, in fact, is so fragile that it has tempered some of the BJP’s hawkish positions. Many analysts believe that the coalition could crumble any time this year, leading to new elections.

Advani has said for years, however, that he has no desire to be prime minister, even if the BJP had a clear majority. He equates the limelight with the crowds that so unnerve him. And, although few believed him, Advani consistently had pledged that his longtime friend and colleague Vajpayee would take the top job. A gifted speaker who is at home onstage, Vajpayee “is more suitable for the job,” Advani said on the campaign trail seven years ago.

“He’s more cut out for it--not I. . . . I would prefer to be in a quiet corner with a book of mine, or watch the theater. That is my nature.”