80-year-old Lal Kishen Advani, a former Deputy Prime Minister, who was on Monday projected as the party's next Prime Ministerial candidate, is a man with a killer instinct.
NEW DELHI: L K Advani, who brought BJP to the centrestage of Indian politics through the Ayodhya movement, is identified with hardline Hindutva politics but his image makeover attempt two years ago got into problems with saffron founthead RSS and other outfits.
80-year-old Lal Kishen Advani, a former Deputy Prime Minister, who was on Monday projected as the party's next Prime Ministerial candidate, is a man with a killer instinct, who virtually single-handedly propelled the BJP to great heights.
His Somnath-to-Ayodhya 'Rath Yatra' of 1990 proved to be one of the defining moments of Indian politics as it turned the tide in favour of the saffron party, which came to power at the Centre for the first time in 1996.
Despite leading the movement, which saw popular upswell in support of the BJP as against only two seats in its kitty in 1984 held in the backdrop of Indira Gandhi's assassination, Advani had then declared that Atal Bihari Vajpayee would be the Prime Minister.
Though the Government then turned out to be a '13-day wonder', Advani continued to be a perfect foil to Vajpayee and the two leaders ensured the first big break for the saffron party and its allies in 1998.
The duo made wonders for the alliance with Vajpayee's poetic and persuasive nature and Advani's forceful oratory and organisation with cold logic shorn of any sentiments.
With Monday's announcement, history has turned full circle for the former Deputy Prime Minister, who was virtually in the doghouse two years ago following the Jinnah controversy.
The Jinnah controversy, which had created ripples in the Sangh Parivar, had seen Advani reportedly eulogisinag the founder of Pakistan on the issue of secularism.
His remarks stirred a hornet's nest in the Sangh Parivar with Advani being forced to quit as the party chief on December 31 two years back, soon after the party celebrated its silver jubilee in Mumbai.
Advani has been associated with the saffron party and its erstwhile avatar, the Jansangh, for more than five decades and has been working with the RSS since his youth days.
He joined the RSS in 1942 and became its Karachi unit secretary in 1947. For four years after the partition, he organised the RSS network in Rajasthan before joining the Bhartiya Jansangh in 1951.
Advani, who was elected Chairman of the Delhi Metropolitan Council way back in 1967, entered Parliament for the first time in 1970 as a Rajya Sabha member.
Immediately after partition, he left Karachi -- still his most favourite city where he was born on November eight, 1927 -- to start a life of politics in this side of the then newly created border.
Married, with a son and a daughter, the one-time film critic in the RSS journal 'The Organiser', the well-read and widely travelled Advani became Union Minister for the first time in the Morarji Desai Government in 1977.
Arrested during emergency, he became the Janata Party General Secretary when it came into being in 1977 and was later the Information and Broadcasting Minister in the first non-Congress government since Independence.
The incisive mind working behind the tall physique of the Leader of the Opposition has come into focus many a time during Parliamentary debates.
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