August 17, 1998

BJP strongman L K Advani was expected to give a decisive direction to the Home ministry, particularly in tackling terrorism in Kashmir. He seems to have lost his way.

By Sumit Mitra and Ramesh Vinayak

History tells us it was home minister Sardar Patel's tough stand that saved Kashmir from Pakistan's evil designs in 1947. Fifty years later, L.K. Advani has taken up the Sardar's unfinished task. The jewel in India's crown is safe with Advani as home minister and Atal Bihari Vajpayee as prime minister. Advani has not minced words while warning Pakistan that it should keep its hands off Kashmir.
(BJP TODAY, May 16, 1998)

Lal Krishna Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. For more than two decades they have been the BJP's presiding duo. Vajpayee was the senior, the thundering orator and the genial public face of a party that has never concealed the iron in its soul. Advani was the organisation man, the clear-headed ideologue who tempered a private softness with a hard-line public profile. Together, they were to be the Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel of India's first BJP Government. A devastating combination that would lead India to a new, and possibly Hindu, millennium.

Some 125 days into power, it hasn't quite worked out like that. The wishy-washy Vajpayee, who was always thought to be the right man in the wrong party, has rewritten history with the nuclear tests in Pokhran. But the decisive Advani, the man billed as "today's Sardar Patel", has faltered. Not once but repeatedly. Gone is the image of Mr Tough, the Iron Man who would galvanise Indian nationalism, rejuvenate the administration and give a bloody nose to the country's enemies. Instead, the man who reinvented Lord Ram for modern India has been shown to have feet of clay.

"I have no business to rule if I can't protect you," Home Minister Advani told the residents of Doda on May 22, after 25 members of a marriage party were gunned down by foreign mercenaries. He went a step further: he made the security of citizens in Jammu and Kashmir a matter of personal honour. "If I'm not able to do it, quitting office would be justified."

Eleven weeks later, the killings have continued with monotonous regularity. Four members of a family, including three women, were gunned down in Hadi Dhoke on July 25; 16 people were mowed down in Doda on July 28; 35 labourers were massacred in the remote Chamba region of Himachal Pradesh by militants operating from Doda on August 3; and 14 children and five adults were mercilessly hacked to death in Surankote in Poonch district the next day. In the first seven months of 1998, the number of civilians killed in Jammu has touched 200, against 141 in the whole of 1997. "I will abide by what I said in Doda if the Government fails to control the situation," Advani told an angry Parliament last week. The Opposition demanded his resignation.

So, has the home minister conceded failure? The haughty boast of "hot pursuit" of terrorists across the border has evaporated. The reference to a "proactive" policy in Jammu and Kashmir invites derisive laughter. Advani even admitted that the intelligence agencies were aware of a plan by the mercenaries to strike in Himachal Pradesh. Yet, he couldn't even protect those Hindus who voted resoundingly for the BJP earlier this year.

On May 18, following a high-level meeting in his North Block office with the Jammu and Kashmir Government and senior military officers, the home minister appointed Special Secretary (Home) M.B. Kaushal as the coordinator of an action plan committee that would formulate the "proactive" approach. Nearly three months later, the plan still awaits its deadline. "Combing operations to flush out insurgents and terrorists are on in full swing," says Kaushal, "We are unsparing in our efforts."

The ground realities tell a different story. Soon after the May 18 meeting, Jammu and Kashmir Director-General of Police (DGP) Gurbachan Jagat asked for Rs 320 crore to modernise the police and arm the village defence committees. He also wanted more forces and at least two helicopters to patrol and rush troops to the mountain heights where the mercenaries camp. So far he has received 5,000 men and an assurance of Rs 200 crore funding. As for helicopters, he has been asked to rent private choppers. "Which private airline is willing to fly to the mountain heights across the Pir Panjal when they know the militants enjoy the advantage of height?" asks a senior official incredulously.

Likewise, an innovative proposal drawn up by the state police for establishing a security grid in the Rajouri-Poonch districts is awaiting implementation for the past two months. Against the projected demand for 7,300 policemen for 240 pickets in the grid, a mere 900 are available, sufficient for only 13 pickets. Says a senior BSF official: "The entire game is being played on maps. All we do after each massacre is look at the map and decide from where to pull out troops." Home Ministry officials say that the forces are handicapped by the state Government's reluctance to enforce the Disturbed Areas Act in the Jammu area but Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah's political compulsions can't explain the overall deterioration. Last month, security forces in Doda were redeployed to protect pilgrims on the Amarnath yatra. "Shortage of forces in Jammu is working to the advantage of the militants," says Jagat.

There isn't much time for Advani to bolster security arrangements and get his act together. The systematic manner in which Pakistan has managed to activate more and more areas of Jammu in the terrorist network has made Advani's "proactive" approach a sick joke. Implicit in the new Pakistani strategy is a two-fold objective. First, to project to the international community that militancy is not merely confined to the Kashmir Valley; and secondly, to alter the demographic profile of Jammu by forcing an exodus of Hindus away from Doda. "The way the Jammu areas bordering the Valley are witnessing ethnic cleansing clearly shows that Pakistan is working towards the infamous Dixon Plan," says Lt-General Krishan Pal of the 15 Corps in Srinagar. For the first time since 1947, the insurgents have enlisted the support of Muslim Gujjars and Bakarwals to their cause using money as a bait.

"Pakistan is trying to whip up a psychological phobia that its mercenaries can strike at will," says Jagat. If that is indeed the case, matters are being helped by the Home Ministry's failure to secure coordination between the security forces. Advani's attempts to inject a sense of purpose are yet to produce results, despite the fact that the security forces are having more joint meetings. For instance, while the army puts the number of active militants in the Jammu region at 300, the police and state intelligence agencies insist that the number is close to 900. The army refuses to acknowledge stepped up infiltration and mock the other agencies for exaggerating the problem for petty gains.

The "foreign hand", however, is not the issue in Advani's own backyard in Delhi where law enforcement is directly under the Home Ministry. The number of murders in the capital was, of course, moving up since 1995, but the rise was gentle, touching 52 in 1997. In the first seven months of this year, it has jumped to 372. There are reports of increasingly daring robberies, including attacks on passing vehicles. Advani's response to this is often comic. After a bomb blast at the Inter-State Bus Terminus last month, he said, "I am aware that the law and order situation in Delhi is not good ... However, Delhi gets into focus because it is the Centre. There are many such incidents taking place in different parts of the country. Internal security is linked to social values." Only Chief Minister Sahib Singh Verma and some Home Ministry officials can claim a better record of inanities. Says Special Secretary Nikhil Kumar, in charge of internal security and policing: "There has been a general deterioration in law and order in the country but with the able guidance of our minister we are chalking out strategies to deal firmly with the situation."

The situation is not any better in Advani's home state of Gujarat, where the BJP is in power. "Nothing has happened in the state," Advani told Parliament, "that would tarnish anyone's image. The Government is competent to deal with the situation." Nominally that is right, but even Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel had to grudgingly accept that much of the turmoil in Gujarat today stems from the high-handedness of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal. The VHP has taken the law into its own hands in punishing those guilty of inter-religious marriages and proselytisation by Christian missionaries. "The BJP is building an anti-Muslim hysteria and the Muslims will be forced to take the path of civil disobedience," warns Muslim intellectual J.S. Bandukwala. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India and the All India Catholic Union have also spoken out against the harassment of Christians in the state.

In electoral terms, as even the Opposition Congress concedes, sectarian tension isn't necessarily inimical to the BJP's political fortunes. However, a home minister is expected to rise above partisan considerations. No wonder the comparison of Advani with Sardar Patel invites ridicule, even from within the saffron brotherhood. "The title (Sardar) was given to him (Patel) not by those who work in the closed chambers of the Congress or by those who edit party publications," wrote Bhanu Pratap Shukla, a former editor of the RSS weekly Panchajanya. Stressing on the Home Ministry's failure to check the deterioration of law and order in the country, Shukla slyly added that the BJP had a record of demanding the resignation of the home minister in the event of such failure.

Not that the BJP is inclined to turn its guns on its former president. Performance or non-performance, Advani remains the darling of the party activists. "There are many problems that appear to be unsolved by the Home Ministry," says party President Kushabhau Thakre, "but let us not forget that law and order is a state subject and Advani cannot do anything on his own without consulting the state governments." Nor is there any willingness to tone down the comparison between Advani and Sardar Patel. At best, says party General Secretary K.N. Govindacharya, "analogies have their limitations. In my view Advaniji is in the battle and will emerge fully triumphant."

The optimism stems from Advani's reputation as a shrewd political strategist. In the past, there may have been a basis to this. He was undoubtedly the architect of the BJP's electoral leap forward. Of late, however, Advani seems to be losing his touch. He has been promising in haste and repenting at leisure.

Take the case of the promised new states. The BJP has been promising full statehood to Delhi for as long as anyone can remember. The Home Ministry began drafting the Statehood Bill immediately after assuming power. However, Advani failed to gauge the complex implications of full statehood within the national capital. At a cabinet meeting on April 3, the bill was put in deep freeze following the Delhi Government's opposition to keeping the entire New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) area out of its territorial purview. Apparently, the local government was loath to compromise its future financial viability by sacrificing the entire NDMC area that includes both Lutyens' Delhi and the diplomatic enclaves. Whatever the objection, it was Advani's business to settle the matter before bringing it before the Cabinet. The result is a loss of face before the electorate with only a few months to go for the Delhi assembly elections.

The Home Ministry exhibited similar short-sightedness in dealing with the Akali Dal's objection to the inclusion of Udham Singh Nagar in the proposed Uttaranchal state to be carved out of Uttar Pradesh. Now, the Akalis have threatened to withdraw support to the Vajpayee Government if the district is included in the new state. The problem may be resolved but the Pahari-Sikh bitterness is certain to endure.

Advani, it seems, is so caught up with bureaucratic details that he is unable to provide genuine, proactive leadership. He is influenced too much by a coterie of officials led by Home Secretary B.P. Singh which lacks imagination and finesse. The Action Taken Report (ATR) on the Jain Commission report showed just how.

When the ATR was first presented to the Cabinet in July, Advani's colleagues were struck by its slimness and sanitised content. There was no action proposed on the allegations of LTTE links against Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi in what a cabinet minister describes as "a few paragraphs of desultory scribblings". The draft ATR also overlooked the great opportunity to pin down Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy, a permanent thorn in the side of the Government. Finally, it took Vajpayee to acknowledge the lacunae and refer the ATR to a group of three ministers. They, finally, transformed an insipid bureaucratic document into a potent political defence strategy. The inclusion of Karunanidhi in future investigations was an insurance against a possible Jayalalitha retribution. If that was the carrot held before the AIADMK, the stick came with the threat of investigations against Swamy. The budget session of Parliament ended with the Congress totally disoriented by the ATR. But this was no thanks to Advani.

The home minister has lost his touch. Thrust into the hot seat, he seems to be at sea and, despite long hours in the ministry, unable to come to terms with power and governance. Quite a contrast from Independent India's first home minister, the real Sardar Patel, the real Mr Tough.

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