IT IS rare for a sub-continental politician to write his memoirs, even the exceptional one equipped with the requisite skills hesitates to pen his autobiography for fear of treading on many toes should he choose to tell it as it was when he was in the thick of active politics.

However, Lal Krishan Advani is in many ways a rare Indian politician.

The Leader of the Opposition in Parliament and the presumptive prime ministerial candidate of the National Democratic Alliance, 80-year-old Advani is one of those thinking politicians who can engage you in a conversation on books, films, culture, various ideological currents and, of course, politics.

The leader of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party has been an active politician for over five decades and has, therefore, enjoyed a ringside view of major developments in post-independent India.

Exceedingly sharp and articulate, both in Hindi and English, Advani last month caused a veritable political storm by coming out with his autobiography. My Country My Life was launched with great fanfare at a function in the national capital by former president, A.P. J. Abdul Kalam on March 19.

Because the book details some of the major events in the recent history of the country, it has attracted both brickbats and bouquets depending on one’s political predilections.

The ruling Congress Party, whose leaders pointedly skipped the book-release function, has panned the book for an alleged one-sided account of modern India’s history.

Advani, they felt, was keen to distance himself from some of the decisions taken by the government of prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee of which he was the Home Minister and, later, Deputy Prime Minister as well.

The politician who changed the terms of ideological discourse by frontally challenging the dominance of the Congress Party, and questioning its policies on minorities, cultural nationalism, security and integrity of the country, terrorism, et al, offers his take on each of these issues.

Besides, he talks at length about the Ram temple movement and how he undertook the cross-country motorised Rath Yatra to enlist popular support for the construction of a temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh.

Rich vignettes of personal and private are laced with the public in the book. Advani tells of his baptism in politics at the young age of 14 back in his birthplace, Karachi, now in Pakistan, when he joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

The family migrated to India amidst the traumatic events of the partition of the sub-continent in August 1947. He devoted himself full-time as a senior member of the RSS.
Advani reviewed Bollywood films besides writing on the activities of the RSS-Jana Sangh.

However, the book has attracted flak for his less-than-full account of some of the events under his watch.

The hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to New Delhi by Pakistani terrorists with 162 passengers on board in late December 1999 was one such event.
Advani was the Home Minister then. The hijackers had forced the plane to land in Kandhar in Afghanistan and demanded the release of four of their comrades held in Indian prisons in exchange of the hostages.
More than the swap, the fact that then Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh had personally flown with the four terrorists who were set free has proved most embarrassing for the BJP.Advani implies in the book that he was in the dark about Jaswant Singh flying to Kandhar along with the four terrorists.

A few days later, George Fernandes, who was Defence Minister in the Vajpayee Government, contradicted Advani, claiming that the latter, as a member of the crisis management committee of the Cabinet, knew of the decision to send Jaswant Singh on the same plane just in case a last-minute hitch in Kandhar required an on-the-spot decision.

Without doubt, the book is an interesting romp through the post-independent history of the country, for instance, the role he and his party colleagues played in fighting the draconian Emergency rule of Indira Gandhi between 1975 and 1977, when civil liberties were snuffed out and a blanket censorship imposed on the media.

Advani spent 19 months in prison along with lakhs of other anti-Emergency protesters.

The author also throws light on his role in the failed Musharraf–Vajpayee Agra summit meeting in July 2001, denying the Musharraf charge that he sabotaged the chance of an agreement.Advani also writes at length about his controversial visit to Pakistan in 2005 during the course of which he called Mohammed Ali Jinnha 'secular'. This upset his party and its ideological mentors, the RSS, to such an extent that he was forced to resign as the president of the BJP.For close to two years he was sidelined by the party for the alleged sacrilege in his calling the founder of Pakistan secular, though Advani claimed that he had been misunderstood.As the presumptive prime ministerial candidate, Advani now has his gaze fixed on the next parliamentary election.