Advani

Panaji, June 9: A stomach bug can keep the politician in L.K. Advani away but not the movie buff in him.

The 85-year-old BJP veteran, who skipped his party’s national executive in Goa apparently because of an “upset” tummy, has turned to one of his first loves in these times of stress: films.

A blog he posted today was almost entirely on actor Kamal Haasan’s controversial but dud film Vishwaroopam. But it referred, almost out of context, to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, two of history’s infamously authoritarian personas with whom the BJP’s flavour of the season, Narendra Modi, is occasionally compared by his critics.

Nobody in the BJP was willing to comment on whether it was a Freudian slip or the allusion was intentional. More so because the reference came from Advani, distinctly out of favour with the dispensation’s movers and shakers.

Modi, the BJP patriarch’s protégé-turned-rival, was today named the party’s campaign committee chief for 2014 in Goa in Advani’s absence.

In his blog titled Vishwaroop: A beautiful film, Advani said he had been dying to see it ever since it ran into trouble with the Tamil Nadu government.

He said Kamal Haasan called him when he was in Delhi recently and had a special screening of Vishwaroopam for Advani and his family.

A couple of days later, Advani asked the actor over for dinner that consisted of “Sindhi curry and rice”, and narrated an anecdote about Hitler and Mussolini.

The story had it that when the duo read the writing on the wall during World War II and a shaky Hitler confided in Mussolini that they may have to pay dearly for the “sins” they had committed, Mussolini told Hitler that when his own end comes, he would go to the Vatican and seek the Pope’s help for a passport to heaven.

Hitler asked his comrade-in-arms to commend him, too, for salvation.

The anecdote closed with Hitler and Mussolini being consigned to hell and the Pope going heavenwards. Any lesson there for Modi?

Kamal Haasan, wrote Advani, “enjoyed my demonstration” and later gifted him a book on Hitler by journalists Gerard Williams and Simon Dunstan.

Stomach bug blamed

Advani broke his silence on his absence from Goa through a video address sent to a religious event he missed in Jaipur today. “For the last three consecutive days health was so indisposed... due to stomach upset… this is the reason I could not go to attend our most important national executive meeting in Goa,” he said in his 11-minute speech that had no mention of Modi, PTI said. He sent no such message to the Goa meet.