Advani

Indore, Feb. 19: L.K. Advani today indicated he was ready to hang up his boots.

“I feel I should be relieved,” the veteran leader said at the BJP’s national council meeting here, pointing out that the “generational change” in the party was almost over with Nitin Gadkari’s takeover as president.

The 83-year-old also said he was the oldest among the 5,000 delegates at the conclave.

But Advani, who still micro-manages the party’s affairs, made it clear he was more than available to guide party “youths” and emphasised his centrality in the process of transition to signal that even now he should not be seen as a push-over.

“This generational change is necessary. In the last quarter of 2009, my comrades in the party and the (RSS) parivar said the BJP should benefit from my experience and I should be around to facilitate the generational transition,” Advani said on the last day of the meet.

He said the appointment of Sushma Swaraj and the re-appointment of Arun Jaitley as leaders of Opposition in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha had taken care of one aspect of the transformation.

“Now even the organisational-level generational change has been done. I don’t know to which generation Gadkari belongs, the second or third. But I hope his team will also have members of the fourth generation.”

The faces on the posters plastered in Indore presaged the BJP’s new managing team: Ravi Shankar Prasad, Shahnawaz Hussain, M.A. Naqvi and Rajiv Pratap Rudy are Gadkari’s contemporaries.

The “fourth generation” Advani mentioned didn’t find a place in the posters. But Piyush Goel, Vani Tripathi, Shaina NC, Smriti Irani and Arati Mehra, some members of this so-far concealed phalanx, are likely to find a place as Gadkari’s aides.

The third layer of the new hierarchy is made of chief ministers feted by Advani, especially Gujarat’s Narendra Modi and Madhya Pradesh’s Shivraj Chauhan. Modi was lauded for cleaning up the Sabarmati and taking its waters to drought-prone Kutch and Saurashtra, and Chauhan for correcting the male-female ratio in his state with his “pro-women” schemes and letting Narmada waters flow to Gujarat.

Advani held up Gadkari as an example of the BJP’s claim to being a “party with a difference”. “We are part of the same Sangh parivar. But there is no scope for parivarwaad (dynastic politics) in our party,” he said.