Lal Krishna Advani is not alone. In India's distant neighbourhood, another equally respected leader and statesman cut from similar cloth has overtaken Advani and is outdoing the Bharatiya Janata Party patriarch.
The similarities between Advani and Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad are too striking on the surface to be missed. However, the political environment in their respective countries that have conjoined them at the hip, in a manner of speaking, to conjure up images of a common purpose could not be more dissimilar despite appearances to the contrary at first sight.
Just as Advani gave political legitimacy to Hindutva with his rath yatra and rhetoric in the 1990s, Mahathir steadily rose as the force behind Malaysia's Islamic pride during his 22 years as the Southeast Asian country's prime minister. Putrajaya, the country's new gleaming administrative capital, a showcase of Islamic architecture and the crowd-drawing Masjid Putra adjacent to the prime minister's office, is a striking symbol of that Islamic pride.
Since the current, rebuilt Somnath temple - which is exclusively a place of worship - India has constructed nothing remotely comparable to Putrajaya since Independence to celebrate its national, or even its Hindu, identity. It must be stressed, however, that Mahathir's deployment of Islam as an instrument of socio-political transformation was very moderate by today's standards, set by the Taliban or the Islamic State creating mayhem in Iraq and Syria.
There is a lot more in common between Advani and Mahathir. It was a combination of Advani's political 'long march' for the legitimization of Hindutva and his shrewd political chess moves two decades ago which set the BJP on its road to power. Without those efforts, which included saving Narendra Modi from the party's axe at its national executive meeting in Goa in 2002 following the violence in Gujarat, Modi would not be prime minister today. It is unlikely that the BJP would be in power now without what Advani set out as his goal at that time.
Similarly, Malaysia's principal ruling party, the United Malays National Organization or UMNO and the governing coalition, Barisan Nasional - the world's longest ruling alliance - remained the dominant political force during the nearly a quarter of a century that Mahathir was prime minister, largely owing to his feel for the pulse of his people. Two facts are incidental to this narrative. The Malaysian Indian Congress is part of the ruling coalition and Mahathir is part Indian, an acknowledgement he made only in 2011.
Just as Modi is prime minister in the long shot because of Advani's legacy in the BJP and his role in rallying India's Hindu constituency, the incumbent prime minister in Kuala Lumpur, Najib Razak and his predecessor Abdullah Badawi - who was Mahathir's chosen successor - rose to the country's top post because of the long-serving UMNO leader and head of government. Support for Barisan Nasional - which roughly translates as National Front - has steadily eroded since Mahathir left office. In the last general election in 2013, the ruling coalition lost the popular vote for the first time since Malaysia's independence in 1957 to an opposition alliance but managed to retain a majority in parliament because of the electoral system.
Advani will be 88 in two months; Mahathir is 90. Unlike most men of their age they blog regularly, and whenever they write their blogs, the contents are front-page news the following day. Here the similarities end, but eerily enough. Advani expressed his deep fears around the 40th anniversary of Indira Gandhi's Emergency that India is not yet immune from another emergency. His comments in June naturally led to speculation about what he really had in mind in those remarks and if he was targeting anyone in New Delhi's new political framework.
Mahathir, on the other hand, has gone well beyond Advani's guarded warning about India's political environment. Ten days ago, when a rare protest rally was held in Kuala Lumpur against the prime minister, Najib Razak, the architect of modern Malaysia, Mahathir joined the protesters, immensely boosting their morale. If there was a single segment in the reports about the protest that made Malaysians sit up, it was the news about Mahathir coming out on the street at his age to call for Najib's resignation.
The conventional wisdom in Malaysia is that when the country's leader who served longest in office turns against another politician in the UMNO, he is history and is as good as written off. The first was Anwar Ibrahim, his protégé, who was deputy prime minister and presumptive successor. In 1998, Mahathir sacked Anwar from his government accusing him of sodomy, a criminal offence in Malaysia. This year, when Anwar appeared to be staging a comeback by proxy outside the ruling coalition, Malaysia's highest court upheld his five-year prison sentence.
The next was Abdullah Badawi, who succeeded the UMNO patriarch. When Mahathir accused his immediate successor of wrecking the economy, Abdullah was forced to resign, paving the way for the incumbent, Najib Razak. A vibrant and thriving economy, after all, was Mahathir's greatest legacy and he proudly takes ownership of development programmes, many of which helped reduce the country's poverty level to 0.6 per cent. The Petronas Twin Towers, once the world's tallest skyscraper, which houses offices of the country's state-owned oil company, Petronas, still dominates Kuala Lumpur's impressive skyline as the pride of its economic miracle as an Asian Tiger, just as Putrajaya symbolizes its Islamic identity.
At the time of independence, Malaysia had an economy that was solely dependent on the exports of rubber and tin. Poverty was in excess of 50 per cent. The World Bank says in its latest review of Malaysia's economy that the country has "succeeded in nearly eradicating poverty". The Asian Development Bank has reported that of all the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the biggest reduction of population below poverty line was in Malaysia.
This time, Mahathir is targeting the current prime minister for a variety of omissions and commissions. His major worry is that if the country's economic performance does not improve or if people are burdened with high living costs and an erosion of their savings, the ruling party will lose the next election to the Opposition, howsoever fragmented the UMNO's rivals may appear to be for now. The Malaysian ringgit has plunged to a 17-year low against the US dollar.
What started as criticism by Najib's former patron escalated into an all-out campaign for the current prime minister's resignation after mysterious deposits as large as $675 million were found in Najib's personal bank account. There are allegations that the money may have come from the country's debt-ridden and poorly-managed sovereign wealth fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad. The prime minister chairs the fund's advisory board.
Mahathir is also very critical of the allegedly lavish lifestyle of the prime minister's wife, Rosmah Mansor, whom he accuses of being an authority beyond accountability. Najib's father was Abdul Razak Hussein, Malaysia's second prime minister, who was succeeded by Hussein Onn, Najib's uncle. The prime minister's political pedigree is impeccable and the criticism is that he is not living up to it.
This columnist was in Malaysia when unprecedented protests over these allegations erupted 10 days ago into an incipient colour revolution by the name of Bersih. Protesters in Kuala Lumpur wore yellow T-shirts. Supporters of Najib have vowed a rival rally wearing red shirts.
It is unpredictable what the immediate future holds for the country now that Mahathir, for whose rule there is much nostalgia, has thrown his weight behind the demand for Najib's resignation, among others. Malaysian politics is known for drama. About a decade ago, when a similar campaign against Abdullah Badawi was building up, a delegate at the UMNO's annual convention brandished a sword to press a demand while addressing delegates. This time the outcome could be more dramatic in line with global trends for change.
