SCENARIO ONE: Boy opposes junior boy’s elevation to rank of class monitor, a title just below or equal to him. Resigns from all positions at school, goes into depression, writes letters in protest. Indicates no patching up possible to anyone who cares to meet him.

SCENARIO TWO: Aforementioned boy opposes aforementioned junior boy’s elevation to the rank of school’s head boy, a rank above or equal to him. Left with few positions to resign all over again, goes into depression, writes at least one letter in protest. Indicates no patching up possible to anyone who cares to visit him. Sulk over, with none really interested after the initial few attempts to get him back on board, boy patches up, sort of.
 
That may be a great topic for a lunch-time or day-end gossip at a school, but not essentially in politics, especially politics at the highest echelons. And that is what LK Advani, former deputy prime minister-cum-union home minister and past president of the country’s second biggest political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is doing these days – for a second time in three months.

Both Advani and his party might say he was not upset, nor did he think/threaten to resign after Narendra Modi was made the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate despite his reservations – like opposition leader in Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj and party president Rajnath Singh said over the weekend – but both the veteran leader and the party’s leaders who forward that line of argument would know they are being economical with truth.

When Advani resigned from most party posts the first time, after Modi was appointed in-charge of the party’s election campaign committee at the conclave in Goa in June, almost all BJP leaders made a beeline for his residence in New Delhi. The attempt was to try and convince him.

When the situation looked threateningly close for a repeat telecast after the parliamentary board’s decision was announced on Friday (September 13), not many leaders were enthused enough to go and talk him out of doing what he could have done. In fact, as reports in many sections of the media have said (without naming any party leader for obvious reasons), not many were going to try and convince him to stay had Advani quit over Modi's appointment as the PM candidate.

On Monday, just about 72 hours after he had refused to attend the parliamentary board meet that eventually appointed Modi as the party’s PM candidate, and less than 24 hours after his reportedly “cold” meeting with the Gujarat CM at veteran lawyer and BJP leader Ram Jethmalani’s house, Advani seemed to have done a 270-degree turn. “Narendra Modi, who my party has appointed as PM candidate, has done a lot for development in Gujarat,” Advani said at a rally in Kirba, in BJP-ruled Chhattisgarh. Talking to reporters later, he was quoted as saying, “I was so moved by Gujarat’s development, especially when Modi kept his promise of providing electricity to every village and towns of Gujarat. Today we in the BJP are on our way to give him the responsibility of the country. The good works he did should happen all around the country.”

Strangely, he did not recall those “good works” a few hours, or a few weeks ago – the venue being New Delhi and Panjim, respectively.

So what prompted this change of tack? Realpolitik, of course. Sensing that he was cornered beyond redemption, with the party that he had helped build up ready to now dump him, there was little option left but to change track, and tact. He might have survived the first frost after the Goa conclave, but the sensible and judicious politician that he is, Advani had realised there would be little role for him but to mark his presence in Lok Sabha for the remainder of its term, and then sit at home writing blogs – unless he offered a reconciliatory note following the second sourness.

As Karl Marx wrote so many winters ago: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”