Yatra mantra

Comparisons are odious but inevitable. When L.K. Advani is flagged off from Kanyakumari on his electoral cross-country rally next Wednesday, it will resurrect images of the earlier rath yatras he has undertaken. This is all the more so given the fact that the second leg of this programme — from Porbander to Samastipur — will overlap at several points the route taken during his first controversial rath yatra of 1990. Points like Somnath, Ajmer, Dhanbad and Samastipur — each of which had a loaded sub-text in the earlier moment.

A leader as politically astute as Advani would not have considered such an involved journey — which some may consider inadvisable for a man in his 77th year — if he did not perceive valuable political dividends accruing from it. What could these be? There is of course the explanation put out by the party office that the rath will help it garner valuable media attention at a time when all political parties are desperately vying for the voter’s attention. This, of course, is very likely because high profile yatras make for primetime spectacle. But Advani, by opting for the familiar yatra mantra, by resorting to a political tool that has come to be identified with his own brand of politics, also seems moved by a desire to project a kinder, gentler image of the party and himself. As he has underlined, the focus this time will be on “development”, not on a shining temple but a “Shining India” — a shift certified by the best known hardliner in the BJP fold. The electoral compulsions of such a shift are easy to understand. The party is anxious to expand its vote base. Certainly, the first phase of Advani’s yatra will traverse largely through regions that have remained immune to the seductions of saffron and the hope perhaps is that voters would respond more positively to a Congress-ised BJP, or at least an Atal-ised BJP. Clearly, the political success of Vajpayee’s moderation has proved to be an object lesson for the hawks within the party fold and the rath yatra — once the metaphor for Hindutva mobilisation — is now being dusted down to showcase a more liberal party and leader.

But the contradictions in this project do not easily go away. Nothing underlines this more than the Gujarat leg of Advani’s journey where the Narendra Modis and Mayaben Kodnanis will dominate the tableau. If Modi’s electoral yatras of late 2002 are any indication, the discourse that will travel the most in these parts will be potent Hindutvaspeak. Advani’s proposed roadshow indicates, then, just how much the party that came to power riding on the rath yatra of 1990 has changed — been forced by the pursuit and exercise of power to change — and how much it has not.