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The reluctant Sanyasi - The Times of India

Editorial ()
18 July 1997

Title: The reluctant Sanyasi
Author: Editorial
Publication: The Times of India
Date: July 18, 1997

In an era dominated by television appearances and sound bites, and VIPs
paranoid with personal security, rare is the politician who embarks on a
mass contact drive except at election time. Bharatiya Janata Party
president Lal Krishna Advani, along with former Prime Minister Chandra
Shekhar, can be said to belong to that vanishing breed of political leaders
who believe in the virtues of direct contact. Mr Advani braved the
gruelling heat of the summer and the downpour of the monsoon to blaze a
15,000-km trail through virtually the length and breadth of the country.
His Swarna Jayanti Rath Yatra covered all the four political dhams of India
- west, south, east and north. Clearly, the mission had a dual purpose:
personal and political. On the personal front, it was both a penance for a
man who had been cleared of Hawala charges and a strategy to vindicate his
standing among the people by renewing mass contact. Indeed, now that Mr
Advani has clarified that he has no intention to take political sanyas, the
constituency built on the yatra would serve him well, even when he quits
the presidentship of the party, as he is expected to. At the same time the
yatra was intended as an exercise to highlight the weaknesses of the United
Front government at the centre and to broaden the BJP's vote ,base,
especially in those regions where it is weak. After all, the 1990 Ram Rath
yatra had helped boost the party's fortunes a great deal, from 11.5 per
cent of the vote in 1989 Lok Sabha elections to around 20 percent in 199 1.

And yet, the Ayodhya card seems to have backfired on the party this time
around. If not elsewhere in the country, the Rath's journey through Uttar
Pradesh was accompanied by shrill incantations of Jai Shri Ram and Mandir
Wahin Banayenge, which echoed the passions of the kar sevaks, brutally
displayed on December 6, 1992. Thus it is that the BJP, which made fighting
corruption and accommodating minority sentiments its major plank in the
western, southern and eastern parts of the country, fell to raucous cries
of extreme Hindutva as soon as the campaign headed northwards. The party
should have known better than to revert to hardline Hindutva, because, as
the results of the recent elections demonstrate, Ayodhya has all but lost
its utility as a vote-catching device with the demolition of the Babri
Masjid. Despite emerging as the largest single party, it failed to deepen
its vote base both in the country as a whole (the BJP was stuck with the
same 20 per cent popular support in the 1996 Lok Sabha elections as in
1991) and in its stronghold of Uttar Pradesh (stuck at the one-third level
of ,popular vote for the last two consecutive assembly elections). A
future repeat of the Ayodhya card by the BJP may well end as a whimper. To
find a foothold in newer areas, and deepen its influence in existing
strongholds in north-western India, the party has to eschew its militant
fundamentalist strategy, and then build fresh alliances, including with
regional groups. The BJP leadership should realise that in a democracy like
India there is no place for a fundamentalist platform Hindu or Muslim.


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