THE INTREPID YATRI
L.K. ADVANI (1927—) ‘Loh purush’ of the BJP, whose rath yatra in 1990 culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the rise of the BJP to power
With the exception of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, no other leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party has contributed as much to its birth, as well as to its meteoric rise in Indian politics, as Lal Krishna Advani did. The Atal-Advani era began even before the birth of the party in 1980. It can be traced to the traumatic aftermath that followed the mysterious assassination of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya, the main ideologue and organiser of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (the BJP’s predecessor party) in February 1968. Left rudderless, the Jana Sangh, which had a highly committed and disciplined band of workers in many parts of the country, needed a new leader. Vajpayee, the rising star in Indian politics, rose to the occasion. But he needed a capable colleague to help him in the party’s mission. Advani, cerebral, shy and with a steely resolve turned out to be that man.
In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Advani brought about a big change in both the direction and vocabulary of Indian politics by leading a mass movement for the reconstruction of a Ram Temple in Ayodhya. His Rath Yatra for this purpose evoked such a massive Hindu response that it shocked the BJP’s opponents and surprised Advani himself. Sadly, the yatri was not in full control of the movement, which triggered large-scale communal violence in the country.
Through the Ayodhya movement, Advani challenged, with stupendous electoral success to his party, the Congress-Left paradigm and practice of secularism. He called it pseudo-secularism, and sought to counter it with the BJP’s own genuine or positive secularism—‘Justice for all, appeasement of none’. Here the BJP’s success is questionable. The party failed to script a holistic vision and practical policies to ensure socio-economic justice to the deprived sections among Indian Muslims,
And Advani has to share the blame. Now things have worsened to such an extent that the BJP, buoyed by its own majoritarian triumphalism, does not speak of secularism, a principal anchor of the Idea of India, at all. It is aggressively practicing its own divisive (Hindu) votebank politics.