By Manish Chand, IANS,
New Delhi : Two decades after his famous ‘rath yatra’ catapulted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into national reckoning, L.K. Advani is making his final bid for India’s top job on a broader, non-denominational platform that talks of good governance and development with Hindutva taking a back seat.
“There are no Hindu issues. There are only national issues in this election,” Sudheendra Kulkarni, a key Advani aide and speech writer of the campaign, told IANS.
The 81-year-old prime ministerial candidate of the BJP, who launched the saffron party on to the national stage in 1989 with a strident Hindu revivalist ideology centred around the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, can now be seen floating his governance philosophy in cyberspace, with progressive mantras of IT revolution and women empowerment.
His target: over 100 million first-time voters who were not even born when he started his famous journey on Sep 25, 1990 in a white Toyota van, rejigged as a ‘rath’ (chariot) of Hindu warriors of yore.
The yatra was cut off mid-way after Advani was arrested by Bihar Police on Oct 23, 1990 at the behest of then Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad. But the journey heralded the meteoric rise of the BJP that formed coalition governments thrice at the centre in 1996, 1998 and 1999, following its debacle in the 1984 elections when it won only two seats.
But for Advani, it’s a new journey this time round, centred more around issues than ideology.
His portal, the face of his prime ministerial campaign, is discreet about Hindutva. The triple Ms – Mandir, Masjid and Muslims – that reaped a rich electoral harvest for the party in the elections in the 1990s, have been replaced by GDP – Good Governance, Development and Protection (read security).
Kulkarni, who has been a prime ministerial aide when Atal Bihari Vajpayee headed three BJP-led coalitions between 1996-2006, agrees that the Ram Mandir issue may have lost its resonance but insists that this should not be construed as the party’s abandonment of its ideology.
“No issue has the same resonance at all points in time. But that does not mean the issues raised by the rath yatra are not relevant. The larger debate about secularism is as potent as before,” said Kulkarani.
Kulkarni underlined that building of the Ram temple has been understood narrowly. “Our goal was to build ‘rastra mandir’ (temple of nation). And this can only be realised through development. Development alone can make India realise its full potential.”
Senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said: “Hindutva has been part of the ideological campaign and the ideological personality of the BJP. But the BJP is not a single-issue party.”
“We still wish the Ram Janmabhoomi issue to be settled. But the issues of governance and development are equally important.”
Achyut Yagnik, the author of “The Shaping of Modern Gujarat: Plurality, Hindutva and Beyond”, agrees that the BJP can’t flog the same slogan that has shown the curve of diminishing electoral returns.
“The party can’t subsist on slogans of the past. What worked in 1989-1990 stopped working a long time ago. It started as an electoral strategy, but after gaining power at the centre and in some states, the imperatives of governance and coalition took over from ideology,” Yagnik told IANS from Ahmedabad.
This was seen in the recent elections to state assemblies in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh where the BJP fought on issues related to development and good governance, Yagnik pointed out.
Said Ramesh Dikshit, a professor of political science at Lucknow University: “Aggressive Hindutva of the Advani and Modi variety don’t find support among a majority of Hindus. That’s because the majority of the Hindus follow the middle path. The decline of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh started with the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.”
The BJP’s turn towards the middle path has been partly dictated by the politics of coalition and partly by the prime ministerial ambitions of Advani who realised a long time ago that he could make it to the top job only by softening his Hindu hawk image.
In the summer of 2009, Advani, who fled with his family as a refugee to India from Karachi in Pakistan after the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, is taking perhaps his last shot at reaching the job that he has long coveted – sans the dominant ideology that has shaped his life and political career.