LEADER ARTICLE
Yesterday Once More| Tale of Two Yatras

When you have to rouse the troops, when elections are near, go out on a "yatra". Simple formula, and one that our politicians have learnt by heart like the rest of us used to do with physics and chemistry formulae in school. Nothing wrong with it, of course: In fact, there’s everything right about leaders getting out and learning first-hand what the rest of us think. So, at least in theory, that''s why L K Advani and Sonia Gandhi are (separately) motoring around the country, and no doubt others are planning their own travels. In Advani''s case, we hear, this is a quite different yatra from past efforts.
Comparing Advani''s 1990 Ram rath yatra with this one, Prem Shankar Jha writes in Outlook (March 15): "This time Advani has left no one in any doubt that his purpose will be to showcase the NDA''s achievements over the past five years." This will be a "clean break with the past", he continues, and "the Ramjanambhoomi issue has receded into the background." The trouble with this kind of analysis is that it has been attempted before.
Every now and then, some writer like Jha, or me, will weave a wishful story of the BJP''s, and Advani''s, transformation. We put down on paper accomplished, scholarly explorations of Advani''s motives and moves. Only to have them promptly ground under the wheels of Advani''s chariot. So, I read a PTI report from Bagalkot in Karnataka dated March 15, six days into his Bharat Uday Yatra. In that town, Advani said he was "confident that a grand Ram temple would be built at Ram''s very birth place with the cooperation and support of all".
It is "in everyone''s heart", he went on, to build the temple — and so we should all "join in the nation-building task to make India a superpower". What was that again, that business about the Ramjanambhoomi issue receding into the background? Also, exactly how does temple-building become nation-building, let alone make us a superpower? But it isn''t just the Jhas and D''Souzas. Balbir Punj, himself a BJP Rajya Sabha MP, explained in this very space (March 16) that Advani''s latest yatra "embodies the zeitgeist of growth, development and prosperity", indeed that it "speaks in the sanitised language of growth, governance, development and prosperity". Now, I have no idea what "zeitgeist" means.
But I''m guessing it has something to do with Advani''s Bagalkot remarks. Because growth, development, governance and prosperity were certainly not what the man spoke about in Bagalkot. The lesson for us wishful storytellers? When pushed, and all it takes is a minuscule push, the BJP goes haring back to the things it knows best. And yet, even that is actually fine. After all, parties must count on their ideologies, their core support, their raisons d''etre. Especially at election time, that''s what politics is all about. What''s not so fine is when party champions resort to half-truths in pursuit of their votes.
To quote Balbir Punj: "(Advani''s rath yatra of 1990) redeemed the self-esteem of Indians, who were condemned to a life of profound inferiority complex by left-oriented secularism." One paragraph later, he actually says that the 1990 exercise had a "unifying effect... on the nation", and to how it "served to mellow down social bitterness". Breathtaking claims, all. But take me, an ordinary Indian: I found no self-esteem in the move to destroy a mosque. I have never felt condemned to any kind of inferiority. I know there are thousands and millions of Indians like me.
Hindus, Muslims, every kind of Indian: People who find self-esteem, not in standing on the rubble of a mosque, but in simply living our lives as law-abiding human beings. If Balbir Punj feels or once felt this "profound inferiority complex", he should speak for himself. As for "unifying effects" and "mellowing down bitterness": Punj''s own article shows up the lie in those claims. He refers to Laloo Prasad Yadav arresting Advani in 1990; to Ram Vilas Paswan calling the yatra a Bharat Vinash Yatra; to a PIL to stop the yatra; to stories of "bloodshed, communal distress and discord during Advani''s past yatras"; to the "disturbances" and "riots" that "accompanied" the demolition of that mosque in 1992.
And Prem Shankar Jha (still in Outlook) writes of the 1990 yatra: "The cost in... human suffering and social strife was enormous. It viciously communalised Indian civil society for good and ended in some 600 deaths in December 1992 and January 1993 and a terrorist-gangster riposte in Mumbai two months later that claimed another 400 lives." Does any of this sound like "mellowing down bitterness"? And take this final half-truth from Punj''s article, proof in the end that he himself does not quite believe his own rhetoric. After the December 6, 1992 mosque demolition, he writes, "The subsequent Mumbai riots did not break out until February 1993." Ah well.
The rioting in my city all through December 1992? The Radhabai Chawl massacre of January 1993? The burning alive of two men in their taxi in Pratiksha Nagar later in January? The hundreds of lives snuffed out in Mumbai through those two horrific months, before we even turned the calendar over to greet February 1993? Dreamed them all up, I suppose. No wonder we hear talk of "sanitised language."