Advani's Swarna Jayanti Yatra
It's Still a Long Ride to Power

The recent political crisis at the centre might have left little immediate advantage to BJP, but it did raise the expectations of mid-term polls. Advani hit the highways again to launch his longest ever fourth yatra hoping that to be a short-cut to the elusive power. Thanks to the judicial exoneration in the hawala scam, it was also a personal bid to be back in the centrestage. But it was an uphill drive for the leader much like his party's political advance which too had plateaued after arriving at a proximate distance to power. The yatra, for long, failed to kick up any dust. It remains to be seen whether Bihar, currently at the peak of its political crisis, would provide some solace to Advani next.

Christened as Swarna Jayanti Yatra to derive maximum mileage out of fiftieth anniversary of freedom, it was designed to project Advani in the cast of Father of the Nation-No.2 in the making. His script writers had accordingly assembled elaborate themes basic to nation building while giving them a Hindu nationalist orientation: vacuous appeals to nationalism and patriotism coated however with the venom of Hindutva fascism, a dubious call for a high-powered commission to thoroughly review the constitution, an appeal for a debate on the legacy of partition while putting the blame solely on Muslims, wooing of the socalled 'nationalist' Muslims while highlighting the tradition of Hindu communal leaders in the freedom movement and an advocacy of a strong state playing upon the middle class revulsion on engulfing corruption and so on. But the sermons from the chariot delivered on the wayside failed to impress even the otherwise starry-eyed local journalists in provincial towns. Even they were more keen on getting the self-styled 'statesman' to reveal his mind on more mundane things like BJP's infighting in Delhi and the prospects of Khurana replacing Verma.

As he was winding his way through the southern states - where his party's repeated forays in the past only met with failure - he carefully avoided any criticism of DMK or even TMC of Indian Bank scam fame despite his vague anti-corruption crusade and, strangely enough, he maintained a studied neutrality between the rival TDPs in AP keeping in mind the future needs to revive his party's abortive national democratic front. Nevertheless his yatra was met with absolute indifference from all these political forces. In his berating everywhere of the popular cynicism and indifference towards the ills plaguing the polity, he appeared to be venting his frustration at the lacklustre public response to his own political ride.