A Late Riser's Journey

Opposition spokesmen have been quick to label L.K. Advani's 'Bharat Uday Yatra' (the journey to rouse India) as 'Bharat Vinash Yatra' (the journey to destroy India). The reference is, of course, to Advani's rath yatra of 1990, which he undertook to mobilise popular support for the construction of a Ramlalla temple at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. That 'yatra' became the launchpad of the BJP's climb to power, for it helped to boost the party's vote in one leap, from 11 per cent in 1989 to over 21 per cent in 1991. But the cost in terms of human suffering and social strife was enormous. For, not only did the confrontation that led to Ayodhya viciously communalise the Indian civil society for good, it legitimised a violent movement to pull down the mosque that 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.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Advani's announcement should have sent a frisson of fear through the minorities—terrorised as they are by the recent memories of the Gujarat carnage that began at Godhra with the burning of two train compartments, purportedly full of kar sevaks. That is exactly what the Opposition wants to capitalise upon. But the similarities between the uday yatra and the yatra of 1990 are entirely superficial. Although Advani has chosen auspicious days on which to start and end his yatra and locations that deliberately recall the Adi Shankaracharya's pilgrimages across India in the 8th century, his attempt to mobilise the powerful symbols of Hinduism ends there. This yatra will not be on a jeep decked up to look like a chariot from the battle of Kurukshetra, but a refurbished (and presumably air-conditioned) campaign bus. And the deputy PM has left no one in any doubt that his purpose will be to showcase the nda's achievements over the past five years.

Should we take Advani at his word, or is there a likelihood that in the face of cheering crowds of the faithful, the old Hindutva rhetoric will surface again? Everything that has happened in the past year suggests that no such thing will occur. Beginning with Vajpayee's January 2003 musings from Goa, both he and Advani have worked assiduously to distance the BJP from the crude anti-Muslim propaganda that Narendra Modi employed to polarise the vote on communal lines and secure victory in the state elections in Gujarat. Both have stressed that Hinduism is pluralistic and secular by nature and implied that an exclusionary interpretation of the religion—precisely the ideological raison d'etre of the BJP's birth and ascendancy—is perverse. Advani went so far on one occasion as to assert that India had to be secular and there could not be a Hindu rashtra. This drew the VHP's ire. It promptly labelled him 'pseudo-secular'.

The party's decision to fight the election mainly on the basis of performance is the next logical step in the secularisation of the party. But it is also the beginning of the most seminal change to take place in Indian politics in the last two decades. Till now, all elections have been fought on the basis of appeals to traditional loyalties such as caste or religion. The nearest that political parties have come to issues of performance has been to make wild promises in their manifestos and offer huge subsidies and loan write-offs in the run-up to an election.

The most glaring example of the insensitivity to performance was furnished by the Congress in 1996. Having given the country a 7.5 per cent rate of growth for three years, a 10 per cent growth in manufacturing and jobs for nearly everyone who came into the labour market, it failed to capitalise on its performance and fell back on atavistic appeals once again.The result, as a detailed opinion poll by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies showed, was that although more than three-fifths of the respondents wanted Narasimha Rao to come back as prime minister, the Congress lost the election.

The BJP seems to have learned this lesson and decided to make a clean break with the past. Today, old issues, such as the enactment of a uniform civil code and the abolition of Article 370 of the Constitution, have become ghosts at the banquet. Even the Ramjanmabhoomi issue has receded into the background. Instead, the party is attempting to capitalise on a bumper harvest—stable prices, a revival of the share market and a long-awaited upturn in investment and industrial growth to win the next election.

By choosing performance as its field of battle, the BJP has forced the Congress to do so too. Today, its intellectuals are busy brushing the dust off the statistics of the Rao government's performance before asking the people to decide which party deserves their trust more.

It is far too early to tell whose appeal will turn out to be the more persuasive. The BJP has to overcome the effects of five years of slow, jobless growth and persuade the voters that the next five years will be qualitatively different. The Congress has an exceptional record to offer but has to cope with the shortness of public memory. The unambiguous gainers, however, will be the Indian people. For, at the end of this election Indian politics will be transformed for all time. Asking people to vote on the basis of performance is asking them to judge their rulers. This is handing over to them a power they will never willingly forego.