The show back on road

Radhika Ramaseshan

Senior Journalist

THE BJP has a long and contested legacy of using yatras or road shows as a disseminator of ideology wrapped in propaganda, a medium to assail its political adversaries and a means to connect with people. In his political career, LK Advani travelled across the country on seven yatras, starting with the spectacular Somnath-Ayodhya Ram Rath chariot ride in 1990 that was stopped midway and winding down with the tepid Jan Chetna yatra in 2011. The objectives of the peregrinations were different: the Ram Rath was designed to ‘liberate’ the Ram temple at Ayodhya and conflate this strand with the larger theme of Hindutva which underpins the BJP’s politics. The 2011 yatra was conceptualised to challenge the UPA government on ‘corruption’ and ‘bad governance’ but with two electoral losses behind him (2004 and 2009), Advani’s raison d’etre to pilot the BJP in the next election in 2014 was questioned by his party colleagues. The spectrum of yatras — also constructed around security and India’s freedom struggle (in which the BJP’s begetter, the RSS had no role) — brought mixed results: some succeeded in according pole position to the BJP, some were promising and others were washouts.

The yatra was a test run for new ministers, mandated to visit their political turf and talk up the government’s record vaccination, among other ‘achievements’.

The latest Jan Ashirwad Yatra — which kicked off on August 16 after a ‘motivational’ Independence Day address by PM Modi to lift the country and his party’s morale — moved on a different trajectory. It flagged security, just about the only issue the Modi government is a tad gung-ho about, hit out at the Opposition unconvincingly for not allowing the PM to introduce his new ministers in Parliament and was largely defensive over Modi’s administration. Modi’s second regime has been difficult to state the least. The pandemic was mismanaged. The first phase saw an economic order that is shored up by the semi-formal and informal sector virtually come apart as panic-stricken migrants in cities and towns headed home to escape the virus and an uncertain future. The second spell was an unmitigated disaster. The lethal mutant ran amok, infected at will, and challenged the health infrastructure to a degree that systems collapsed. Only now, after a catastrophic April and May, has a vaccination regimen been put somewhat in place but it could be the lull before the next strike. The economy is in distress, the threat of a drought looms over states like Gujarat which reported an indifferent monsoon and the protesting farmers on Delhi’s borders refuse to budge. The challenge in the neighbourhood goes way beyond the logistics of evacuating stranded Indians and accommodating Afghan asylum-seekers. It is hardly the backdrop for a politician to connect with people and infuse in them, a sense of well-being.

The yatra was a test run for the new Cabinet ministers. These ministers were mandated to visit their political turf and talk up the government’s record in vaccine administration, among other ‘achievements’. Clearly, the participants did not get the macro picture. While Anurag Thakur waxed eloquent on the reading down of Article 370 in J&K, in Himachal Pradesh, his home state, Bhupender Yadav went big on transforming India into an ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’. The Gujarat ministers, Parshottam Rupala and Mansukh Mandaviya, focused on vaccination.

The yatra hit its first big road bump in Maharashtra that was assigned to party hopper and new inductee Narayan Rane. Rane, who did a long spell in the Shiv Sena under Bal Thackeray’s tutelage and a short stint in the Congress, habitually courts controversies, gets into trouble and wriggles out. This time, Rane overrated his strength as a Maratha leader from the coastal Konkan region. A sworn hater of CM Uddhav Thackeray, Rane quit the Sena once Bal Thackeray declared Uddhav as his political heir. But he couldn’t shake off the Thackeray bequest. Rane started the yatra from the Bal Thackeray memorial at Mumbai’s Shivaji Park. The move riled the Sena so much that its activists ‘purified’ the place with a ‘shuddhikaran’ ritual. Then he made a highly provocative statement against the CM that drove the Sainiks, who are up for a brawl any time, to the streets and confront Rane’s men. Interestingly, the Maharashtra BJP kept itself away from the combat that saw Rane arrested and released on bail. Rane was ushered in the BJP in 2019 to bolster its prospects in the Konkan region where it was bereft of a leader. Rane was brought into the Congress for the same reason but he did not fetch for it the political heft it sought. The central BJP bestowed on him Cabinet rank for his purported political utility which he has to prove in the 2022 elections to the prestigious Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), currently Sena-controlled. Indeed, infelicitous as they are, Rane’s jibes on Thackeray are a prelude to sharpen and unsheathe the knives before the BMC battle next April. Rane was slated to exceed the allotted number of days on the yatra but the arrest aborted his plans.

Another obstacle was encountered in Rajasthan. Bhupender Yadav, whose yatra spanned Haryana and Rajasthan, set the cat among the pigeons when he said the next state elections would be fought collectively by ‘Team Rajasthan’ under the stewardship of the local BJP president, Satish Poonia. The cheerleaders of Vasundhara Raje, the former CM, saw red because in January 2021, they had constituted a pressure group called the ‘Vasundhara Raje Samarthak Manch’ and demanded that she should be declared as the leader right away. Following Yadav’s assertion, Vasundhara’s followers took forward their campaign by opening a separate office for her to signal that she was not part of the ‘official’ BJP. Although Vasundhara spends her time mostly in Delhi, she apparently works the levers through her loyalists to ensure that the BJP is kept on tenterhooks regarding her plans.

This is one yatra that is unlikely to be scripted in glory in the BJP’s chronicles.

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