It’s curtains for India’s senior-most politician Lal Krishna Advani, who changed the contours of the country’s politics by undertaking his Ram Rath Yatra in 1990.
The 91-year-old Advani, who has become the senior-most MP ever in India’s history, will not be contesting the upcoming general election.
Advani, who served as India’s deputy prime minister under Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee from 2002 to 2004 when the term `India shining’ became very famous, changed India’s politics forever by undertaking his Ram Rath Yatra with the mission to build a temple to Lord Rama at the disputed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.
Consequently, the disputed masjid, which Hindus believe was built by the 15th century Mughal emperor Babur by destroying a Hindu temple, was demolished by crowds of over 150,000 Hindu kar sevaks on December 6, 1992.
The build-up to Advani’s Ram Rath Yatra and the consequent demolition of the mosque by Hindu nationalists began in the mid-1980s when Advani’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had won just two seats in the 1984 parliamentary elections.
The Congress under Rajiv Gandhi had swept the 1984 polls on the sympathy wave generated by the assassination of his mother Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards, winning 426 seats in the 542-member Lok Sabha (the lower House of Parliament).
The only two seats that the BJP had won in 1984 were by Dr AK Patel from Mehsana in Gujarat, and Chandupatla Janga Reddy from Hanamkonda in Andhra Pradesh.
In 1986, Advani took over the president of the BJP and the build-up for the Ram temple began then. One could see slogans such `Saugandh Ram ki khate hain hum mandir wahin banaye gai’ (We vow in the name of Lord Rama to build a temple at the disputed site) written everywhere.
It was Advani who nurtured the rise of right-wing Hindu nationalism. Soon his party started reaping the harvest in 1989.
From just two seats in 1984, the BJP went on to win 89 seats in the 1989 parliamentary elections. In the mid-term elections in 1991, the BJP further increased its tally to 120.
Then came the 1996 elections and the BJP became the top party in India’s Parliament for the first time by winning 161 seats as against 140 by the Congress.
The next two quick mid-term elections in 1998 and 1999 took the party’s tally to 182 when the party formed its government under Atal Behari Vajpayee and completed its full term. Barring 2004 when the party lost power to Congress, the BJP’s tally in Parliament has been increasing steadily. In the 2014 elections, the party won 282 seats on its own and formed government led by Advani’s one-time protege Narendra Modi.
If Modi is India’s prime minister today, give its credit to Advani because it was he who scripted the rise of the BJP and changed Indian politics forever.
In fact, Modi’s political career would have ended after the 2002 Gujarat riots when he was the chief minister. The then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who had chosen Modi to be the chief minister, wanted to sack him from the post because of the riots that killed thousands of people. But Advani intervened to save Modi by telling Vajpayee that `bawaal mach jayega’ (Modi’s sacking could create a storm).
The rest is history.
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