New Delhi, July 20 (Inditop.com) Twenty years after he took out a 10,000-km yatra to catapult his party into political reckoning, veteran Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L.K. Advani will next month embark upon another journey for a similar purpose and is likely to start with states going to the polls this year.
“The chief purpose is to instil confidence among the party rank and file in the aftermath of the party’s poll debacle,” national executive member and a political adviser of the party G.V.L. Narasimha Rao told IANS.
Advani, 81, had announced on the concluding day of the party’s national executive meeting last month that they would travel across the country to explain to BJP workers that there lay an opportunity in this defeat.
“In order to let party cadres know both the opportunities and tasks before us, I have decided to tour the entire country in the months to come. I shall be visiting all the states, and more than one place in some of the bigger states,” Advani said, addressing the national executive.
The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha called the poll defeat an opportunity as the electoral verdict had decimated regional parties paving the way for a bi-polar polity in the country and the other pole was the BJP – the largest opposition party.
In the April-May Lok Sabha elections, the party’s tally came down to 116 from 138 seats in the 2004 polls.
Narasimha Rao said the logistics of Advani’s cross-country tour were yet to be firmed up but he was most likely to start after the current session of parliament that ends Aug 7.
According to Rao, the octogenarian leader would most likely start from the election-bound states Maharashtra, Haryana and Arunachal Pradesh before proceeding to other places.
“Maximum attention would be given to these states to ensure the party organisation is battle ready,” Rao said.
This defeat, he added, was “larger than expected and it is impossible to boost the morale of the cadres”.
Usually such a defeat — and a second consecutive one — could create organisational problems, which needed to be addressed, Rao said.
Rao said if Advani himself went and met party workers in the states it would help bridge the gulf between the “neta and the karyakarta (leader and party workers)”.
After the election-bound states, the BJP leader’s focus would be “states like Rajasthan where there already are serious organisational problems”.
This tour, unlike the one he started in 1990, would not entail any public meetings. It is only to interact with BJP workers and also to gather “first-hand intelligence and feedback” about what ails the party, Rao said.
Advani’s first yatra in September-October 1990 on a specially designed chariot began from Somnath in Gujarat and was to culminate in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh but Advani was arrested in Bihar and could not complete it.
The journey to rustle up a national movement for construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya on the site of the 16th century Babri Masjid catapulted the BJP to national political significance.
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