Advani roadshow to cover 121 seats

Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani will embark on a 33-day nation-wide electioneering through a motorised chariot to take the India shining campaign to a new high by covering 7,831 kms and canvassing for the party in 121 Lok Sabha constituencies.

Advani's roadshow known as the Bharat Uday (rising India) Yatra will be covered in two phases and is expected to unleash an aggressive campaign on the resurgent nationalism with a heady mixture of religious fervour.

The strategy was to put all political adversaries, particularly Sonia Gandhi's Congress, on the defensive and appropriate symbols of nationalism, said a BJP leader.

The first phase, beginning on March 10 from Kanyakumari, will cover southern states, parts of Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh , Uttar Pradesh and culminate on March 26 in Amritsar where Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Advani will address a joint rally and visit the Golden Temple and a temple of goddess to seek people's support and divine's blessings.

The second phase of the yatra will begin on March 30 from Mahatma Gandhi's birth place, Porbandar and cover Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and terminate at Puri (the temporal seat of Lord Jagannath).

However, BJP strategists avoided describing the journey as "rath yatra" as the word had religious connotations and could trigger protest. But the ingredients of the yatra would not be any different from the previous rath yatras undertaken by Advani, confirmed BJP leaders.

The gruelling journey through road by Advani is expected to galvanise the party cadre to full potential, subsume internal bickering with the Sangh Parivar and re-energise the party apparatus on the eve of polls.

That Vajpayee's "able leadership" will be focus of the campaign is evident by the manner in which Advani rejected the suggestion that the hidden agenda of the yatra was to catapult him to the centrestage.

"Elections are an occasion for political education of people," Advani said while briefing reporters about his yatra. He said he would be using the yatra to galvanise the party cadre, educate people about the good governance and future vision of the BJP for India. "Components of good governance will become the principal point of debate in this election," he said.

Referring to his experience of two rath yatras taken out in 1990 known as the Ayodhya rath yatra and in 1997 known as the swaran jayanti rath yatra, Advani said an emotional thread of "resurgent nationalism" ran through all of these exercises.

"We have developed the yatra as an effective instrument of mass mobilisation," Advani said. There was an intrinsic link between this yatra and his previous two yatras, he added.

That the yatra will play on the emotional appeal of resurgent nationalism is a clever move to push the Congress on defensive with the second rung BJP leadership be left to make subtle references to foreign origin of Sonia Gandhi.

"The idea of making India a developed nation and superpower is a powerful one, capable of touching the patriotic chrod in every Indian, regardless of caste, creed, religion gender or class," he said.

Describing Vajpayee as "a phenomenon that embodies the best traditions of the Jan Sangh and the BJP, and also the best values of the India's democracy," Advani said Vajpayee emerged as the only Prime Minister after Jawahar Lal Nehru who defied the logic of incumbency being a liability. "In 2004, people will vote for stability, continuity and above all the performance of the government," Advani said.

But what appears to be a clever move to wrest from the Congress the Nehruvian legacy in the post-independence era, Advani said while Nehru owed a "unique position" in the history because of his contribution in the freedom struggle and nation-building, the subsequent leadership nurtured an arrogance that it alone could rule India. "The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance has pulverised this arrogant attitude," he said.