Considering that Narendra Modi said after the BJP’s defeat in 2009 that Advani will be the prime minister in 2014, there is nothing surprising about the present endeavour. It is known that Advani was not too keen to hand over the leader of the opposition’s post to Sushma Swaraj in 2009 and had to be “persuaded”, as Venkaiah Naidu said, to become the leader of the parliamentary party instead, a post created by the BJP to accommodate him. Prior to that, he had publicly expressed his willingness to continue as leader of the opposition till 2014.

It is clear that the somewhat rusty loh purush was biding his time since he was kicked upstairs by his party, to use an infelicitous term for an octogenarian. If he has now decided to throw his hat into the ring, catching the BJP by surprise, there are several explanations. For one, the government’s reputation is at its lowest ebb. Moreover, Manmohan Singh’s own image has suffered immeasurably so much so that Advani’s earlier jibes about the prime minister’s weakness now ring true.

For another, it is obvious that Rahul Gandhi is far from being ready to take over. For all the encouragement which his mother has been giving him from behind – even making him the head of a four-member group to guide the party in her absence – the heir apparent remains a babe in the wilderness. Not only has he failed to outline his vision – whether on politics or economy – he has apparently been running around in search of an image for himself, preferably that of a champion of farmers, as his visits to Bhatta Parsaul and Pune, the sites of recent police action against agitating peasants, show.

Even as the Congress is caught between a tottering present leadership and an unready future one, it has come under attack from civil activists, who have taken full advantage of the party’s state of disarray to put it on the defensive. Their focus on corruption has found deep resonance among the common people in the season of scams. Not surprisingly, Advani has grabbed this issue as the theme for his yatra. For him, the jump from Mandir to malfeasance after a 20-year gap is apparently an easy one.

If the Congress’s dysfunctional condition and the availability of a popular cause are the external incentives for Advani’s latest adventure, the internal ones are the failures of his putative successors – Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley – to rise above their second-rank status to a higher tier. What is more, Nitin Gadkari, the party president, remains a second-ranker with the additional disadvantage of being gaffe-prone, as when he described Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav as Sonia Gandhi’s canine followers and Afzal Guru as the Congress’s son-in-law.

If the BJP believed that the passage of time since the Gujarat riots of 2002 and Modi’s focus on development would enable the poster-boy of its followers to bury the past, it was mistaken. Not only has Modi remained the bete noire of even the BJP’s camp followers like the JD (U), the continuing court cases, including the revelations of a few conscience-stricken police officers and the reopening of the Haren Pandya murder case, mean that the chief minister’s dubious role will continue to be in the spotlight in the foreseeable future.

All of this have seemingly played a part in persuading Advani to jump into the fray one more time to fulfil an ambition which was thwarted by Atal Behari Vajpayee’s presence in the party even if the latter was deemed “half a Congressman” by Sadhvi Rithambara and a mukhota by Govindacharya. Unfortunately for Advani, although Vajpayee has been rendered hors d’combat by his ailments, there is another figure like him in the NDA who may frustrate PM wannabe yet again.

He is Nitish Kumar, whose secular image makes him more widely acceptable than the hero of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement. If the push comes to shove, therefore, and the NDA is serious about looking for someone who can offer a genuine challenge to the Congress by taking on board parties like the DMK or the AIADMK (the two will always be in opposing camps), the Telugu Desam, the Biju Janata Dal and the Janata Dal (Secular) while inducing the Left to offer outside support, it cannot be anyone other than the Bihar chief minister. Advani, therefore, is nurturing a false hope, for the divisive reputation of his first rath or, as it was also known, riot yatra will doom the trumped-up objectives of what will probably be his last. (IPA Service)