The Hindu : Advani's road show from March 10

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 03, 2004

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Advani's road show from March 10

By Neena Vyas

NEW DELHI, MARCH 2. The Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, is all set to hit the road for a countrywide election campaign beginning March 10. In two phases over 33 days, he plans to cover about 8,000 km in a bus that will take him to 121 Lok Sabha constituencies spread over 15 States and a Union Territory.

In the first phase of the campaign, he will travel from Kanyakumari to Amritsar from March 10 to 26. At the end of the journey, the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, will join him for a public meeting at Amritsar and prayers at the Golden Temple.

In the second phase, Mr. Advani will start his campaign from Porbandar in Gujarat on March 30 and end it in Puri on April 14, just ahead of the polling in the first phase of the elections.

Mr. Advani said that going by road was a successful way of reaching out to the people and gathering support for the Bharatiya Janata Party. His main aim was to get the people's mandate for "continuing good governance." Recently the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, went by road on an election campaign, first in Uttar Pradesh and then in Haryana.

The BJP general secretary, Pramod Mahajan, said that Mr. Advani would be using a refurbished bus used by the party's Chhattisgarh leader, Dilip Singh Judev (of the cash-on-camera fame) for the road show, which has been given the name `Bharat Uday Yatra,' recalling the party's `India Shining' campaign.

Addressing the press here today, Mr. Advani said that except for Jawaharlal Nehru, it would be the first time that a Prime Minister in office would be seeking another term "with his popularity ratings higher than the last time he was elected in 1999 and the world acknowledging him as a statesman." He said it was a "qualitative change" from the last several decades that no emotional issue had been raked up and the people were being asked to vote on the basis of the Government's performance.

He said that for five decades, the Congress had been nurturing an arrogance that it alone could rule and, further, that only a member of the Nehru family could rule. Since 1999, the Congress arrogance had been "pulverised" with the Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance Government providing stability and "dynamic governance," Mr. Advani said. He recalled that while in 1990 he had undertaken a `rath yatra' seeking support for building a Ram temple at Ayodhya, in 1997 he had traversed the country on a `rath' to highlight the party's contention that even 50 years after Independence, the country had not been able to achieve `su-raj' (good governance). That had come finally only with the installation of the Vajpayee Government in 1998, he said.

He indicated that "if the party so wished" he would contest again from Gandhinagar in Gujarat.

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