With its origin at Jayaprakash Narayan’s birth place and its passage through Bihar, BJP patriarch L.K. Advani’s Janchetna Rath Yatra against corruption has unleashed a fresh contest for the socialist icon’s legacy between his two prominent protégés currently at the centre of Bihar’s politics.
Despite JP, as the revolution leader and Emergency era hero is popularly known, never having any close links with the BJP or the Jan Sangh, many posters put up during Advani’s yatra had JP in them, prompting political analysts to infer that the BJP and Advani might be slyly seeking an image makeover beginning from JP’s home state. Before he began his yatra for the second day, Advani said in Patna that he had managed to take JP to an executive meeting of the Jan Sangh.
JP’s newfound association with Advani’s yatra has now added a fresh churn to Bihar’s politics, where the legendary leader has always remained an emotive rallying point for his followers, especially chief minister Nitish Kumar of the JD(U) and his arch rival Lalu Prasad Yadav of the RJD. Their unending battle for claiming JP’s legacy as their own saw a politically contentious dichotomy when senior BJP leader Sushma Swaraj, speaking at Sitab Diara, described Kumar and deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi of the BJP as JP’s noble protégés and Yadav as the opposite.
Clearly uncomfortable with the BJP getting identified with JP and Nitish Kumar approving of this exercise by flagging off Advani’s rath yatra, Yadav hit out at the BJP and the RSS as organisations opposed to JP’s ideologies. Both leaders are set to heighten the political nostalgia over their association with JP in coming months to win wider acceptance among Bihar’s people. “The BJP and RSS had opposed JP’s agitation. When JP appealed to the upper castes to reject their sacred thread and work for social unity, people in the BJP and the RSS had opposed that campaign and worked to weaken JP’s agitations. The same people are beginning their yatra from Sitab Diara to attain political power,” said Yadav. Both the JD(U) and the BJP have attacked Yadav during and after Advani’s yatra passed through Bihar, but analysts say the battle for JP’s legacy could now grow more severe and that the BJP would be another claimant.