The triumphal has been rendered through careful ministration into the utterly tedious. Pity poor L.K. Advani. Seven years after that first grand rath yatra, he is still on the road. It has been a bit like dragging the serpent Vasuki around Mount Mandar and churning the Ocean of Politics ceaselessly for the elusive amrit of national leadership.

A unique labour of an old actor flogging his tamasha/ yakshagana /ottam thullal/ burakatha/ jatra show around the countryside. The curious may linger, but there's a suspicion that the show, albeit with varied props, has been staged too often.

Advani's four major rath yatras were occasioned by his reading of a particular politico-historical moment. During each one of them, he predicted that general elections were imminent and that his party was set to sweep them. Each foray was mounted as a mobilising technique to legitimise the gains of the BJP as a national party.

Going to the people in this manner has rich associations in India. Advani often refers to Adi Shankaracharya's Bharat yatra to propagate the message of Advaita. The Gandhian overtones too are emphasised, but don't quite work.

Four wheels can never replace the thin legs and walking stick of the naked fakir, just as the exclusivist concept of Hindutva can never replace the inclusivist one of Gandhian Ram Rajya. Ultimately, it is not Adi Shankaracharya, or Gandhi, but the Advani of the Somnath Ram Rath Yatra that most inspires him. He has never tired of observing that it wrought a ``cataclysmic change in national politics''.

There's no denying that it was an audacious idea. To seem to emerge from the sets of Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan or masquerade as Arjun riding his chariot in Mahabharat when the televised versions of these epics were alive in popular memory displayed an astute sense of timing. As that first DCM-Toyota left Somnath to cries of ``Har har Mahadev'', sympathetic political commentators declared that Hindu nationalism had at last come of age.

Advani himself proclaimed that it was symbolic of the might and aspirations of 70 crore Hindus. What must have given him some satisfaction was that it was he who embodied the BJP promise. The moderate mask of Vajpayee was still hanging on the peg of history waiting to be worn.

Many of the slogans that became notorious for their communal import later were first used on that run ones like tel lagao Dabur ka, naam mita do Babar ka (use the hair-oil of Dabur and wipe out the name of Babar). Advani also chose this occasion to reveal his political agenda: construction of the temple in Ayodhya was not a political issue but a matter of faith, he declared. It became the central argument for the subsequent mass movement.

Blind faith it certainly was that led 101 youths in Jetpur to offer the Charioteer a vessel of their blood, or people to slash their bodies and smear a bloody tilak on his forehead. The pieces of marigold garlands that he threw back at the crowds were gratefully accepted as Lord Ram's prasad.

Advani has always maintained that his Somnath yatra was a peaceful one, but like a string of crackers, incidents of arson and stabbing broke out in Gonda, Bahraich, Bareilly, Meerut, Pratapgarh. That first rath yatra was the BJP response to V.P. Singh's Mandal initiative and the possibility of a snap general election. It carried in its very success the seeds of subsequent failures, with the Babri Masjid events, robbing a carefully calibrated campaign of its raison d'etre.

Three years after the first yatra, there was the all-India Janadesh Yatra. Again, it was in pursuit of political power that the indefatigable ideologue rode spurred by the prospect of the party winning that November's Assembly polls in four states and sweeping an imaginary mid-term general election thereafter.

The trishuls were not in evidence, and although the temple cause was raised on occasion, it was not the full-throated demand of yore. With the Masjid gone, it had in any case lost its power to make crowds delirious. The ire this time was to be focused on the Bills seeking to delink religion from politics, with the central slogan: ``Politics without religion is mud.'' To broaden the appeal, national security and corruption were also added to the list.

What's interesting is that while other leaders went north, west and east, Advani's saffron-draped Gypsy, followed by a Contessa, emerged from Mangalore. Having opened its account in the 1991 general elections with four seats in Karnataka -- one of them in Mangalore -- the south was to be the BJP's new destination. This required a drastic modulation of the central message, so the call was to save Maha Bharat from the clutches of Rao and Co.

This, of course, did not happen. As the 1996 general elections drew nearer, Advani was once again seized by wanderlust. But it was not just for party honour, but his own, that he now rode. That trip on a Suraj Rath, decorated with painted horses, was also an attempt to escape the ignominy of the hawala scam.

Again he chose the South -- Ernakulam -- as the launchpad. The idea was to traverse 8,849 km through 13 states to reach Delhi on Ambedkar's birthday April 14. Of all the yatras, this proved the most futile. Slogans like suraj (good governance) and swaraj hung heavily in the air. The Dilli Chalo cry, echoing Bose's call of 1943, lacked passion. As it happened, it was Advani who had to jump ship mid-way and head for Delhi, ostensibly to attend a poll panel meeting.

The present Swarna Jayanti Rath showcases a born-again Advani, newly freed from the millstone of the hawala scandal in the 50th year of independence. The yatra itself is -- in adspeak -- a new, improved version: More States, More Sights, and Great New Causes.

There is a promise made to remove bhook (hunger); bhay (fear) and bhrastachar (corruption), but little evidence of how it is to be done. No attempt is made to engage with the crucial issues of the day. What is the party's stand on liberalisation? Unemployment? Land reform? Development projects? It is easy enough to point to the mess that the Congress and UF governments have created, but does the BJP really represent an alternative? Going by Advani's rath speeches thus far, it does not.

Indeed, with the possible exception of his first foray, none of Advani's yatras have broken new ground. Collectively they represent an endless odyssey made without the benefit of a map. A flight of fancy through make-believe terrain in a make-believe vahana.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.