It seems that some people just refuse to get it – that what worked in the early 20th century against the British is unlikely to be applicable a 100 years later. There is a terrorist attack in a temple in Varanasi, and Islamic terrorists are the major suspects. This attack was preceded by India voting against Iran on the nuclear issue, and India signing a nuclear agreement with the US. There are some politicians who link the vote against Iran as part of an anti-Muslim sentiment in the UPA government. There are politicians within the UPA who feel that they have to appease Muslims as “compensation”! That this is far beyond the realm of any logic is not the issue; it is a fact that some politicians think that by making religious noise, they will curry favor and attract votes. Just the same logic was used by a Muslim UP politician who issued a fatwa against the editor of a Danish newspaper for publishing religious cartoons. Why he should not be arrested for incitement to murder is a question few politicians want to deal with.

Entering this cauldron of hate and illogic is Mr. Advani, the always also ran BJP candidate for Prime Minister. His bright interpretation of the Varanasi terrorism (plain simple criminal activity as Uma Bharati, also of the BJP, had the good sense to point out) is that the attack on the temple was an attack on Hindus and a result of the "minority appeasement" politics of the Congress and the UPA. Further, he grandiosely (and wrongly) declared that "India has remained democratic and secular because it is pre- dominantly Hindu, India is what it is because it is Hindu". Most likely, India is democratic precisely because it a is a very heterogeneous society, and democratic precisely because it is in its bones, a capitalistic society. Democracy and capitalism both reward individual initiative, and individual merit (of course criminals get in the way of both the market and democracy).

What is Advani's solution to get the hate and appeasement out of the way? Why, from a knee-jerk yatri, a national integration yatri! . Simple unsolicited advice to the BJP and especially Advani - just don't do it.

For his own sake. The march is likely to be a super humongous dud, and forever Advani will be remembered as the yatri who never reached his destination. There are several reasons for arriving at this harsh conclusion. First, a march is an anachronistic idea, it belongs to a different era. When Mahatma Gandhi led the salt march, that was innovation and high political skill. It was a method of communicating with the people - indeed, at that time the only method of communication, of being in political touch.

Second, a little appreciated fact is that the yatra was already outdated at the time Advani undertook it in the early 1990s. Some credit Mr. Advani's yatra before the 1991 elections as a major reason for BJP's electoral success in that year. The BJP won the highest number of seats in that year (not counting subsequent years). They won 120 seats after contesting 468 for a win ratio of 25.6 percent. Just two years earlier in 1989, and before Advani's "great" and "successful" rath yatra, the BJP had won 86 seats contesting only 226, or a high win ratio of 38 percent. In the 1984 elections, the BJP had won only 2 seats. The point being that just as in stocks, so in politics, there is a marked tendency for a "reversal to the mean". So to attribute the BJP triumph of 1991 to the rath yatra is akin to attributing the fall of the NDA government in 2004 to "bad" economic policies. And akin to attributing the rise of the Sensex to the economic policies of the UPA government! Elections and markets are the result of several factors. Rath yatra, and populist economic policies, just do not make it.

The third fallacy in Mr. Advani's quest "in the name of votes" is his belief that religion remains an important voting criteria. Religion is possibly most important when societies are very poor, or very rich. In the in-between realm, religion is important, but getting ahead is even more important. India has changed since Mahatma's time, and changed even more since 1990. No longer does Bharat provide a ready basis for a "rent a riot" or "rent a vote" campaign.

Who does Mr. Advani think he will appeal to? What is the "new" idea, or the new reasoning, that Advani will communicate with his travels? The rent a crowd mentality is not appropriate anymore. People are busy working, something that was established during the BJP tenure year of 2003 when unemployment rate in India reached record lows of less than 3.5 percent. Results from the National Sample Survey of consumer expenditures for 2004/05 are eagerly awaited; they are likely to confirm what other survey organizations and rural experts have been stating for quite some time - you underestimate the strength of the rural economy at your own peril.

What politicians (especially older ones) like Advani do not recognize is that India is a changed country today, an evolution that has been in the works for the last decade or so. Today, only two groups remain who do not recognize this important historical transition - the extreme left and the extreme right i.e. the doctrinaire left within the left, and the reactionary right within the right. Thus, for the nth time, the extreme right and the extreme left are on the same side - both wish, for their own distorted ends, that Bharat is the poor, very poor, India of the 1960s and 1970s. Sadly for them, the burgeoning middle class, now more than a third of the population, and influential beyond its size, is in no mood for the beliefs that have delayed India reaching its tryst with a successful destiny. A destiny that does not have time for strikes, or yatras.

A realization that has dawned on some extremes - news just in is that the founder oligarch of the Communist party in Kerala has been ousted by his colleagues. The coffee shop revolutionaries in the Communist party have been sidelined by all, except their drinking buddies! So there are winds of change that even the extremes recognize for survival. This is a change that Mr. Advani, and the BJP, cannot afford to ignore.