Advani's phenomenal rath yatra changed the course of the BJP.

It was in September 1990 when BJP president L.K. Advani decided to go for a padyatra to educate the people about the Ayodhya movement. This had been the BJP's main election plank during the 1989 elections. However, when the late Pramod Mahajan heard about this, he pointed out that Advani would make slow progress on foot. "A jeep yatra, then ?" asked Advani. It was then that Mahajan suggested that they take a mini-bus and redesign it as a rath.

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And that is how Advani embarked on his first Toyota rath yatra, catalysing a chain of events that resulted in the demolition of the Babri Masjid two years later. He took off from Somnath in Gujarat and worked his way to Ayodhya via central India. The idea of a chariot worked as a great mobiliser. Hindutva supporters rang temple bells, beat thalis and shouted slogans to welcome the rath. Some smeared the rath with a tilak and smeared the dust from its wheels on their forehead.

As expected, there was a communal backlash as riots broke out in Gujarat, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra. Advani was arrested in Samastipur on October 23 by then chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav before he could reach the kar seva at Ayodhya on October 30. Although in his autobiography, My Country My Life, Advani calls this rath yatra, "an exhilarating period in my political life", it was much more than that.

It whipped up a strong Hindu fervour and increased the party's votebank from 85 in 1989 to 120 in the 1991 general elections. It also launched Advani's career as the Eternal Yatri as he undertook four other rath yatras. However, the rath yatra also hung the albatross of Hindutva round the BJP's neck, an accessory that the BJP and Advani alternately embrace and at times try hard to shrug off.

-by Priya Sahgal

The main event: The Mandal report

The crisis, the likes of which has rarely engulfed the nation with such overwhelming intensity and rage,was of his own making and,as it mounted with increasing ferocity, PM V.P. Singh found himself facing it almost alone. The very people who had pushed him into taking the controversial decision were nowhere to be seen. Having taken the big bite from the forbidden apple of the Mandal Commission, Singh found himself unable to swallow it or to spit it out. Even as he found himself paralysed in grappling with the consequences of the hasty decision he had made, his government watched in stunned horror as city after city exploded in violent anti-Mandal agitations.

India Today, October 15, 1990