Opinion A yatra going nowhere

It certainly seems that way or Lal Krishna Advani would have thought twice before announcing that he is ready to set off on yet another (groan) yatra. This time it will be Raja Ram off to defeat the ten-headed demon of corruption. Will it go through Karnataka? Will Shri Yeddyurappa be one of Shri Advani’s charioteers? Will the Reddy brothers have a walk-on part? Has Shri Advani not noticed that the anti-corruption movement is against the entire political class and that trying to hijack it could be a big mistake? Clearly not. Nor has he noticed that one reason why the United Progressive Alliance won a second term in 2009 was because he was the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. Dr Manmohan Singh,hard though it is to believe today,looked better by comparison.

He and his government look terrible now. He is acknowledged as the weakest Prime Minister India has ever had and this has bad consequences for his government. There have been no economic reforms at all in recent years,policy making has been outsourced to the jholawallahs who constitute the NAC (National Advisory Council) and as we saw during the Anna Hazare agitation,senior Cabinet ministers seem to be in the throes of a civil war.

Luckily for the government,the BJP is in such bad shape that it seems unable even to analyse why a small time social activist from a village in Maharashtra was able to bring thousands of angry Indians into the streets of our cities shouting Vande Matram. It should have been something that the BJP could have easily done with the legendary organisational skills of the RSS. But,the party did not have its ear to the ground. Or it would have detected long ago the rage building up not just against the government but against politicians in general.

Had it noticed,it would perhaps have allowed more dignified,serious debates in Parliament. There would have been less shouting in the well of the House and less walking petulantly out on flimsy grounds. Then when Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev became big news,all that the BJP’s senior leaders seemed able to do was try and jump onto their bandwagon. And,now another yatra. What for? Will it reduce corruption? Will it improve our highways? Will it persuade young voters that even if Shri Advani will be nearly ninety in 2014,he is still young at heart?

If the BJP were led by wiser leaders,it would spend the next few months rebuilding the party through internal elections and drawing up an agenda for governance. It needs to tell us what it plans to do when (if?) it is next able to form a government in Delhi. Does it believe in taking the economic reform process further or does it believe,as UPA II seems to,that we need to go back to socialist times? What does it plan to do to make the country more secure against terrorism? What does it plan to do about improving public services in education and healthcare? What does it think about the laws that this government is preparing on land acquisition and food security? What are its plans for accommodating the millions of Indians who are expected to move to towns and cities in the next two decades?

This is a subject that is especially close to my heart this week because of the nightmare images of urban squalor that I saw on my journey into rural India. Of these,the most shaming were of small children defecating by the side of the road oblivious to the rotting garbage that spilled around them. This is a common sight on journeys almost anywhere in India and it is not corruption that is the problem but a criminal absence of basic governance. Instead of yet another yatra to nowhere,what we need from our main Opposition party is a vision of governance that is different

to Congress.

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter@tavleen_singh