In 1990, literally at the helm of a wave of Hindutva sweeping through parts of the country, Salim Makani drove a DCM Toyota Rath for nearly 10,000 km. And, for this 53-year-old Khoja Muslim, that was just long enough to understand how ideas like Ram Rajya had become evocative enough to command thousands of supporters wherever they went. “All the veterans had played a role in these ideas evolving,” says Lal Krishna Advani’s three-time rath yatra driver. “And what the party needs now is for the seniors to come together once again.”

As the BJP struggles to re-energise itself, a man who came to be known as Ram Bhakt Salim says he knew the party to be always inclusive, and with ample space for differing opinions, with the emphasis always on ideology and thinking. “Mahaul ab badal gaya hai,” says the 53-year-old whose best anecdotes are from days spent behind the wheel of a decked-up van with a sometimes jubilant, sometimes thoughtful Lal Krishna Advani by his side, a frenzied month until they were arrested in October 1990, barred from proceeding beyond Samastipur, Bihar. “Advaniji’s speeches were awe inspiring,” he says.

As a Muslim, he says, he never doubted the concept of “freeing” Ram Janmabhoomi by “lifting the mosque there and placing it some metres away”. A resident of Hindu-dominated Dombivli, about 25 km from Mumbai, Makani’s greeting, when he calls old associates from the Sangh Parivar or the Bharatiya Janata Party’s older lot, remains ‘Jai Shri Ram’. After all, his father Wali Mohammed Makani had been general secretary of the Jan Sangh’s Jhopadpatti Mahasangh in 1972-73. “We grew up with the Parivar as our family,” says the father of two who now runs a transportation business and undertakes civil contracts in the local civic corporation and other urban local bodies.

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