Almost twenty three years and one month ago on Republic Day 1992, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, the then president of the Bharatiya Janata Party and a gangling apparatchik of the ‘Right’ variety hoisted the Indian tricolour at Srinagar’s Lal Chowk. The act, though undertaken surreptitiously under curfew and after Joshi and his aide had flown in from Jammu by a DRDO aircraft used for purposes of surveillance, had immense symbolic value.
Though the Ekta Yatra, as the programme was called, did not yield political dividends for Dr Joshi, the hoisting the national flag at a time when militancy reared its head aggressively was a watershed in the political narrative of Jammu and Kashmir. Dr Joshi’s political career took a turn for the worst thereafter but the young man returned to his home state and became a political role model of sorts because of the precision and meticulous organisation of the Ekta Yatra. That man went on to earn further kudos and is today not just prime minister of India but has played a significant role in installing a government in the state in which his party is now an important- if not equal – stakeholder.
Yet Narendra Modi, when he heads for Srinagar to witness the historical searing in where one his party colleagues will also be inducted into the coalition as Deputy Chief Minister, would be aware that while two rounds of problems have been overcome, the final and more protracted one has just begun. The first problem had been articulated as an ambition of the party last year. Ubiquitously called Mission 44+ in party circles, the attempt of the BJP to secure majority on its own was more audacious by several degrees when compared to the Mission 272+ for Lok Sabha polls. In the end the party fell short of this mark by a large margin yet the BJP notched the best ever performance by bagging 25 seats in the 87 member J&K assembly.