My grandfather was a Punjabi refugee from what is now Pakistan’s Toba Tek Singh district. The first fissures of the Yatra – with “Jai Sri Ram” as its rallying cry – and what it meant for India were being felt in our household. That wider recognition would not come until he became a key organiser of the Yatra’s Gujarat leg in 1990. His name first appeared as a politician in the pages of The Times of India in 1988, as the organiser of an anti-Congress rasta-roko agitation on farmer demands in Gujarat, but not many outside the state had heard of him. India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi, had just started making his name in Gujarat as a local BJP apparatchik. LK Advani, then president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had just started his 10,000-km Rath Yatra (literally, “chariot journey”), from the ancient reconstructed temple of Somnath on the western Gujarat coast to the disputed Babri Masjid site in Ayodhya in the heart of Uttar Pradesh (UP). “It would be treason to sport a political sticker and drive this scooter while wearing my uniform,” I remember him saying. “Yes, but this is now a political slogan. What’s your problem with a sticker that has his name?” he asked with furious indignation. My grandfather could not understand this reaction. My grandfather brought a “Jai Sri Ram” (Victory to Lord Ram) sticker from somewhere and pasted it on the front of my father’s Bajaj 150 scooter. My family’s first domestic political fight, as far as I can remember, was over the Ram Temple.
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