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Magsaysay Award winner Sandeep Pandey on Thursday said he is planning to launch a padayatra (march) from Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh to the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, some time in November, before the Gujarat election.
He said the idea is to spread the message of communal harmony and expose the politics of violence propagated by right-wing Hindu organisations.
Pandey, who has quit his job at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and is working for underprivileged children, said he had chosen Ayodhya and the Sabarmati Ashram as both places symbolise communal harmony.
Pandey is in Patna to attend a three-day Sarvodaya Samaj Sammelan as part of the Jayaprakash Narayan birth centenary celebrations, which began on Wednesday.
He said he was disturbed by the politics of communalism being played by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party in Gujarat.
Pandey said that in Gujarat, violence was not only justified but glorified by everyone from the BJP government led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. What was more shocking, he said, was that even Deputy Prime Minister Lal Kishenchand Advani and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee supported Modi.
The BJP had made violence a weapon, which is a dangerous trend in Indian politics, he said. "Many people may not realise its consequence today, but it is going to be deadly for everyone."
He feared that if the experiment of violence in Gujarat, which has been termed a laboratory of the Sangh Parivar, succeeded, it would prove dangerous for all Indians and not only the minority.
Pandey said the RSS and its outfits hardly have any faith in democracy, an attitude that is against the spirit of the Constitution. "They have entered into power from the backdoor by using the BJP," he said.
He pointed out that before the Emergency in the 1970s, the RSS and the BJP's predecessor, the Jan Sangh, were not very popular. Advani's rathyatra from Somnath to Ayodhya in the late 1980s was the turning point, after which he and his party gained rapid popularity using religion.
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