It was sometime in October 1990, I first saw Lal Krishna Advani.

Advani was on his Rath Yatra across the country starting from the Somnath Temple in Gujarat on September 25, 1990.

He had made a one night stopover atthe guest house in the colony we used to live. Before proceeding in the morning Advani made a small speech which he concluded with the following line: "SaugandhRam Ki Khaatein Hain Mandir Wohi Banayenge".

It need not be said this was met with a thunderous applause from the small crowd that had gathered to hear Advani.

The women of the colony could later be heard discussing and saying "kitna acha bole na".

This Rath Yatra was undertaken in an air-conditioned van which was decorated to look like a chariot, started from Somnath in Gujarat and had covered a large part of Northern India until it was brought to a halt by the Chief Minister of Bihar, Laloo Prasad Yadav (now Lalu Prasad Yadav). The yatra was originally supposed to end at Ayodhya.

As Advani writes in his autobiography My Country My Life "My yatra was scheduled to enter Deoria in Uttar Pradesh on 24 October. However, as I had anticipated, it was stopped at Samastipur in Bihar on 23 October and I was arrested by the Janata Dal government in the state then headed by Laloo Prasad Yadav. I was taken to an inspection bungalow of the irrigation department at a place called Massanjore near Dumka on the Bihar-Bengal border (Dumka now comes under the state of Jharkhand)."

The politics of fear was never used so well by any other politician/party in India except for the Indian National Congress (which I will look at a little later). And it did work for a while.

Bharitya Janta Party was formed in 1979 when the Janta Party split (It existed under the name of Jan Sangh before merging with the Janta Party in 1977). In the 1984 Lok Sabha electionsthe party got two seats. It got wiped out under the sympathy wave that happened after Indira Gandhi was assassinated on October 31, 1984.

In the 1989 Lok Sabha elections, BJP in alliance with the Janta Dal, faced a Bofors tarred Indian National Congress and Rajiv Gandhi. It managed to increase its number of seats to 88.

It was after this that Advani decided to go on a Rath Yatra. The impact was seen in the 1991 Lok Sabha elections when the party (this time not in alliance with Janta Dal and competing on its own) managed to increase the number of seats to 118. This happened under the background of Rajiv Gandhi being assassinated while the Lok Sabha elections were still on and that leading to a sympathy wave in favour of the Congress party.

Now how many seats BJP would have won if Rajiv Gandhi had not been assassinated there is no way of finding out. But it would have definitely won more than the 118 it eventually ended up with.

The moral of the story, the Ramjanambhoomi-Babri Masjid issue helped catapult BJP from being a small political front of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to being a party which had substantial following across parts of Northern, Western and Eastern India.

But what Advani did then is a time tested method that politicians have followed over the years.

As his well known by now a section of the Indian National Congress (back then known as the Congress (I)) whipped up mass frenzy against the Sikhs after the assassination of Indira Gandhi.

In the carnage that followed Sikhs were killed all over NorthernIndia. The Lok Sabha elections of 1985, the Congress won a whopping 415 seats of the 540 odd seats. A feat that had never been achieved before that, has never been achieved after that, and in all probability will never be achieved again.

Or take the case of the Shiv Sena which started with Bal Thackeray's attempts at filling fear in the minds of the Marathi Manoos against the South Indians (or lungis as they were colloquially referred to) in the sixties and the seventies.

Consider the politics that a party like Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) indulges in. Before forming the BSP Kanshi Ram had formed the Dalit Soshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti or DS4 as it was more popularly known as. The rallying cry of DS4 was "Thakur, Brahmin, Bania Chhod, Baki Sab Hain DS4.""

This slogan gave birth to the more famous slogan which became the rallying cry for BSP in Uttar Pradesh, a few years back. "Tilak Tarazu aur Talwaar, inko maaro joote chaar." ( Tilak , Tarazu and Talwar referrring to the Brahmans, the Banias and the Thakurs, respectively).

Lalu Prasad Yadav ruled Bihar for 15 years directly and through proxy by building a deadly combination of Muslim and Yadav votes (or MY as the media referred to it) which almost never let him down.

Or take the case of Raj Thackeray. Currently he is busy creating fear in the minds of the Marathi Manoos against people from North India (or bhaiyas, as they are colloquially referred to. And North India isn't exactly North India, in Mumbai parlance bhaiyas now include Biharis also, and Bihar definitely does not come in North India).

Down south, Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam, gained ascendance by protesting against the Hindi language and putting fear in the mind of the people of Tamil Nadu about Tamil pride being at stake.