From the Rivers of Blood to Toyota Chariot : Why Prophets Are Best Kept Uncrowned

Not all transformative politicians are populists. Some, like Pratap Singh Kairon of Punjab, were pragmatic state-builders who resisted short-term populist temptations and thought institutionally. Kairon opposed the Punjabi Suba movement on linguistic and religious grounds, invested heavily in long-term electrification, and strengthened rural infrastructure. His fall owed more to the authoritarian style of his administration than to populism. Similarly, K. Kamaraj in Madras pioneered the mid-day meal scheme and educational expansion, embedding social policy in ways that outlived him. Internationally, Jacinda Ardern and Lee Kuan Yew exemplify leaders who did not merely ride waves of mass grievance but channelled state capacity to rebuild polities.

But politics has a way of elevating not only such builders but also demagogues and provocateurs. If one studies populists across contexts, three things stand out. First, they rarely create grievances; they exploit those already fermenting below the surface. As Tony Blair once put it, populism “does not create grievances but exploits them.” Second, they identify a “true people” and juxtapose them against elites, outsiders, or minorities. Finally, they offer simplistic solutions to structural problems, usually packaged in slogans or spectacles that mobilize mass emotion. Their genius lies in timing, in sensing when a polity is weary of the old orthodoxy and ripe for disruption. But do these traits contribute to welfare of the polity?

It is through this prism that we must compare two figures separated by geography and culture but joined by their disruptive role in national life: Enoch Powell in Britain and Lal Krishna Advani in India. Both were intellectuals and insiders who turned dissidents; both challenged the reigning liberal consensus of their era; both weaponized anxiety about identity into potent mobilization; and both paved the way for new political orders led by successors who perfected, but also transcended, their original vision. Powell was to Thatcher what Advani was to Modi.

John Enoch Powell was no rabble-rouser in the conventional sense. A classical scholar, a Brigadier in the Second World War, and once considered a future leader of the Conservative Party, Powell embodied establishment credentials. Yet his trajectory shows how an intellectual can harness cultural anxieties to disrupt political consensus.

His infamous 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech in Birmingham was the culmination of a worldview deeply embedded in imperial nostalgia. Powell saw Britain not as a multicultural polity but as an organic nation whose coherence derived from cultural homogeneity. Immigration from former colonies threatened this vision. He warned of being “strangers in their own country” and a nation “heaping up its own funeral pyre.” The rhetoric cost him his post in Edward Heath’s Shadow Cabinet but immortalized him as a folk hero to the disenchanted working class who felt abandoned by liberal elites. The speech did more to turn working classes towards the conservative party, more than than Churchill could imagine.

As Simon Heffer has argued in his magisterial biography, Powell was “not a racist in the crude sense” but a profound nationalist whose critique of mass immigration resonated because it articulated submerged anxieties. Shivaji Sondhi reminds us that Powell’s intellectualism, his consistency and logic, distinguished him from crude nativists. Yet in giving a voice to fears that elites refused to acknowledge, Powell made himself indispensable to the ideological genealogy of Thatcherism.

Margaret Thatcher, though careful never to embrace Powell outright, absorbed his themes. Her insistence on curbing immigration, her suspicion of supranationalism in Europe, her emphasis on national sovereignty, and her appeal to the “common man” owed much to the terrain Powell had prepared. As one scholar noted, “Powell was the stone rejected by the builders who became the cornerstone of Thatcherite populism.”

Lal Krishna Advani’s journey is equally revealing. A Sindhi displaced by Partition, he began as a pracharak in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, committed to its Hindu nationalist worldview. For decades, he was a loyal lieutenant of the Jan Sangh and later the BJP, overshadowed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s oratory and broader appeal.

Advani’s moment of rupture came in 1990 with the Ram Rath Yatra, a journey from Somnath to Ayodhya that was as much theatre as politics. In his Toyota (masquerading as a chariot), Advani carried the message of Hindutva into India’s heartland, mobilizing thousands around the cry for a Ram temple on the disputed site of the Babri Masjid. The yatra was drenched in symbolism: Somnath as the site of “resurrection” after centuries of Islamic desecration; Ayodhya as the birthplace of Ram, the should-be sovereign.

The Rath Yatra and its aftermath fundamentally reoriented Indian politics. By making the temple an electoral plank, Advani injected religious nationalism into the mainstream, reshaping the BJP from a marginal party of notables into a mass political force. Vinay Sitapati calls him “Hindutva’s poster boy,” who provided the ideological fevicol that bound together the Sangh Parivar.

Yet Advani, like Powell, had his contradictions. His 2005 speech in Karachi praising Jinnah as a “secular leader” exposed his desire for statesmanship and inclusivity, but it backfired spectacularly. He lost the BJP presidency, and his attempt at moderation clashed with the movement he had unleashed. Like Powell, who remained intellectually rigorous but politically isolated, Advani too was gradually marginalized—consigned to the BJP’s Margadarshak Mandal even as his protégé Narendra Modi ascended.

The parallels between Powell and Advani are striking at several levels:

1. Breaking the Liberal Consensus
   Powell challenged post-war Britain’s liberal consensus on immigration and empire. Advani disrupted India’s Nehruvian consensus on secularism. Both spoke the unspeakable, giving legitimacy to sentiments considered beyond the pale. Both men broke taboos, and uttered drawing room talks in public discourse.  
2. Mobilizing through Anxiety
   Powell, in his Birmingham address, articulated the apprehensions of a section of Britain’s working class who believed that large-scale immigration threatened to overwhelm their cultural moorings. In a rather different context, Advani sought to mobilize Hindu sentiment around the claim that India’s majority community had long been denied its rightful place in the nation’s narrative. Both leaders framed these anxieties in the language of civilizational peril, thereby casting their political projects not as mere policy disagreements but as struggles for national survival.
3. Spectacle and Symbolism
   Powell’s rhetorical flourish in Birmingham and Advani’s performative Rath Yatra were events that seared themselves into public memory. They were political theatre designed to shock and create waves, rather than defuse grievances, or find solutions.   
4. Marginalized Yet Pivotal
   Neither Powell nor Advani achieved the office they coveted. Powell never led the Tories; Advani never became Prime Minister. Yet both were indispensable precursors, preparing the ground for successors—Thatcher and Modi—who translated their disruption into durable political hegemony.
5. Legacies that Outlasted Them
   Thatcherite Britain institutionalized Powell’s anxieties in economic and cultural policy. Modi’s India has operationalized Advani’s Hindutva into statecraft, with the Ram temple inaugurated in 2024 as the ultimate vindication of Advani’s original crusade, to the determination of a secular fabric.

The legacies of Powellism and Advanism are not merely electoral. They transformed national narratives in ways that continue to divide.

In Britain, Thatcherite reforms broke the back of trade unions and deregulated the economy, but they also hollowed out industrial communities and deepened north–south divides. The cultural polarization Powell warned of in racial terms reappeared as socioeconomic fragmentation.

In India, the Hindutva project has shifted the centre of gravity from pluralist secularism to majoritarian nationalism. The price has been the alienation of minorities, the rise of vigilante violence, and the corrosion of constitutional guarantees. What Powell called “the funeral pyre” of Britain’s nationhood and what Advani framed as the “restoration” of Ram are both symbolic vocabularies for exclusionary nationhood.

 

Venkat Dhulipala, in his work on Partition, has shown how political entrepreneurs repurpose civilizational anxieties into new national projects. If Powell gave Britain a foretaste of Thatcherism by unsettling the postwar consensus, Advani gave India a foretaste of Modi-ism by demolishing the Nehruvian consensus. Both acted as midwives of a more muscular nationalism that would outlive them, even as they themselves faded from the centre stage.

To say Advani was India’s Powell is not merely to note biographical parallels. It is to underline a structural truth about nationalist politics: dissidents who seem marginal at one moment can become progenitors of epochal change. Powell never entered Downing Street, but his ghost haunted Thatcher’s reforms. Advani never became Prime Minister, but his Rath Yatra set India on the path to a Hindu Rashtra.

If Powell was the prophet of doom in post-war Britain, Advani was the charioteer of Hindu resurgence in post-Nehruvian India. Both unleashed forces they could not control, both were cast aside when their task was complete, but both live on in the regimes that followed. In that sense, history will remember Advani, like Powell, not as a failed aspirant, but as the indispensable disruptor who cleared the path for a new political order.

Thatcher left Britain richer, and with the decisive victory in the Falklands. Would Modi do so? The empirical evidence so far isn’t in his favour. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSKCBMKd-ag