New Delhi, Sept. 8: L.K. Advani today said he would launch a yatra for “good governance and clean politics” and the announcement immediately fuelled questions about his chances of being the BJP’s prime ministerial face.

Party sources said the 40-day yatra — the senior BJP leader’s seventh after the “Ram rath” he mounted on September 25, 1990 — is likely to begin mid-September and conclude by December, with breaks for festivals. He would like to cover the country, they said.

The announcement came days after a survey showed that the BJP had gained the most from Anna Hazare’s anti-graft protest. The STAR News-Nielsen survey showed the BJP would garner 32 per cent votes across the country and the Congress only 20 per cent if the Lok Sabha polls were to be fought now.

Asked in a news conference if his new exertion was intended to put him back on the BJP’s centre stage and place him as its prime ministerial candidate for the next Lok Sabha election, Advani, who is nearing his 84th birthday this November, smiled and said: “Again, you people are coming back to a ghisa-pita baat (worn-out issue).” But he neither remonstrated nor denied that he was out of the leadership frame.

Initially, sources maintained that Advani’s decision was “unilateral”, later it became apparent that he took the BJP’s paterfamilias, the RSS, as well as party president Nitin Gadkari into confidence.

Advani said: “I spoke to the BJP president this morning and told him that I wanted to campaign against corruption and for preserving the institutions that nurtured and strengthened our democracy.”

Sources said it was necessary for him to have the Sangh on board, given the patchy equation he had with its leaders since 2005 when he had lauded Mohammed Ali Jinnah while visiting Pakistan.

Although the RSS, rather unwillingly, projected him as the BJP’s prime ministerial face in the 2009 elections, the defeat made it untenable for him to enjoy the kind of uninterrupted primacy he had since the politically fruitful Ayodhya “yatra”. It also became easier for the Sangh to relegate him to the fringes of policy and decision-making in the BJP.

This it did by installing its hand-picked nominee, Gadkari, to lead the party and Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj as Opposition leaders in Parliament to undercut Advani’s veto over the organisation and parliamentary affairs.

He, however, remained a member of the BJP’s top decision-making body, the parliamentary board.

RSS spokesperson Ram Madhav said: “We have already asked all our front organisations to actively participate in all the anti-corruption movements and Advaniji’s yatra is most certainly one of them.”

The message from Nagpur, the Sangh’s control room, was that Gadkari should ensure that the BJP too mobilised its cadres to the “maximum” possible extent and where it fell short, the RSS would fill in.

Asked if the Sangh’s “endorsement” was a precursor to reaffirm Advani’s pre-eminence, sources alluded to a recent interview Gadkari gave to a Delhi newspaper. He said the next election would be fought under a “collective leadership”.

The statement was interpreted in party circles as a strategy to contain the jockeying for the top job among the post-Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Advani generation of leaders. They include Sushma, Jaitley and Narendra Modi. Of late even Gadkari was thought to nurse “bigger” ambitions.

“Gadkari’s statement was a long-term view premised on the belief that the UPA would last its full-term. The task before the RSS was to keep the BJP united and put a lid on its inner squabbles,” a source said.

The BJP’s reading was the political scenario looked “more muddled and uncertain”, caused not so much by Hazare’s agitation as the Congress and the UPA’s internal churning.

But nobody would categorically say if the logical corollary was that the next election would be contested with Advani at the helm.