The sanyasin met her father in her dream and sat on his lap “like a baby”. He hugged her with his frail hands and told her all will be well. Two years later, the “little girl” founded her own brand of BJP — the Bharatiya Janshakti Party — and swears by her “Bapu”.
Bharatiya Janshakti Party chief Uma Bharti— now a staunch Gandhian — feels this is her new avatar. Narrating her dream, she said, “I told Baba (Mahatma Gandhi) that I will finish what you could not. But they would try to kill me. How can I save myself? But I did not name my killers. Then I saw him hugging me and I sat on his lap like a baby. The vision I saw in my car kept recurring in my dreams during my weeklong stay at Vardha, where the Mahatma had spent six years, and continued to haunt me for a month.”
Uma Bharti often speaks to the “Father of the Nation” in her dreams. In an exclusive interview to the Hindustan Times, the sadhvi said she finds herself so deeply attached to the Mahatma now that it feels as if she worked with him in her previous life. “For me, he is the strongest force after Pt Deendayal Upadhyay and Shyama Prasad Mukherjee — Sangh icons whom I look up to.”
She said the transformation — from indifference to the Gandhian philosophy to an avid practitioner— was like an explosion. It took place after she was told by her previous party leadership to go to Madhya Pradesh before the 2003 Assembly polls. Most of the time, Uma used to be worried about how to address the common man’s problems and ensure development of the state. Two months later in Kedarnath, Gandhi visited her in her dream.
{{/usCountry}}She said the transformation — from indifference to the Gandhian philosophy to an avid practitioner— was like an explosion. It took place after she was told by her previous party leadership to go to Madhya Pradesh before the 2003 Assembly polls. Most of the time, Uma used to be worried about how to address the common man’s problems and ensure development of the state. Two months later in Kedarnath, Gandhi visited her in her dream.
{{/usCountry}}She was initially shocked for she did not think of him. She asked the head priest of the Kedarnath temple to interpret it. The priest wanted to know what were her thoughts before going to bed every night. Mostly people’s problems. The preist told her that Kedarnath had answered her question. The sadhvi said the Panch-J project she launched in Madhya Pradesh after becoming the chief minister was Gandhian in thought— for he had shown her the way to tap natural resources without foreign aid.