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Atal's Election! Really?
This is the last time that BJP needs Vajpayee. Will it let him run Govt as he wants?
Politicians are fortunate that voters have short memories. Today nobody remembers how the BJP regarded Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the aftermath of the assembly election defeats in such states as Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in late 1998.
Hard as this may be to believe now, Vajpayee was regarded as a liability in those days. He had still to settle down at Race Course Road and already, the BJP hardliners were writing him off. The economy seemed to be in bad shape. The election defeats had shocked the party. An opinion poll in India Today had shown that a majority of respondents preferred Sonia Gandhi to Vajpayee.
As the disillusionment grew, so did the sniping from within the parivar. It was, the sceptics said, a vision thing. Vajpayee might be a nice enough fellow but he had no vision of a new India. On the other hand, LK Advani and his pals had dreamt up a brave new India; and a magnificent Ram Temple at Ayodhya was at the centre of that vision. But as for Vajpayee, well, the old boy didn’t really subscribe to that vision, did he? He was still clinging to some post-Nehruvian dream of a secular India.
Nor was he ideologically sound. He failed to recognise the strengths of the glorious Sangh parivar and stuck to a small inner circle. The PMO was really nothing more than his dining table. And within his household, they were said to refer to the brave soldiers of the sangh as ‘chaddiwallahs.’ They had forgotten their roots. And the old man’s age and ill-health were catching up with him. It was only a matter of time before the energetic and ideologically sound LK Advani took over.
It is not my case that poor Mr Advani sanctioned, supported or even, approved of this mud-slinging. Whenever he’s been asked about the party hierarchy, he has been categorical: he has no ambition other than to be a good number two to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a man he has loyally stood by (and stood behind, if old pictures are anything to go by) for decades.
But anybody who saw the mood of the BJP after the assembly election defeats of 1998 would have concluded that Atal Bihari Vajpayee was on his last legs.
Contrast that period with this election. It is well known that Vajpayee was not in favour of early elections. It is as well known that he didn’t even want to lead the BJP into this campaign. But the BJP told him that the party could only hope to return to power if he led the campaign. His health was good, they said, and his popularity was at an high. So how could he, in good conscience, refuse to lead the party he had given his life to?
But I wonder if even Vajpayee realised how much the campaign would revolve around him. Venkaiah Naidu had foolishly declared that Vajpayee and Advani would be treated on par — only to have to eat his words and perform a ceremonial grovel when Vajpayee said fine, in that case, let Advani run the campaign himself. But even as Venkaiah genuflected, none of us realised that the BJP would turn this into a campaign reminiscent of the old Congress party where only the Supreme Leader mattered.
Advani may be a symbol of the vision thing, the man who fought for the grand Ayodhya temple and whose extended household never discusses policy on the dining table but, this time around, he is very clearly the sidekick: Alfred to Vajpayee‘s Batman, Guran to Vajpayee‘s Phantom. This year, on Advani’s rath yatra, he’s been careful to put Vajpayee’s picture on the rath. Contrast this with the 1989-90 rath yatras when it was almost as though Vajpayee didn’t exist.
As a journalist, the most interesting aspect of this campaign for me has been the manner in which nearly every NDA (or potential NDA) leader I’ve interviewed has sung Vajpayee’s praises. I asked Sahib Singh Varma, not the most obvious Vajpayee groupie, what the issues in this campaign were: “Atal Bihari Vajpayee”, he said. I asked Najma Heptullah why she was considering joining the NDA and she said “Atal Bihari Vajpayee”. An HT correspondent asked Navjyot Singh Sidhu if he thought the BJP was communal and he said, “Atal Bihari Vajpayee is totally secular.” On Friday, I interviewed the Shiv Sena’s Sanjay Nirupam, the man whose absurd outburst in Parliament over UTI led to the crisis when Vajpayee threatened to resign. Nirupam now thinks that Vajpayee is a great leader; what’s more, even Vajpayee’s family members are totally wonderful, he says, a little desperately.
Some of the Vajpayee-worship is understandable. The BJP has two real achievements to its credit: the zeal with which the government has pursued the reforms process and the foreign policy triumphs.
Of these, the reforms are almost entirely a consequence of Vajpayee's own determination to push ahead. The two men who can get the credit — Arun Shourie and Jaswant Singh — have succeeded only because Vajpayee has put his weight behind them, overcoming all opposition.
Foreign policy is Vajpayee’s baby. It is his passion and his great interest. Right from the time he stood firm and got the Americans to force Pakistan to withdraw from Kargil to today, when India has earned the world’s respect, these have been Vajpayee’s own achievements. The men who have secured these triumphs — first Jaswant Singh and now Yashwant Sinha but always, from behind the scenes, Brajesh Mishra — have been able to do so only because Vajpayee has backed them.
Most recently, Vajpayee staked nearly everything on India’s cricket tour of Pakistan. He was told that our team would get a hostile response. He refused to believe the sceptics. He was told (by intelligence agencies affiliated to the Home Ministry but not, significantly, by RAW which actually understands Pakistan) that it was not safe for our cricketers to go; he decided that the risk was worth it. And then he was told by the BJP that if India lost, it would puncture the feel-good factor. He refused to let electoral compulsions dictate the future of foreign policy.
As it turned out, Vajpayee won the gamble. The Pakistanis gave us a warm welcome, there were no terrorist attacks and we won both the one-day’s and Tests so there was no danger to the feel-good factor. But it could easily have gone the other way. Only a statesman could have taken a risk like this on the eve of an election.
All this explains why Vajpayee is pretty much unbeatable in this election. If you trust the opinion and exit polls then the BJP has fought a pretty disastrous campaign. The early euphoria about a landslide has evaporated and now it looks as though the NDA may just about scrape through. And yet, no poll shows any significant erosion in Vajpayee’s own popularity. In many polls, he is at least twice as popular as his nearest rival.
I have a few concerns about the way all this is going.
One: I think the NDA is expecting too much of Vajpayee. Even the largely unreadable BJP Vision Document was, in Sonia Gandhi’s phrase, “Vajpayee’s photo album with a few captions.” Vajpayee did complain about the Vision Document and it was duly reprinted. But I suspect that even he is getting a little fed up of being expected to win this election single-handed.
Two: How long will Vajpayee be Prime Minister? He told us that he wouldn’t contest this election and yet, he is, touring the country. Now, he says he won’t step down for five years but I have my doubts. He will be 84 when his next term ends and Advani will be 81. He may well want to step down halfway through to give Advani a chance. In that case, how honest is it for the BJP to ask for votes in Vajpayee’s name?
And finally, Vajpayee and the BJP have co-existed so long because the party knows it needs him. No matter how much it resents his liberalism, he remains its only hope of being elected. But we’ve seen how the BJP turned against him in 1998 when he looked like a loser. (And that’s excluding the way it ignored him in the late 1980s and early 1990s.)
This is the last time the BJP really needs Vajpayee. He’s not going to win yet another election for the party. So will it still let him run the government as he wants to? Will it allow him to follow his own liberal line? Or will all that old nonsense about the ‘vision thing’ be resurrected?
I have no answers. But the questions themselves are worrying.
