NEW DELHI, 19 August — Winston Churchill, who could introduce English wit into the most devious politics, once remarked, “The trouble with allies is that they sometimes develop opinions of their own.” He also said this without any premonition of how a country he despised would rule itself 50 years after freedom from him. Churchill’s English would have become even better if he had been discussing the allies in the present government in Delhi.
There is a curious twist to the traditional curse of coalitions in Indian politics. All the allies of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) have reconciled themselves to a few facts. First, that among the available options there is no better prime minister for them than Atal Behari Vajpayee. He delivers his party’s core vote to them; he transfers his own personal popularity benefits to them; and he leaves them alone to handle their ministries (and any resultant cash flows) without any interference or questions. What could be better than that? In political terms this is paradise come to Delhi.
Second, being in government makes far more sense than being outside it. Mamata Banerjee tried some heroics earlier this year, and is now waiting at Jana Krishnamurthy’s door with a petition that has to be amended each time the BJP president utters a word. Mamata has sunk from Rani of Jhansi to bathos; she arouses pity but not much sympathy.
Therefore, the partners of the BJP have decided that they will remain in the alliance irrespective of their government’s popularity ratings.
In fact, the lower they sink in the opinion polls the firmer their grip on the alliance because a portfolio is definitely better than wilderness. Any careful, or even careless, observer will note that even George Fernandes has stopped developing opinions of his own. This is the same man who launched an independent campaign against China from his perch in the Defense Ministry in the early, heady days.
Surveys like the opinion poll published in India Today recently, that showed a decline in the popularity of both the prime minister and the government, have a paradoxical bounce. While they encourage the opposition to smile, they also strengthen the determination of a government to survive. The prospect of defeat becomes the glue that keeps allies particularly allied. And this poll had a curious aberration.
Normally there is some semblance of logic in the seesaw relationship between a prime minister and the leader of the opposition: the rise of one is generally accompanied by the fall of the other and vice versa. But the seesaw on which Vajpayee and Sonia Gandhi are sitting is a strange one. It defies every law of physics. It is a flat seesaw. If Vajpayee’s acceptance has declined so has that of Sonia. Congressmen who welcomed the rise in the party’s popularity as evidence of the psephologist’s integrity cannot call that part of the survey doctored.
But since there is no recipe for comfort in Indian power politics, it is futile for Vajpayee to expect that he will be left in peace merely because, in both incline and decline, he has created conditions that encourage the survival of his government. Vajpayee’s problem is no longer his allies. His problem is his own party. His problem is not numbers. His problem is the course that he is following.
The ideologues of the Hindutva parivar are now convinced that Vajpayee is not good for their cause. They dare not say as much yet, because half of them believe that they still need him and the other half that this is not enough reason to bring back the Congress. But the change is visible on their faces if not heard on the tongue. The sharpest attacks on the prime minister are coming from those inside the Sangh Parivar loop. There is nothing veiled about these attacks either.
The prime minister’s problems with those who had made him prime minister began with economic policy. It is a trifle surprising that a political party whose general philosophy has been what used to be called “right-wing” should resist liberalization when the former “left-wingers” have turned right, but surface similarity with the “right” hides the deeply insular philosophy of the Hindutva movement.
The BJP is the child of a philosophy that is content with the mental, economic, social and religious boundaries of a certain conception of pre-Islamic India. Anything outside this imagined, but defined, framework, be it even economic policy, invites immediate resistance.
For the Congress the switch to liberalization from the Fabianism of Nehru and the protectionism-socialism of Indira Gandhi was easier. The Congress simply redefined itself as the Rajaji Congress, or, to use a felicitous political pun, a Swatantra Congress. For one of the great stalwarts of the freedom movement and the Indian National Congress, C. Rajagopalachri (popularly known as Raajaji) broke from the parent body to protest what he called the license-permit raj of Jawaharlal Nehru. What P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh did was to begin the process of dismantling the license-permit raj. Rajaji would have been even more delighted than the World Bank.
Actually, Vajpayee and Yashwant Sinha could claim some historical legitimacy for their decision to carry forward this process and open up Indian manufactures and services to international competition, because the BJS (Bhartiya Jana Sangh and forebear of BJP) was fully supportive of the Swatantra Party’s economic line and its leaders happily berated the license-permit raj as well. But since power in Delhi was not within the Sangh’s horizon then (we are talking of the late Fifties and Sixties), criticism was considered valid for its own sake.
A serious formulation of economic policy within the Sangh only started when the possibility of power at the center became a probability in the Nineties. Organizations like the Swadeshi Jagran Manch were a consequence.
This deviation by Vajpayee was disliked, but it was tolerable. Even sharp critics could see some good emerging at the end of the day (if this day is ever going to come to an end, that is). But what made the prime minister into a hostile element within his own fold was his Pakistan policy, and by inference his attitude to the Muslim question on the subcontinent. That the prime minister was a liberal on such issues was well-known; in fact, it was this that made him preferable to L.K. Advani as leader of a coalition.
A BJP-majority government would have had different dynamics and almost certainly Advani as prime minister. The prime minister’s initial forays into the cold reaches of Indian Muslim consciousness were actually welcomed by his party as a legitimate political effort to expand the BJP’s base into hostile territory. The BJP leaders did not need to be told that it was the Hindu-Muslim question that was at the heart of their political existence, but they recognized that the demands of power were different from the polemics of opposition. There was a potential worry. At what point would the liberal intersect with the core hard-line constituency, irritating it and perhaps repelling it? The common assumption was that the friction would come over the construction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya.
Instead it came over Pakistan.
The prime minister has been a lonely man on the road to post-Kargil Pakistan. His political allies in the coalition consist largely of leaders who do not care much what happens, except to the extent that it affects their popular support.
And within his own party, he knew that he was walking on eggs. In Agra the eggs cracked. The hard-liners hatched. It was, to push the metaphor in a different direction, breaking point. Advani represented their sentiments at Agra, and it is evident that Jaswant Singh too has shifted toward them, possibly in an effort to get out of the path of their retaliation. Vajpayee alone has taken the brunt of the attack, along with Brajesh Mishra, who is a bureaucrat and therefore not a political figure. The salvo against Vajpayee during the BJP’s national executive meeting was harsh.
If Vajpayee was a statesman before Agra, he has been a politician since then, carefully feeding his pursuers with the tidbits they need so that he can continue. In the process he has been harsh on his guest, President Pervez Musharraf, but that is precisely what the furies wanted to hear. His adversaries confused compromise with submission. They did not quite realize that those tidbits were simultaneously a bait to lull them. When they least expected it, during a debate in the Rajya Sabha on the Agra summit that was not supposed to set the Taj Mahal on fire, the prime minister reasserted his authority over the government’s policy lines and sent a clear message: he was still traveling on that road, however lonely. His party was stunned when Vajpayee publicly teased Advani for being so hawkish as to suspect the prime minister himself.
The prime minister’s main concern has not been, whatever one may think, his party’s attitude toward his Pakistan policy. His real concern was the country’s view of what he was doing. There is no scoop in saying that he aspires toward the reputation of a Nehru, but a Nehru minus the China debacle. He did not want Agra to become known as his China war, a label that his own side’s hard-liners are busy planting in whichever mind they can, through whichever forum they find. He retreated in Agra, but only to live and fight another day against the opposition in his own party.
There is a dilemma, though, born out of a perception problem. Anyone who speaks of peace almost instantly acquires the reputation of being a “softie”, or at least a soft touch. The clichés are flying around; Vajpayee has been taken for a ride et al. That grates with the BJP, which has reached where it has by being tough on “Muslim issues” and hyper on Pakistan.
What the prime minister has not done is to communicate what precisely are the contours of the road he has chosen. It is possible that the route map is still being cast in both Delhi and Islamabad, and both are playing, more carefully this time, the game of low expectations and sensible returns after the high-expectations-no-returns story of Agra. Whatever the problems, Vajpayee can only win the confidence of India by taking India into confidence.
India is larger than the BJP.
