NEW DELHI, 2 September — P.C. Sorcar Jr., that supreme master of illusion who has made both the Victoria Memorial and the Taj Mahal disappear, loves to admit that there is one magician in India much bigger than him. B. Sorcar. Bharat Sorcar.

He says this with a lovely Bengali nuance that merges Sorcar and Sirkar, name and nomenclature. This is one punch line with genuine punch. You cannot run the government of India without some of the arts of a magician. A prime minister has to juggle between illusion and reality, offering the first in the guise of the second to the people. This keeps the voter on his side. And handing out the second in the guise of the first to the politician. It keeps ministers on the edge. One false step and they could fall off.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is exactly midway between one term to another. This is the point where he has to pause for some intellectual refreshment on an exhausting journey. His compulsions are obvious.

First, he has to measure the success of his government on economic issues. This is the key, because the nature of the economy defines the government. Any honest scale will tell Vajpayee that the performance of his ministers with economic portfolios has been appalling. Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha must be having nightmares about his dream budget.

In any case his budget has only really been about 30 percent of India’s economy; he is a finance minister ruled by the stock markets of Bombay rather than the agricultural markets of rural India. Agriculture has been stagnant under his stewardship.

If Sinha’s purpose was to drive the economy forward by fresh capitalization and growth in the industrial sector, an unexceptionable target in itself, then he has failed. The stock market has become a manipulated lottery under his watch. The ministers who were in charge of other key elements of that exercise called liberalization have literally no clue whatsoever about what is happening.

Of the economic ministers Arun Shourie at least cares about his beat, even if, under the most dire torture and interrogation he would not be able to tell you whether Air-India was coming or going. You cannot fault him for sincerity: he handed over BALCO at a throwaway price, but did it with complete honesty. He is clearly not familiar with the rules of a privilege committee, and called P.R. Das Munshi an ass on television in a clever-clever way, but once again did it with commendable sincerity. Such is the law of bad governance that Shourie’s sincerity is rewarded with a promotion to ensure that he can get out of his own way. When he is heaved upstairs he will have to leave disinvestments behind.

The other ministers with economic portfolios do not really care about what happens to their watch, as long they have used their power to increase their individual influence by the distribution of largesse.

Second, Vajpayee has to ensure that his own place in the power structure is not either diluted or compromised or challenged. One would imagine that this would be at the top of the agenda, but the real place for such concern is second.

Different political parties have separate ways of tackling the problem of leadership and challenge. The Congress party does it by public sycophancy and private venom. This is inevitable. Sycophancy is so inherently self-abusive that it will breed venom that lives in hope of some eventual moment when it can strike to kill.

 It leads to all sorts of contradictions. Congress leaders will accept nothing less than sycophancy and expect nothing else than betrayal. This is why you can give a Sonia Gandhi all the power she can use and never eliminate her insecurity.

Family parties like Mulayam Singh Yadav’s or Laloo Yadav’s outfits have simpler solutions. They leave no space for confusion. You have to be as loyal to the heir as to the king. This is fiefdom culture. A Bal Thackeray makes triply sure by keeping the signed resignations of all those who have won anything on his vote. Even doubt is punished by political elimination.

More democratic parties like the old Janata Party had a different formula. They used all the variable techniques of the “dhobhi ghaat.” Every bit of linen was washed on the banks of the media river. A “dhobhi ghaat” is the natural paradise of a journalist.

The BJP dialectic is unique: it is a “dhobhi ghaat” hidden by a large, flapping screen. The media river that flows beside this “ghaat” is in a single color, but with varying hues. The basic color is saffron; the shades reflect different sectarian or individual loyalties. Publicly there is never dissent in the BJP.

Privately there is substantial dissent in the BJP. How do the underprivileged denied access through the screen know this? Because BJP leaders, being politicians, also need to get the message of their struggle across to their constituency. This entails the use of selective media, which in turn is available, eventually, to those who also serve while they only stand and wait.

It is common enough knowledge that building differences between Vajpayee and his potential successor L.K. Advani reached flash point over the prime minister’s policy toward Pakistan. The combustion seared the government and almost led to a meltdown when Vajpayee offered his resignation. Since that moment, when his party had to reaffirm that he was still needed, he has fought back to reassert his authority — particularly over those who sought to marginalize him. There have been occasions on which he has been unable to fully disguise his anger against this challenge.

However, anger is not a strategy. The prime minister has to assess just how many bumps, potholes and sandtraps there are between that summit in Agra and an election to Lucknow. He survived failure in Agra; he cannot be certain he will survive failure in the Uttar Pradesh (UP) Assembly elections.

The stage is being set once again for a revolt. The temple-hard-liners who visited him with an ultimatum were part of this play. In a deft protective feint, Vajpayee has put Advani in charge of the UP elections; he is not going to take the blame alone. But that is limited protection. The prime minister knows that the BJP cannot win a majority on its own in UP. That is impossible. His aim is to deliver enough MLAs to be able to offer a coalition with either Mayawati or Mulayam Singh Yadav as a sop, with the BJP as junior partner.

In any case, Vajpayee will need far more support from his own government and party after Lucknow than he received after Agra. The reshuffle of this weekend is one part of his political response. It is a fallacy to believe that the ministers who are being inducted or promoted are meant to help the BJP’s chances in UP.

Bringing in people from Bihar and Maharashtra cannot help you in Uttar Pradesh. That is why a UP leader like Kalraj Mishra was not sworn in. What Vajpayee is doing, is to increase the strength of those who are ready to support him. This is something he has not done so far as prime minister, and in that sense this is long overdue.

Politics is a two-way street. If the sour joke in BJP circles is that Vijay Goel has reached the Cabinet by bringing “jalebi” for the prime minister from Chandni Chowk, then this too carries a message. It will be, henceforth, more profitable for BJP MPs to bring “jalebi” for the prime minister from Chandni Chowk than dosa for the home minister from Bangalore.

Vajpayee is playing a numbers game both within the BJP and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). He is promoting his loyalists within his party, and expanding the alliance by bringing back parties like Trinamool Congress to make himself less vulnerable in any future showdown. It is not accidental that the hostility toward the re-arrival of Mamata Banerjee was led by the pro-RSS element that eventually wants to replace Vajpayee with Advani. The prime minister had to virtually smuggle Mamata into the alliance. And he will put her into the Cabinet by October or November.

The most important fact about this reshuffle is that it is partial. Given the limitations of, first, coalition politics, and, second, the poor quality of material available to him, Vajpayee cannot really do very much about the people in his government. The coalition partners for instance nominate themselves, and the BJP is not quite overburdened with genius. But he has in his power the right to allocate portfolios. He will use the yardstick of performance for a radical overhaul of departments in the second and more important stage of his reshuffle; that will be a coalition government with a Vajpayee stamp rather than a coalition government through a consensus process.

The chess game of political power has different rules. The two opponents do not play one move at a time, one after another. This is more like a combination of chess and football: chessball. The pace is chess; the pieces are queens and knights and bishops and pawns but the strategies are those of football. When one side is on the offensive then there is a flurry of one-sided moves with the opponent protecting his positions before using either a mistake or an opportunity to mount a counteroffensive.

From Agra to the moment when Vajpayee offered his resignation, Advani was on the offensive with lightning darts, lobs, pretty passing and, to mix games, checkmates to the king himself. Since that unaccepted resignation Vajpayee has been gathering strength with slow and deliberate momentum. The prime minister is more elephant than horse, but he is now in control of greater space on the battlefield.

Even as he continues his central advance he will revive the Pakistan flank of his offensive, and use the New York meeting with President Pervez Musharraf to calm both the core sensitivity on cross-border terrorism as well as to progress ideas like the opening of communications and trade.

At this moment a second summit seems unlikely before the early part of next year, unless the two leaders extend their meeting during SAARC in December into a bilateral as well.

By the time of the UP election results, Vajpayee expects to be once again fully in control of his own government. It will not put him in charge of the country, but it will be a start, or at least a restart.

P.C. Sorcar Jr. has a lament. His magic shows work better abroad than at home, because audiences abroad come to be entertained on a full stomach. In India, his weakness is also exposed. He can make the Taj Mahal disappear, but he cannot make a plate of food appear. People ask him why he cannot fill a man’s stomach, or cure disease with his magic. This is where his contrived connect between illusion and reality breaks down. The use of illusion becomes counterproductive.

Prime ministers have the same problem when they use illusion to cloak reality. The finest speech, the most brilliant bit of power play in Delhi cannot make a plate of food appear for the Dalit in the village. Governments must live or die by that plate of food, not that spin of sentences or that masterly exposition of a world view in a dialogue with George Bush in America.

It is the economy that defines a government. And the government does not know how to define the economy.