NEW DELHI, 28 July — Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is tired. This is official. Senior ministers are now opting out of any euphemism and are happy to attribute exhaustion as the reason for the non-appearance of the prime minister at any meeting. However, Vajpayee has not retired. Emphatically not.
This is not to say that no one wants him to retire. He might have heard a few such voices within his own party. Such people will of course be hopeful, but they would be wise not to be optimists.
The proposition that the Prime Minister is tired invites, as is said in parliamentary language, supplementaries. Tired is a word that bends in more than one direction, leaning upon the auxiliary. Is he tired of something? Is he tired of someone? The easy answer is that advancing age and failing health leave him tired. The easy answer rarely amounts to the full truth. It is certainly a half-truth.
Age is a fact of life, and the prime minister’s health was a cause of concern even when he took the oath of office for the first time. But facts are more complex than the obvious.
We will for the moment ignore Dhirubhai Ambani’s remark (which should be more famous than it is) that anyone who works for 18 hours a day is clearly a slow worker. Broadly, leaders have two kinds of styles. One might be called the Rajiv Gandhi mode. He would be a great detail man, stretching his schedule to the early hours of the morning and expecting virtually every serious decision to pass through his microscope before it was sent to Cabinet or converted into law.
Depending on which issue was at the fore, Rajiv was therefore minister of everything in addition to being prime minister. When India negotiated a treaty with Sri Lanka he became the de facto foreign minister; when Indian troops landed in the neighboring country he became the de facto defense minister; when Ayodhya or Shah Bano appeared on the agenda he was the real home minister, and there was more than one occasion when he became a chief minister of some state or the other as well. That is the attitude of a workaholic who is more certain of his own judgment than that of his ministers.
Vajpayee belongs to a totally different school of thought, and that phrase is used deliberately despite being a cliché. His concept of work is more Brahmanical. His job, he certainly believes, is to do the thinking — only as and when required — and let those down the line to fulfill their assignments.
There will be unevenness but that is a law of life: Nothing is equal because every mind is not equal, and every birth is not equal, and every destiny is not the same. Vajpayee will involve himself with decisions that open, or shut, doors, and are therefore correctly known as key decisions. He takes time over them, for rumination and consideration are of necessity time-consuming. Left to himself he would have permitted foreign direct investment in the print media two years ago, but he permitted time and debate to prepare the climate before he took the final step (and only he took that final step, no one else).
Once he was convinced in his mind he left the paperwork and the political passage of the decision to the relevant minister, in this case Sushma Swaraj.
Similarly disinvestment is now the headache of Arun Shourie. Rajiv would in all likelihood get involved in each particular case of disinvestments after having pronounced the broad policy. Vajpayee has no time for the details; that is the proper job of the designated minister. He is not a physical worker. It stands to reason therefore that his daily routine cannot be particularly tiring, except in the sense of being tiresome; which is more a function of boredom rather than a physical burden.
Prime ministers younger than Vajpayee have been known to sleep on the job, and Vajpayee, to his credit, has kept his eyes open through the worst instances of tedium. If he now feels that he does not really have time for tedium, can anyone really blame him?
But that does not mean that the prime minister is tired. That only means that he is tired of the unnecessary, as in his scheme of things. A very good example of this was the way he dealt with Uttar Pradesh issues. He was too tired to meet an MPs’ delegation, spurring once again speculation that he was vacating space for his new Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani. But when UP BJP leaders like Rajnath Singh and Vinay Katiyar took a decisive step into what they thought was vacated space, and tried to break the coalition with Mayawati which is in power in Lucknow, they found the prime minister himself there.
He moved in, snuffed out the revisionist line, and went back to his “tired” self. All that the prime minister has done is that he has reserved crucial and critical areas for his concern, and told the others to get on with life without him. This is also useful when it comes to issues on which he may not be totally in agreement with most of his party. The sharpest difference is over Narendra Modi. How do we know this?
From the speech made in Parliament by none other than the prime minister himself, when he admitted that he had made up his mind to change the chief minister of Gujarat but was prevailed upon by the majority view of his party to let Modi stay. And so when Gujarat resurfaced in Parliament, the prime minister decided that Advani should defend in public what he had defended within the party. Fair is fair. If you want the bouquets within the party you must also be ready to pick up brickbats in Parliament. Nothing personal about it.
Actually Vajpayee and Advani probably understand that better than any of their loyalists who feed speculation in the hope of some indecipherable reward. The two are closer friends than they readily let on; they have, quite simply, worked together longer than any other comparable team of leaders. They were even together (albeit accidentally) when arrested during Emergency and shared the same jail, as Advani’s prison recently republished jail diaries narrate so well.
Sentiment apart they know the eternal value of good-cop-bad-cop in public life, and hold up the party using contradictory poles. Of this much they are sure: Neither is going to move so far away from the other that the party’s tensile strength gets seriously tested. That is the way the BJP works, for better or for worse.
The two also know the hierarchy. Vajpayee has created more space for his deputy, at least partly because the deputy prime minister is not getting any younger either. But as he leaves more of the domestic agenda to Advani (in effect, only reinforcing the natural constituency of a home minister), the prime minister is likely to spend more of his own time on issues that motivate him. He would like to define his years in power with one great issue, and that clearly is a resolution of the problems with Pakistan, if that is at all possible.
American involvement in the problem is now a transparent fact, and one that offers both risk and opportunity. It will be a complex dance in an open barn, but the dance has begun. Colin Powell’s latest message to the subcontinent is that the time has come for a resumption of dialogue. The first anniversary of the Agra summit has gone so quietly that you may not have noticed, but hopes were higher than the temperature in June and July last year.
The only way you will never be disillusioned is if you have no illusions to begin with. Neither hope nor reality could find their correct level last year. Since then we have tasted the dangers of life on the precipice.
Everyone will tread more carefully now. There is no other rational way to walk through the minefields of history. The prime minister will not be tired when the time comes for that walk to restart.
