NEW DELHI, 16 May 2004 — So the BJP did bite off more than it could chew, and I have had to buy a vacuum cleaner to wipe egg off my face. Alas, God gave me only two eyes: To get this election right you needed Shiva’s Third Eye. But a mere hack, or even a psephologist, getting it wrong is as nothing compared to the bookies getting it wrong. A journalist only puts a laptop where his mouth is. A bookie puts his money where his mouth is. Their mouths must still be open.
The principal reason for being blindsided is apparent: Atal Behari Vajpayee was an excellent prime minister. Let us leave his personal qualities of charm, generosity and grace aside; that is for those who knew him personally. The political calculus has to be done on the less sentimental terrain of performance.
An underappreciated achievement needs immediate mention: He gave legitimacy to coalitions, an idea that had never worked in New Delhi among India’s fractious politicians. It gets more evident in every election that two forces are at work in the Indian polity: Even as centripetal forces strengthen the unity of India, centrifugal urges increase the autonomous political space of its various regions. A federal system can be governed either through coalitions or a directly elected president. Since we do not have a presidential system, it is vital that there should be confidence in the idea of coalitions, or authority would become so fragmented as to break down. The stability of the NDA is now the model against which future experiments will be measured. Ironically, Vajpayee’s success convinced the voter that any coalition could be stable, and persuaded him to change one for another.
Vajpayee’s second substantive achievement was in neighborhood policy. His initiatives toward China and Pakistan were built on his oft-repeated view that you can change friends but not neighbors, and conviction that peace with neighbors is a prerequisite for progress. Every prime minister intones such sentiments with suitable solemnity. Theory is not always matched by practice. Prime ministers begin to treat national military strength as an extension of their ego; soon, the correctly-named Defense Ministry morphs into an offense ministry. Vajpayee understood both the strength and limitations of muscle. Pakistan learned to respect this to the point where Vajpayee could aver that cross-border terrorism had come to its lowest point. This became the basis of a hope that a settlement of our most debilitating problem, the Kashmir dispute, was possible.
Failure may be an orphan but it gets a hundred times more news space than success. Vajpayee achieved a breakthrough with China on Sikkim last year, now recognized in Chinese maps that show Sikkim as part of India, but this fact has faded from public memory. Peace with Pakistan is a work in progress. After Agra, foundations had to be relaid, and confidence rebuilt. That was achieved by January this year. The critical part lies ahead, and much will hinge on the foreign minister-level talks scheduled for August. It would be foolish to sabotage the momentum that has been created. A successor government always has problems with inheritance, not least because the culture of opposition demands criticism. Hawks (and they nest everywhere) will try to dismiss the peace initiative as either naïve or “soft”. That would be counterproductive.
His significant weakness lay in his rudimentary understanding of economics. He knew what he wanted: Privatization that would lead to efficiency, and a modern infrastructure for the country. But he left implementation to those who could not see beyond middle class India. Reform without employment is an absurdity in a developing country. When profit becomes king, the economy becomes captive to a limited company (pun intended).
But when all equations are done, a prime minister has to be much more than a sum of the parts.
Vajpayee’s mission, in a phrase, was to put his generation’s problems to rest so that the next generation could take India forward to the destiny that Jawaharlal Nehru had promised. This vision often put him at odds with his own party. Vajpayee and the BJP interpreted the same historical facts differently. The idea that Jawaharlal Nehru could be a hero was anathema to the hard-liners in the Hindutva family. They could, at a pinch, find space for Mahathma Gandhi, whose religiosity and asceticism had an obvious appeal to the RSS. But Nehru was the very opposite, intellectually, culturally, emotionally, to all that they stood for. Vajpayee did not treat nationalism as the exclusive preserve of the Sangh philosophy; he recognized the nationalist in Nehru, and made no secret of his admiration. He was not converted to Nehru suddenly on the road to Delhi. He could not control his tears when Jawaharlal died in 1964. When Vajpayee became foreign minister in 1977, some sycophant tried to curry favor with him by removing Jawaharlal’s picture from the foreign office. He was furious. The picture returned. He was equally ready to admire the nationalist in Indira Gandhi. Or in the man who is today our president, and a much loved one too. Only Vajpayee in this government could have made Abdul Kalam president of India.
The biggest problem of his generation was, obviously, partition and its consequences: An armed confrontation between India and Pakistan, and the volatile state of Hindu-Muslim relations. He admitted, privately if not publicly, that part of the problem was the BJP’s investment in this tension in order to reap votes. His response was to try and reinvent the BJP. This is why the party’s dialectic for this general election has been radically different, and it has attempted to become inclusive toward Muslims.
The contradiction lay in the Gujarat riots. He placed his own reaction in the public purview. He told Parliament that when he went to the BJP conference in Goa, he had decided that Narendra Modi must take responsibility and resign. He added, ruefully, that his party overruled him. He apologized. Was this enough? No. Voters are not idiots. They do not expect a prime minister’s pocket to be stuffed with resignation letters.
But there occasionally comes an event that demands moral clarity. Gujarat was one such. Vajpayee stayed on and reaped, like the rest of his party, the benefits of the Modi victory. Two years later, in a fascinating turn, the voter of Narendra Modi’s Gujarat punished Vajpayee and helped defeat his government.
But Vajpayee did remold the politics of the BJP, although it would be excessive to say that he changed its philosophy. Will the Vajpayee swerve survive defeat? Hindutva hard-liners are already on television with a single-point post mortem: Vajpayee tried to turn the BJP into the Congress, and was therefore rejected by his own. But if enough BJP leaders have begun to appreciate his view that in order to become a mainstream party the BJP cannot isolate and demonize one vital tide of India, the Muslims, then it will have been a major achievement. The jury is out.
There is no murder in politics; death is always by suicide. The NDA’s suicide note was prepared by the Finance Ministry last year and signed “India Shining”. The message alienated the poor and woke them up from indifference, for it showed them the world that existed outside their reach. The alienation was as strong as the ad-blitz; every ad created a fresh pool of resentment.
The agency, in any case, was not very original. The campaign was a rehash of Rajiv Gandhi’s Mera Bharat Mahaan, with mobiles and motorbikes instead of spiders and snakes.
The end result was the same. An election that could have been won was lost. We thought that Vajpayee’s personal popularity and credibility would cover the gaps that were becoming visible in BJP territory. The gaps became too large in the course of a long and fatiguing election process.
There will certainly be consequences. When Jyoti Basu, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Bal Thackeray speak the same language on economic reform, it means that a spectrum of opposition looms over the bulls of the stock market. The principle of reforms is that if wealth is created at the top it will trickle down eventually.
In a democracy, elections interfere with “eventually”. Comrade-Capitalist Deng got away with this policy in China because he did not have to check with the ballot box. The Indian model must be balanced: You can afford “trickle down” only if you simultaneously invest in “trickle up”. Amul is a classic example of the latter model, where milk, a product from the poorest section of India, has been converted into a great manufacturing and marketing success story through a cooperative movement.
Sonia Gandhi is where she is today for three reasons, one of which has been noted above. But, equally, she believed in herself when very few others believed in her. The third and most important reason is an aging Marxist tactician called Harkishen Singh Surjeet, who realized that this general election was going to be won or lost not by the principals but by the partners. Ironically, both the BJP and the Congress have lost two percent of their vote in this election, but the Congress chose the right allies. The BJP got complacent. The reward for Surjeet’s wisdom is control of the route map through which he will steer Indian politics.
How have I suddenly become so wise? Because I acquired Shiva’s Third Eye after the elections. It’s called hindsight.
