NEW DELHI — In politics, the window of opportunity has very temperamental shutters. Or, if you want to shift the metaphor to a door, opportunity does knock when it wants to, but it does not keep hanging around waiting for you to complete your ablutions. If you do not respond, opportunity simply transfers its attentions to someone with better response systems. Fickle thing, opportunity.
At some point during the last fortnight, enough political parties could have got together and served as a magnet to break the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and possibly even dislodge the government. Consultations did take place, and once again agreement seemed to be growing on Jyoti Basu as the head of an alternative alliance that could induce the TDP, DMK and many of the variety of Dals out of the BJP’s embrace.
However, these parties were ready to hop out of one government only if they could hop into another. No one was interested in another general election. Sonia Gandhi spiked the idea. The Congress party put it out that it would rather wait and make Sonia its prime minister rather than join or support a coalition under Basu or anyone else. They say that a week is a long time in politics. Sonia has just gifted Atal Behari Vajpayee about a hundred weeks more of power.
This is not the first time that she has been so generous. Cast your mind back to the first moment of what might be called the Assembly Syndrome. Sonia was still new in her job. The halo behind her coiffured head could almost be photographed. This was in the “pre-272” era of Congress history.
On one magic day in autumn the Congress swept to power in five states. The NDA looked hobbled. A push was all that it needed to topple and Jayalalitha was ready to push. Sonia, suffering from bad advice and poor judgment, decided to wait. The prime minister should have sent her a personal letter of thanks as he went to Lahore, pushed through a reform budget and seized the political high ground.
Sonia decided to strike when he was on high ground after having left him when he was in the dumps. Vajpayee lost his government in Parliament and won it back from the electorate. The gods could not have timed the general election better for him.
Wafting once again on assembly euphoria, Sonia has chosen to repeat herself, with one extra twist in the story. She has decided to personalize the battle between the Congress and the BJP into a battle between Sonia and Vajpayee.
I have no idea who is responsible for such naiveté; it is quite possible that this is her own decision. Someone should tell her a simple and even stark truth.
In any confrontation between the BJP and the Congress, the Congress is likely to win. That is why the Congress wins assembly elections and could continue doing so.
In any confrontation between Vajpayee and Sonia, Sonia will lose. It is a no-contest. In fact the battle may not even be fair. Mohun Bagan may be a champion in Calcutta but it is not fair to expect it to defeat Manchester United. The two are not in the same league.
Leave aside experience and political skill, Vajpayee is an Indian and Sonia is not. A passport can give you citizenship. To be prime minister requires more than a piece of paper acquired late in life, long after it might have been taken.
It is a strategic mistake on the part of the Congress to personalize the battle. In marketing terminology, the Congress brand is much stronger today than the Sonia brand.
A party as wedded to dynasty as the Congress will find this hard to accept — publicly. Privately Congress leaders see much more clear. They know that the Nehru-Gandhi family has been an asset to the party. But this asset is not a magic wand.
The circumstances have to be right for the asset to pay dividends. Would even Nehru’s magic have worked if the general elections of 1962 had been held after the China debacle? 1967 would have happened in 1962. Indira Gandhi became prime minister in January 1966 but in her first electoral test, in 1967, she barely scraped through in Parliament and lost every single assembly between Amritsar and Calcutta.
It was in 1971 that Indira became a winner in her own right, and only after she had changed the nation’s agenda and placed the poor at the very top of our national concerns. Indira became synonymous with hope, and no political muscle can be stronger than that. That muscle wasted in less than five years. When elections were held in 1977 the Congress was erased, literally, all across the main artery of Indian politics, that highway between Amritsar and Calcutta. It is a moot point whether Indira could have won re-election in 1984-85 after the havoc of Operation Bluestar. (Curious fact: Two architects of Bluestar, Arun Singh and Arun Nehru, are now with the BJP).
All the family charisma and his own youth could not save Rajiv Gandhi from defeat in 1989. His tragic assassination in 1991 tilted the balance just enough for the Congress for it to become the largest party and rule for five years. Sonia thought that the magic of the family name would deliver the electorate to her the moment she announced that she was the claimant for the prime minister’s august chair rather than a Sitaram Kesri. She brought in 30 seats less than the man who had sunk the party into a trough.
You cannot become Indira by wearing a sari in the same fashion; you have to represent what she did. So far at least Sonia symbolizes nothing that the poor can believe in. Her only Unique Selling Proposition is that she is better than the BJP. This works, but only up to a point. The minorities might be motivated by their intense fear and anger to accept this as enough reason. But that does not add up to victory in a general election.
There are indications, on the other hand, that Vajpayee knows what he wants to do over the next 50 weeks. He has begun by rebuilding his vote base in Uttar Pradesh, and quelled a minor revolt to hand over power to Mayawati in return for an electoral understanding that will add a new chunk to his party’s vote. True, dealing with Mayawati is like making friends with dynamite; you never know when it will blow up in your face. But Vajpayee has obviously calculated the risk and taken it.
That was the easy part.
Narendra Modi has done incredible damage to the BJP’s credibility. The hawks (young ones, I gather) who protected Modi against Vajpayee’s own judgment had the vision of the hawk. It specialized in the immediate kill. It is not famous for perspective. Vajpayee is now faced with one of the most difficult challenges of his political career. He has to reinvent his own government. This is not going to be possible through a tickle here and a shuffle there. He has to present a fresh visage and purpose, and recreate a rationale for his power.
I would not be surprised if Modi goes in the process. Modi cannot govern Gujarat any more. That is obvious from every day’s front page. If you leave him too long in Ahmedabad no one may be able to govern Gujarat in the foreseeable future. The legacy of hate, poison and distrust he has fomented would be too much for anyone to clean up.
There is a third, discernible side of the emerging Vajpayee plan. In fact, you could call it the 3M Plan: Mayawati, Modi and Musharraf. The dialogue between India and Pakistan is being quietly revived. India will soon send a high commissioner to Islamabad; Pakistan has left its envoy in place in Delhi. The second track of deliberations, by which governments test the waters without the need to commit themselves, has been reactivated. Vajpayee has chosen to visit Kazakhstan for a summit at which Pervez Musharraf will be present. This time they might actually smile at each other and mean it.
Simultaneously the prime minister has set in motion a process that could see Mirwaiz Omar Farooq of the Hurriyat Conference become chief minister after an unmanipulated assembly election, while the National Conference is accommodated in Delhi as a partner of the NDA.
The differences between India and Pakistan will not be resolved in a hurry, but they could be narrowed down enough to permit space for other initiatives. If Vajpayee can restore the peace momentum with Pakistan he will be back in charge of the national agenda. He has shown in the past that he knows how to use power.
There is a qualifying “if”, of course. But he has got the opportunity to revive his government only because it survived.
Sonia prevented Jyoti Basu from becoming prime minister in 1999 and sank in the general elections that inevitably followed. Those who do not understand the past are condemned to repeat it.
