March 2, 1998

Changing tack mid-way through the poll campaign, the party begins attacking Sonia in right earnest

By Saba Naqvi Bhaumik

The BJP had planned an election campaign centering on one personality: Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The campaign went according to plan -- for about a month. By late January, it had become clear that Sonia Gandhi had stolen the limelight. The plan had to be suddenly altered. Instead of extolling the virtues of Vajpayee, the BJP now finds itself spending more time combating the Sonia offensive. Much to its discomfiture, the party has been forced to follow the agenda set by a woman who has been described in its poll advertisements as "someone with just two weeks' political experience".

From downplaying Sonia, the BJP has been compelled to launch a strident attack on her. Initially, admits a senior leader, "we thought she could be ignored". So party President L.K. Advani dismissed her as the "Imran Khan phenomenon in Pakistan", where crowds did not translate into votes, while Vajpayee made only oblique references to her in his speeches. The party's prime minister-designate gave the impression that it would be beneath him to indulge in mud-slinging; it was left to the second-rung leadership to make shrill noises about Sonia.

Then two things happened in quick succession. A number of newspapers and magazines published opinion polls indicating that Sonia had halted the BJP march; and Sonia herself got bolder, graduating from a generalised attack on the "communal forces who killed Mahatma Gandhi" to directly calling Vajpayee "a liar" in the context of his pronouncements on Bofors.

That's when the rhetoric got nasty. High-flying lawyer and BJP national executive member Arun Jaitley was wheeled out of hibernation to nail the contradictions in Sonia's statements about Bofors. Something of a Bofors specialist, Jaitley had been involved with the legal aspects of the probe during his tenure as additional solicitor-general during V.P. Singh's prime ministership. He now took the lead in framing a cogent rejoinder. Tracing the evidence that reveals the involvement of persons close to Rajiv Gandhi in the pay-off scandal, Jaitley declared: "It is not Vajpayee who has to answer on Bofors, but Sonia herself. Sonia's outburst flies in the face of Indian culture. Beginners in politics must learn how to address veterans." Jaitley kept raising basic questions: Why did Quattrocchi receive the Bofors kickbacks? Was he not a friend of the Gandhis?

On his part, Vajpayee made a characteristically emotional speech saying, "Even Indira and Nehru had never called me a liar." He continued making the grand prime ministerial pronouncements on poverty, education and health, but every now and then took a swipe at Sonia. "She is offending India's sensitivities and democratic traditions," he charged. "Sonia's claim that India will disintegrate if the BJP comes to power would have been laughable but for the fact that it shows how ignorant she is about the resilience of the nation. Democracy does not need a dynasty. India is larger than a family." This was also Vajpayee's way of projecting the battle as being between stability and dynasty.

The BJP campaign managers have now set about countering the Sonia onslaught in right earnest. Advani has persisted in dismissing the so-called Sonia wave as originating from the curiosity about a dynasty replacing the elected leadership of a dying Congress. He also took the initiative in demanding that the "Congress and United Front (UF) should avoid committing another fraud on the electorate and should immediately make their post-poll intentions clear". Says a party strategist: "So many UF constituents are battling the Congress in the states. Now that Sonia has entered the fray, we want to remind UF constituents that in any post-poll deal the choice is not between so-called secular and communal forces but between the BJP and the dynasty."

One individual who will be singled out for attack is V.P. Singh, who has adopted a conciliatory tone towards Sonia in anticipation of a post-poll Congress-UF arrangement. The BJP is naturally peeved that the Bofors hero refuses to attack Sonia on the issue. Some clever one-liners to debunk the V.P. Singh line are being fine-tuned at the BJP's Ashoka Road headquarters in Delhi: "The Raja is eyeing the court of the Empress", and "For those bought up in feudal traditions, dynasty is never an issue".

Though the BJP is persisting with its attack on Sonia's foreign origins, there are those who believe it may rebound on the party. Even a section of the RSS reportedly had misgivings about this line of attack, on the grounds that even a newcomer becomes a member of a Parivar in the course of time. Taking a tangent, the party is highlighting Sonia's Italian origins by demanding that naturalised citizens be barred from contesting for top political office. BJP campaign managers believe that to some extent Sonia has fallen into their trap. Says party General Secretary Venkaiah Naidu: "She spends half her speeches declaring that she is an Indian, a daughter of Bharat Mata. That means she is on the defensive on this issue."

Jaitley, meanwhile, is marshalling facts to try and "explode the myth of Sonia making an electoral difference". He points to media reports suggesting that the Congress could lose in the Gandhi family stronghold, Amethi. "We are going to come up with more facts like this to combat the media hype of a Sonia wave," he says. With telegenic leaders like Pramod Mahajan and Sushma Swaraj caught up in campaigning, Jaitley has been playing BJP spokesman on numerous TV shows. His strategy: Hammer home the facts about dynasty and Bofors and keep questioning Sonia's refusal to answer any questions. Says Jaitley: "She's only willing to parrot speeches written by ghost-writers. But we can't allow her to acquire a mother goddess position without being accountable."

Their aggressive posturing notwithstanding, Sonia does appear to have forced the BJP on the backfoot. The party's problems are compounded by Sonia and other Congress leaders' persistent jibes at the RSS. The BJP itself is to be partly blamed for this: on the one hand, it projects the moderate Vajpayee, on the other an ideologue like K.N. Govindacharya keeps the hard-core cadre happy by making occasional noises about the Ram Mandir and the "emotional tug" of Kashi and Mathura. And it is precisely this doublespeak that is being exploited by the Congress. Its President Sitaram Kesri's statement that the RSS would never allow Vajpayee to become prime minister appears to have provoked RSS chief Rajendra Singh into taking the uncharacteristic step of publicly rubbishing the suggestion. Both the RSS and the BJP reacted angrily to Kesri's charge that the RSS could have engineered the Coimbatore blasts. While the RSS sued the Congress president for defamation, the BJP tried the subtle approach. It took out advertisements in local south Indian dailies saying: "The BJP is an idea that has come to stay ... You can never kill an idea."

Maybe. But for now, the BJP's campaign managers are worried that Sonia's aggressive style may reduce the party's attempt to capture Delhi to just that: an idea.

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