August 10, 1998

Good PR means not having power cuts in the capital

Swapan Dasgupta

It sometimes pays to digest a bit of unsolicited advice. Jagdish Bhagwati, the economics don from Columbia University, told the BJP leadership a few home truths during his brief visit to Delhi last month. First, he advised Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Jaswant Singh to immediately secure the services of those professional economists who are not committed to the ancien regime. So far, that advice is unheeded. More important, he expressed his bewilderment at how a regime could have such a feeble sense of public relations (PR).

That advice must have been music to the ears of a harried government. Paralysed into inactivity by its own predicament, there are many ministers who trace the problems to the media's unrelenting hostility. That is only half the truth. There is undoubtedly a section of the print and electronic media that is engulfed by what can loosely be called a secular bias and is, therefore, unwilling to give Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee any quarter. However, when the prejudices of a minority transform into conventional wisdom of the majority, it is difficult to maintain the pretence that it is all a massive PR problem. The cleverest copywriters of Mumbai couldn't prevent Rajiv Gandhi from crashing to a defeat in 1989 and the endorsement of the cosmopolitan chatterati couldn't stop Sonia Gandhi's Congress from its worst debacle last March. As the economists would say, good PR is a necessary but not a sufficient precondition of successful politics.

Not that the Vajpayee Government has done half a decent job selling itself. Overwhelmed by liberal squeamishness, the prime minister put the brakes on aggressively touting the Pokhran success. The other side wasn't similarly inhibited and today, there is the unseemly spectacle of literary aesthetes flaunting their emotional secession from a nuclear India. Thanks to an overweening anxiety not to trip up, the BJP's own party propaganda machinery also took premature retirement. Nor, fortunately, did the Government attempt arm-twisting the media into compliance, a'la Indira Gandhi. The "de-fascification" of the BJP is one of the unintended consequences of this government's ineptitude.

No wonder Sonia is in no hurry to try anything adventurist. She knows that the longer this government hobbles around in crutches, the greater will be the electoral backlash against it. The BJP instinctively knows that it is on a sticky wicket in Rajasthan. It is, however, still loath to admit it also faces an absolute rout in the Delhi Assembly election this winter. Indeed, the only point of contention is who has contributed more to it: Chief Minister Sahib Singh Verma or Delhi Vidyut Board (DVB) chief Navin Chawla, aptly described as the "Prince of Darkness".

Actually, the breakdown of civic administration in the capital has more to do with the BJP's misfortunes than Vajpayee's poor PR. That the national media is excessively Delhi-centric is well-known. It is only too willing to see in the roadblocks in middle-class colonies against power cuts a more generalised uprising against "fascist" ineptitude. With civic distress in Delhi setting the tone, everything else-from the Shiv Sena's muscle flexing in Mumbai to shameful incidents of Bible burning in Gujarat-is just more confirmation of collapse.

If Vajpayee wants to improve his PR, he can start by improving the DVB. If the capital improves, the editorial classes will revert to debating whether or not to sign the CTBT. That is half the battle. The other half, as Vajpayee said in Colombo, lies in enriching ourselves.

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