May 11, 1998

Pity poor Vajpayee: the next 300 are going to be even worse.

Mani Shankar Aiyar

What has become of Atal Bihari Vajpayee's beatific smile? Success, it seems, has smothered it. In just 30 days, the bouncy, bubbly Vajpayee of yesteryear has turned wan, fatigued, dispirited. The banter has gone out of him. The wit is subdued. The pauses grow longer and longer. Some men are born to Opposition. Office sits ill on them.

A bachelor, of course, is not entitled to a honeymoon. Still, one feels sorry that one so deserving of the benefit of the doubt should so soon have had to cringe at this unravelling of his woven follies. Poor Vajpayee has not had half a chance: no opportunity for sonorous speeches, no occasion to play the statesman, no time to articulate policy, not even time to present himself at his weekly Tuesday darshan. How, he must be asking himself, did I get into such an unholy mess?

The answer, of course, is that it is unholy. I well remember the fire-eating Vajpayee of my youth. For Vajpayee got into Parliament the year I finished school. I would take the No. 9 bus from Delhi University to Parliament Street and clamber up to the visitors' gallery to gape at the great men arguing below. I agreed with nothing Vajpayee said but he said what he did with conviction: Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan. What does Vajpayee stand for now? He does not know himself.

He has repudiated his entire intellectual, political and, dare one say it, spiritual inheritance. Time was when he would be engaged in titanic battles on the floor of the House with C.N. Annadurai, the founder of the DMK, on the language question. Now he winces at his pathetic dependence on Jayalalitha.

He was once the voice of the Hindu rashtra. Now he indignantly asks Rajiv Shukla, in a frequently telecast interview clip, where is Ayodhya? One forebears to tell him that Ayodhya is on the mind of his chief minister in Uttar Pradesh, his home minister, his party president and on the mind of every BJP backbencher and Parivarist who thought he had dismantled the Babri Masjid to build a Ram mandir as the preliminary to Ram Rajya. What is the status of the Ram mandir on the prime minister's agenda? Non-existent. Unmentionable.

The drubbing Vajpayee has received at the hands of his partners and allies in his first month in office is nothing compared to the drubbing that is in store for him from his most ardent supporters. They are already asking in stage whispers why a kal ka defector like Rangarajan Kumaramangalam, who would not know a bhagwa dhwaj from a khaki knicker, is such a big wheel in the Cabinet? They accept, even if they resent, the loaves and fishes cast to their coalition partners but, directing a long glare at that Johnny-come-lately, the finance minister, want to know why so many of their own deserving are being left to cool their ardour on distant backbenches.

It is not even primarily a question of office. Most BJP MPs went into politics when there was little hope of their achieving office. They can do without it. But, they ask themselves, are we in office now to repudiate what we came into public life to espouse?

The Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM) has fired the first shot, rejecting the new exim policy. Nothing Yashwant Sinha said in Washington or London has reassured them. "If you asked me to define swadeshi, I could not do it," says this card-carrying SJM activist, now elevated to the real world. "Swadeshi," he adds, "is a state of mind." The SJM had thought it was a policy! What will it do when the budget confirms Sinha's apostasy?

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad too has bared its teeth. The Bajrang Dal is making its restlessness evident. The RSS has its fifth columnist in the BJP in Kushabhau Thakre, the party president. Before even being formally anointed, Thakre has distanced himself from his government's shenanigans in Himachal. Should Guinness not be informed of this first government ever to have been repudiated by its own party?

What, after all, has the BJP as a party got out of winning the vote of confidence? First, an agenda for governance that promises to not do what the BJP manifesto pledged it would do. Second, a whole sluice of promises that are no concern of the BJP's -- such as the waters of the Cauvery -- that its partners have put into the so called National Agenda, not because the partners seriously expect it to deliver what they want but because it provides them with the excuse to quarrel with one another. Shape up for Round II of Jaya vs Hegde on June 12 when the Metur dam is opened and not a drop flows out from Karnataka.

Third, the Coordination Committee, where the partners will take time off from each other to tell the BJP what is wrong with the BJP -- and walk out in a huff if the BJP ever tells them what is wrong with them.

How long before someone in 11 Ashoka Road asks: is any of this worth struggling for? Recalcitrant MPs can be intimidated; what is more difficult to defuse is the anger of those who joined the Parivar not for the power but for the cause. Vajpayee is a prime minister without a cause. Commentators are concentrating on the problems his partners have with each other and with him. Vajpayee may yet succeed in disciplining them. But how is he to respond to the baying in his backyard? This Government will fall when it is toppled by the BJP. Which is why Vajpayee is not smiling any more. He is not amused.

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