Race Course Road

India Today, December 14, 1998
Dec 14, 1998

RACE COURSE ROAD
Puhing Ahead

Vajpayee is confident of winning back the people's trust.

Prabhu Chawla

A Prime Minister without a mission is like a super computer without a software to run it. This reality has finally dawned on Atal Bihari Vajpayee. With the BJP still living in the medieval past, Vajpayee has realised that history would judge him not by his oratorial skills but by the impact of his Government's policies on India's future.

The electoral setbacks notwithstanding, he has opted for an aggressive economic and defence agenda. Ignoring strong protests from the Sangh Parivar and some of his alliance partners, Vajpayee is determined to push ahead with what he calls a blue print for mahan aur shaktishali rashtra (great and powerful nation). Undeterred by the BJP's total rout in the recent assembly elections, the prime minister has chalked out a time-bound strategy for delivering the goods. He told his advisers recently, "If we can lose the goodwill of the people in eight months, we can also win back their confidence within the next six months."

Recent exercises carried out by his top advisers have thrown up the alarming fact that, barring a handful, most of his ministers lack administrative acumen and ideological agenda. They have been driven by the bureaucracy and have failed to implement any of the points mentioned in the National Agenda for Governance. Some of them are too busy fighting frivolous battles with political adversaries in their home states, leaving them with little time for the serious business of governance. A close scrutiny reveals that most of the important economic decisions emanated not from the ministries concerned but from the prime minister who either took unilateral decisions or brought those issues before the Cabinet. For example, it was at his initiative that the ordinances allowing buyback of shares by corporates and foreign participation in the insurance sector were brought to the Cabinet for a final decision. Even the successful information-technology package was conceived and implemented at the behest of the prime minister.

Contrary to popular perception, Vajpayee has not confined himself merely to taking decisions which find favour with the foreign audience and the Indian corporate world alone. Ignoring the advice of his other ministerial colleagues, he announced the ambitious Rs 28,000 crore national highways project and told them to start work by December 30, 1998. Surface Transport Minister M. Thambi Durai -- who spends more time in Chennai than in Delhi -- had to call a press conference last week to announce that the prime minister's dream project was on track. In the case of the Communications Ministry, Vajpayee drafted in Jaswant Singh to sort out all the pending problems of private telephone service providers by mid-December.

Vajpayee seems to have taken a peep into the legacy of his predecessors. While Jawaharlal Nehru laid the foundation for an industrial India, Indira Gandhi coined the popular slogan of "Garibi Hatao". Her son Rajiv spoke about taking the country into the 21st century, while V.P. Singh launched a highly controversial social re-engineering programme by implementing the Mandal Commission report. And P.V. Narasimha Rao began the process of dismantling the licence-permit raj. Vajpayee may scoff at the idea of choosing any of his predecessors as his role model. He is still in a desperate search for a distinct identity. He knows the road ahead is full of potholes and speed-breakers. After all, he has to prove that he belongs to a "party with a difference".

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