Viewpoint: Tavleen Singh

India Today, December 14, 1998
Dec 14, 1998

VIEWPOINT
Atal has a PR Problem

Vajpayee needs to do something about his wimp image.

Tavleen Singh

In politics, reality is not half as important as the public perception of it. This is even more true of countries like India where the average voter is either illiterate or semi-literate and thereby less likely to go looking for realities. The BJP appears to have lost Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh to the Congress because of a series of perceptions. When shock subsides and introspection begins we can only hope for the prime minister's sake that someone in his inner circle discovers the elections were lost because of perceptions -- and attempts to rectify things. Otherwise Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Government will find it hard to survive.

Let's look at some perceptions and their reality. In actuality, despite the price of onions, the Vajpayee Government has not done badly on the economic front. It even got a certificate from Claude Smadja, the World Economic Forum's managing director. At the India summit this past week, Smadja said, "On the positive side, it is quite true that despite all the converging signs of a continued economic slowdown and despite all the anxiety of corporate India, the country seems set to register a growth rate of between 5 and 5.5 per cent for the fiscal year ending next March.

"This is significantly below the 6.5 to 7 per cent target that the Government had set, but it looks considerably brighter than almost all emerging or developed economies in the present global context. In fact, India's performance this year puts it in the top world league."

The BJP is infested with swadeshi economists who believe, as Nehruvian socialists do, that the economy is best handled by bureaucrats and ideologues rather than businessmen. Vajpayee has ignored them and gone ahead with formulating laws that will make private investment easier in insurance, telecom, power, roads. Even better is his Government's declared intention to privatise the public sector.

This is not a bad record for eight months. But it means nothing because the price of onions created the overwhelming perception that Vajpayee's Government could not manage the economy. Onions have became the symbol of economic incompetence.

Let's look at another perception. Muslims voted overwhelmingly for the Congress this time because of the perception that the BJP is communal and fascist. Few people have noticed that there have been no communal riots in India since Vajpayee became prime minister. Remember the Congress' record of one major communal riot every few months? Meerut, Maliana, Bhagalpur, Moradabad, Mumbai.

Riot after riot after riot. Nobody punished. No action taken against policemen and officials guilty of criminal administrative failure. So the absence of communal violence should have gone in Vajpayee's favour. It did not -- again because perceptions have been more important than reality.

Perceptions so powerful that Muslim preachers got away with a fatwa that orders Muslim children out of schools in Uttar Pradesh on the grounds that compulsory singing of Vande Mataram is against the tenets of Islam. Nobody bothered to find out whether the state Government had in fact made Vande Mataram compulsory. It had not. But the perception persists. As does the perception that Saraswati Vandana at the start of the state education ministers' conference was another insidious attempt to offend Muslim sensibilities.

Christians share the perception that Vajpayee's Government is very communal. This perception is based mainly on the horrific rape of four nuns at a convent in Jhabua. Madhya Pradesh had a "secular" Congress government at the time and some reports indicate that one of the criminals was a member of the Congress.

But the incident was blamed on the BJP Government in Delhi because a former BJP MP announced proudly that such incidents were indicative of people's anger against attempts to convert Hindus to Christianity. It was an offensive, ugly statement which should have been disowned by the prime minister and the home minister. But nobody did this strongly enough.

When it comes to communalism, Vajpayee's Government is particularly vulnerable because of the many slimy, venomous creatures that hide in the Sangh Parivar's underbelly. These creatures should have been put down or silenced when the BJP came to power. But since nothing like this was attempted, the Congress manages to portray itself as secular -- despite patronising the likes of H.K.L. Bhagat and Sajjan Kumar, despite its policies in Punjab and Kashmir.

If Vajpayee is currently wallowing in the gloomy introspection that electoral defeats usually bring, he needs to ask himself why he has failed in projecting his Government's achievements. One reason is his puzzling inability to rid himself of bureaucrats who have spent years in loyal service to "secular" forces. Most of them are as much victims of the general perception of the BJP (as communal and incompetent). Yet they remain in high office and in some cases are directly responsible for projecting the Government's achievements.

Ironically, just the fact that they remain where they are confirms the most dangerous perception of all: that Atal Bihari Vajpayee is a decent, honourable man but not a leader. If the reality is different then it is time that the prime minister made a serious effort to show us that it is. Otherwise perceptions will continue to be more important than reality -- and the BJP's first chance to rule India could also be its last.

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