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VIEWPOINT: KAUTILYA
Lame Duck Dame Luck
Increasingly, the Vajpayee regime is becoming a
farce to be reckoned with
By Jairam Ramesh
The last few weeks
has seen the emasculation of the Vajpayee administration. The bruised
prime minister himself sits in splendid isolation. His finance minister
has been badly mauled. His commerce minister is caught up in local politics.
Neither of these two gentlemen have been able to provide leadership of
any kind. His feisty minister for disinvestment has been undercut from
within. Other economic ministers, like in power and petroleum, although
well-meaning, have been unable to impart a new momentum. Vajpayee may
well survive and pull the occasional rabbit out of the hat as he did a
few days ago by introducing the Lok Pal Bill in Parliament. But the sparkle
and zest has vanished and even industry, a most ardent supporter, is becoming
impatient and disillusioned.
 Vajpayee
has never been known to be a man for details. He is a man for the grand
gesture, for the theatrical flourish. And his tenure has proved this conclusively
whether it be Lahore and Agra, whether it be his innovatively bold insaaniyat
formulation to kick-start a political dialogue in the Kashmir Valley or
whether it be his directive to the armed forces to evict the Pakistanis
from Kargil without crossing the Line of Control or even his courageous
decision to make India go overtly nuclear. Vajpayee also deserves credit
for allowing his foreign minister to deepen India's relationship with
the US. For the economy, his singular contribution has been to bury obscurantist
swadeshi and RSS economics and embrace Manmohanomics. The fact that there
have been no U-turns or reversals is all the more remarkable given that
the BJP and many of its allies had opposed the economic policies of the
Congress and the United Front in the 1990s.
So where and how did Vajpayee falter? Ironically,
for somebody who had an awesome reputation as an orator, Vajpayee's single-most
important failing has been in not being able to communicate. But that
should not come as a complete surprise, since he is not the most gregarious
or outgoing of men-spell-binding oratory is not a substitute for interactive
communication. He has become a prisoner of bland speech writers. When
Vajpayee has spoken extempore, he has shown flashes of his brilliance
but these occasions have been few and far between. Worse, although he
has national appeal, he finds himself a prisoner in the capital.
His second major failure has been his extreme
reluctance and inability to assert prime ministerial authority. Contrary
to popular belief, the Indian prime minister wields enormous powers, much
more than even an American President. Vajpayee has much in common with
Ronald Reagan. But Reagan built a formidable team. On November 20, 1957,
while speaking in the Lok Sabha, Vajpayee admonished Jawaharlal Nehru
thus: our prime minister is a dreamer but he does not have around him
people who can translate those dreams into reality. Forty four years later,
the wheel has turned full circle and it can truly be said-physician, heal
thyself. The job of the chief executive is to proactively craft a consensus
on national issues, not simply to bemoan the lack of one. And where a
consensus is not possible because of the myopia of the Opposition, then
the job of the chief executive is to just do it. Strong executive action
automatically creates a consensus as we saw in 1991. On both these fronts,
Vajpayee has failed from day one.
Third, Vajpayee has not networked with chief
ministers to advance the nation's developmental agenda. On the occasions
he has done so, the results have been dramatic. On June 3, he called a
meeting of chief ministers on power-sector reforms. The stars of this
meeting were Congress chief ministers who put partisan politics aside
and supported what the Vajpayee Government was attempting to do. When
the finance minister called a meeting of chief ministers last year on
tax reforms, it was a Congress chief minister who saved the day for the
Centre. Individual ministers interacting with states is one thing but
the prime minister himself reaching out is quite another and sends a wholly
different type of signal. Curiously, for somebody who belongs to a party
that makes a fetish of nationalism, Vajpayee has never embarked on the
task of reinventing the Centre without which decentralisation can easily
degenerate into parochialism.
Vajpayee had tremendous goodwill and rightly
so. Even his political opponents conceded his essential liberalism, his
great decency and his record of transcending partisan politics. But that
goodwill is evaporating. He is now a forlorn figure-in office but not
in power, in the seat but not in control, heading a coalition that has
no coherence, no discipline and no sense of national purpose. Cricketer
Vijay Merchant when asked why he retired when he did replied: "Better
to go when people ask 'why is he' instead of 'why isn't he'." The
longer Vajpayee stays, more people will echo the second sentiment. Only
a policy and a problem-solving blitz can save him.
(The author is with the Congress party. These
are his personal views.)
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