Feb 22, 1999
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G-15 SUMMIT Calypso Break Vajpayee went through the motions at the Jamaica gathering but his mind was clearly on the developments back home and the impending bus ride to Lahore. By Swapan Dasgupta in Jamaica
To be fair, Vajpayee easily ducked the first problem. Having experienced the novel spectacle of the National Steel Orchestra following its rendering of Jana Gana Mana with something that sounded suspiciously similar to a tune from the film Kinara, he glossed over Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) Prime Minister Basdeo Panday's passionate plea for exporting the Trinidad Carnival to India. He didn't make a ritual journey to the Queen's Park Savannah, where steel bands from local schools vied with each other for cacophonic supremacy -- although Panday's evening reception did present him the sight of young black boys dressed as Roman soldiers. When the Julia Edwards Dance Company did its rhythmically gripping and erotically suggestive African dance at Panday's evening reception, Vajpayee merely offered a mischievous smile and a generous hand. The TV cameras didn't catch him joining the chorus, as calypso singer Lord Relator brought back memories of another famous 1971 victory at Queen's Park Oval -- "West Indies couldn't get Gavaskar at all". It didn't even record a fleeting moment of anxiety when a woman with a rather low-cut dress was instructed by her husband to touch his feet. Vajpayee did, however, make a concession by greeting the young Jamaicans who turned out to welcome him at the airport, swaying to Bob Marley's One Love.
But that would have been disastrous. It would have destabilised the Panday Government and turned ethnic competition into race confrontation. As it is, the quaintly named "sod-turning ceremony" of the Gandhi Centre became a subject of partisan politics for 30 years, with black separatists and fringe Christian groups opposing its establishment. So profound is the racial divide that East Indians openly refer to black music as "noise pollution" and stay away from the carnival. "Steel bands are alien to us. We prefer the tabla, dholak and harmonium," said columnist Devant Maharaj who approvingly quoted Vajpayee's famous "Sangh is my soul" article in the local press. At the "sod-turning" ceremony, the local Hindu priest suddenly burst into Gandhi's Ram dhun but stopped short of the "Ishwar, Allah, tero naam" lines. When an East Indian's appointment to a public-sector unit was opposed, Panday remarked bitterly that there would have been no resistance if the offending Ken Sadhoo were instead named Ken Voodoo! For Vajpayee, this undercurrent meant curtailing some of the nationalist flamboyance BJP leaders are prone to demonstrating in the diaspora. He didn't depart an iota from the prepared text. Not even to make a casual aside about cricket. The Jamaicans weren't so inhibited. While signing a routine MOU, their ministers pressed India to despatch Anil Kumble as a coach to the West Indies as a gesture of goodwill. Likewise, goodwill could have come via Hindi, as it did in Mauritius last August when Vajpayee brought the house down with an extempore speech. Not that the East Indian locals would have understood a word -- Hindi is no longer a spoken language in the West Indies. It would have been a gesture, but in the local context, a self-defeating one in an election year. Despite fervent appeals of bodies like the Sanatan Dharma Mahasabha -- frenetically seeking to establish links with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in India -- Vajpayee kept his global Hindutva firmly on hold. He even refrained from once referring to Trinidad's most famous convert to saffron nationalism -- Sir Vidia Naipaul, the man who once wrote: "To be an Indian from Trinidad is to be unlikely it is also to be a little fraudulent."
Even the ever-measured External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh felt bewildered by the "G-15 mystique". Translated into plain English, it could have meant his inability to be at one with the tub-thumping, anti-West agenda that found expression in the opening speeches of some of its members. Sipping a glass of St Emillion 1996 -- "a bit young" -- his thoughts were on the appealing consequences of "Atalji's meeting with Mian Sahib". To staid Indian diplomats who were in attendance, he advised a cruise with lots of deep-sea marlin fishing and "commended an article in the Financial Times". It was quite a contrast from Vajpayee's snide imagery of the khayali pulao being cooked by Sonia Gandhi, an expression that left the non-Hindi types gasping with incomprehension. In a sense, conflicting styles is what marked this prime ministerial visit. Vajpayee combined his natural charm with exaggerated circumspection. Where many G-15 leaders, particularly Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, imagined they were addressing election rallies at home, Vajpayee refused to be blown off his feet. He erred on the side of blandness and the only point of note was his affirmation that India would not renege on its commitment to economic liberalisation. The one time Vajpayee managed a hearty laugh was when someone asked him about VHP stalwart Acharya Dharmendra's advice to go to Lahore in a battle tank. "Such remarks shouldn't be taken too seriously," he retorted, the accompanying laugh saying it all. Singh quoted the "indirect approach" of strategist Liddle-Hart and assumed a Curzonian stance while referring to "Persia". The nattily-turned out Principal Secretary Brajesh Mishra oozed excitement over a forthcoming G-8 meeting in Tokyo. The CII was also there, hosting an Indian stall at the trade fair. To say the stall was tacky is to be charitable. India's foremost voice of industry successfully reduced the country's progress to three motorcycles and lots of herbal remedies. The public face of Indian capitalism put India at par with Senegal and Nigeria, thereby confirming that G-15 is not so meaningless after all. Even in the dollar-crazy Baywatch setting of Montego Bay, where the food reflects the sumptuous extravagance of sugar planters, the mindset of Third Worldism is alive and kicking. This time, mercifully, the Government was not even remotely at fault. Vajpayee kept the flag flying once again. |
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Prime Minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee is no stranger to controversy. But even for a man who has apparently seen it all
in his five decades of public life, this one was touchingly different. He flew into
picturesque Trinidad confronted with two distractions. Local society seemed sharply
divided over an apparent injustice to the Amoco Renegades -- six-time winner of the
Trinidad Carnival's steel band competition -- by judges who were apparently biased in
favour of the Witco Desperadoes. The controversy even overshadowed local anxiety over
countryman Brian Lara's indifferent form. The other strain was over the formal
inauguration of the construction work for the Mahatma Gandhi Institute for Cultural
Cooperation at Port of Spain. 
It was not the detachment
of a fuddy-duddy. In the ethnic menagerie of the Caribbean, politics and cultural symbols
are inseparable despite coming together in fusion chutney cooking. For the descendants of
the Bhojpuri-indentured labour who make up some 41 per cent of T&T's population,
Vajpayee was more than the Indian prime minister -- he was the representative of a Bharat
Mata etched in their imagination. Given half a chance, the local East Indians would have
loved taking him in a ceremonial procession through the leafy streets, named after
evocative symbols like Lucknow, Bengal and Ganges, with rousing chants of Sanatan dharma
ki jai. 
Actually, peddling a cause
was the least of the prime minister's preoccupation. In an eerily predictable way, even
his involvement in the G-15 summit in Jamaica's Montego Bay resort was tempered by silent
preparations for the bus ride to Lahore. When he appeared for his ritual mid-air press
conference between Trinidad and Jamaica, his concern was Indo-Pakistan relations, with
Mamata Banerjee's Calcutta rally and Om Prakash Chautala's fulminations providing
salacious footnotes. Not that the amorphous G-15 -- best described as the club of the
lesser Third World -- could have realistically gripped his imagination. 
