April 27, 1998

Why is the BJP Government fighting shy of a radical break from the past?

Tavleen Singh

It is now 30 days since our first genuine non-Congress Government took charge in Delhi. If you keep in mind the fact that new governments are usually judged by their first 90 days, you will understand how important the first month is. How saddening it is, therefore, that there have been so few indicators of real change.

Nobody expected miracles, melodrama or instant transformation. But what some of us had looked forward to was, at the very least, some change in the idols and iconography that the Congress insisted on for 50 years, in what L.K. Advani recently described as the rashtra mandir. The temple of the nation -- despite Hinduism not being a religion of received wisdom or prophets -- has been a place in which nobody has dared move the idols nor question their wisdom. The main reason being that even our non-Congress prime ministers have so far had their roots in the Congress.

For Atal Bihari Vajpayee, though, this kind of questioning should not constitute blasphemy. Yet, he seems to be falling over himself trying to be as much like a Congress prime minister as possible. A couple of weeks ago, I pointed out in this column the clumsy manner in which a picture of Gandhiji had been stuck behind Vajpayee's head when he made his first prime ministerial address to the nation. Congress devotees in the rashtra mandir have not been able to take the sneer off their faces at the absurdity of this gesture. Nor have they been able to contain their glee at the BJP's constant talk of swadeshi. In the words of Najma Heptullah, Sonia Gandhi's chief lady-in-waiting, "They should have just asked us for our manifesto and used it as the National Agenda."

Why is the BJP so afraid to admit that it has never really subscribed to the views of Jawaharlal Nehru or Mahatma Gandhi and that, in any case, it does not amount to blasphemy to start asking a few questions?

What is wrong, for instance, with saying -- as V.S. Naipaul did to me in a recent interview -- that Gandhiji's ideas may have been important at their time but they cannot be considered universal ones. In Naipaul's words, "His (Gandhi's) ideas about poverty and the spinning wheel were historical ideas at a particular moment. They're not universal ideas ... To pretend that they are is to ask for trouble. And I think the sooner your politicians get out of their Gandhi caps and their homespun -- which are the emblems of power, not the emblems of poverty any more -- the better for the country."

If Gandhiji's ideas were historical rather than universal, Nehru's were even more so. If swadeshi has become outdated and irrelevant, so has Nehru's dream of a benign state that would be at the commanding heights of the economy and have a licence to interfere in virtually every aspect of our lives. If we are still among the 30 poorest countries in the world, it is largely on account of Nehru's dream having turned into a nightmare.

A country that glorifies poverty can never be prosperous -- and the Congress' political philosophy, its ideology and the mindset it gave the country were founded on the glorification of poverty. To quote Naipaul again, "I remember in 1962, when I first came here, oh how people were proud of the poverty in India. Every discussion ended with '... we are the poorest country in the world, we have a very private beauty'. Other countries were rich. You went there to enjoy yourself. But you came home to have a wallow in the great spirituality of poverty."

Things changed only under that most forgotten of Congress leaders: P.V. Narasimha Rao. They would have changed more had he been able to move less furtively. If Rao managed to move away from Nehruvian socialism towards more sensible economic policies, he did so surreptitiously. He never once had the courage to admit that Nehru could have been wrong and that Indira Gandhi most certainly was.

Rao opened only the smallest window in the closed house of the economy to the winds of liberalisation -- and the whole atmosphere in the country changed. This is why India in the '90s is so different from that other India Naipaul remembers from the '60s. It is important to note that Rao is not among the icons in the Congress' rashtra mandir. He has been dumped unceremoniously in the trash can outside the temple -- from whence, with characteristic furtiveness, he now provides us with an autobiography disguised as a novel.

The BJP government does not need to be furtive, it does not need to kowtow to the idols and ideas we have so far revered. In fact, it is only when it has the courage not to do these things that we can begin to hope for real change. The country needs to be told very clearly what went wrong and why. If the prime minister does this, he will be amazed at the amount of support he will get.

Vajpayee is perhaps too old and tired to be a proper iconoclast in that it is difficult to visualise him sweeping through the rasthra mandir, knocking idols over and putting new ones in their place. Nor has the BJP shown it is capable of producing a new set of political and economic scriptures. The most we can hope for is an admission that not everything we did in the past is sacrosanct. If we do not get this, we may just as well have a Congress government back -- with the same old idols, the same old iconography.

Issue Contents | Write to us | Subscriptions

© Living Media India Ltd