June 29, 1998

Vajpayee must differentiate between friends and foes

Prabhu Chawla

The nation loves heroes, not zeroes. No one understands this better than the darling of the masses -- Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. As he completes his first 100 days in office this week, the prime minister has acquired the reputation of a status quoist and a compromiser. With the entire Opposition at home and the major world powers ganging up against his Government, a collective and coercive pressure has been mounted on the prime minister to bend, if not crawl. Since he abhors confrontation, Vajpayee has been blowing hot and cold on economic, political and international issues during the past few weeks.

Unlike his predecessors, he is simply unable to disown, marginalise or punish those who misuse his trust or patronage for promoting their own political or personal agenda. Congress President Sonia Gandhi and former prime minister I.K. Gujral are prime examples of betraying prime ministerial confidence and favour. Vajpayee's Government has been less than enthusiastic in doggedly pursuing the Bofors investigation and withdrawing governmental largesse being doled out to various semi-government trusts and organisations controlled by Sonia and her family members.

However, Vajpayee's current international isolation stems from India's stand on the resumption of the India-Pakistan dialogue. While the United Front (UF) government should bear the entire brunt for this mess, it is the Vajpayee Government which is carrying the can and has been accused of adopting an inflexible approach. The BJP Government has offered to discuss with Pakistan the gamut of disputes. Pakistan insists on sorting out the Kashmir problem first before any other issue is taken up.

During his 11-month free-for-all government, Gujral was obsessed with Pakistan. Officials of the neighbouring country now claim that they were given to understand by the then foreign secretary Salman Haider in June 1997 that India would not mind discussing confidence-building measures and the Kashmir imbroglio, leaving other problems to be sorted out later. This arrangement was known to very few people in the Ministry of External Affairs. But later, under domestic pressure, the government beat a hasty retreat. Soon after his resignation in November 1997, Gujral started singing a nationalist tune. During his meeting with Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Dhaka in January 1998, Gujral told him that India would discuss the entire Indo-Pak problem in totality rather than just Kashmir.

If this is true, Pakistan cannot be faulted for asking India to honour the commitment made by the UF government. It is this assurance which Vajpayee is willing to respect now. But Gujral, instead of backing the prime minister, has opened parallel lines of communication with Sharif and other international leaders. Gujral has even ignored the favour shown to him by the prime minister. Vajpayee made him chairman of the parliamentary committee on external affairs, which otherwise should have gone to a BJP nominee. In fact, Gujral has embarrassed the Vajpayee Government more than the Congress. This, despite winning the Lok Sabha election with the BJP's support. Senior leaders of the BJP are now insisting that the prime minister should either disown Gujral and his doctrine or force him to make public his stand on the Indo-Pak relationship. If Vajpayee is able to do this, he may be able to retain his icon status a while longer.

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