Race Course Road

India Today, November 30, 1998
Nov 30, 1998

RACE COURSE ROAD
Vajpayee's Last Hurrah

PM decides to shed his non-confrontationist image.

Prabhu Chawla

Irrespective of a likely adverse election verdict in next week's assembly polls, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has plenty to celebrate. The economy is slowly beginning to look up and there is no run on the rupee or depletion of foreign exchange reserves. The capital flight that depressed the Sensex in the past few months has slowed to a trickle. Even a hostile western media has complimented the Indian economy's resilience and its ability to insulate itself from the Asian flu. And finally, India has managed to fight back globalisation by acquiring more acceptability in the European Union and even Japan.

Despite visible signs of a gradual recovery after three years of slowdown, the Vajpayee Government is perceived as one of the worst performing governments in recent times. According to its detractors, the BJP-led Government has neither the vision nor the acumen to lead such a big nation. Stung by this offensive, the prime minister has chosen to initiate a series of administrative, economic and political measures aimed at restoring investor confidence in the markets, spurring infrastructure development and neutralising a hostile international community. The prime minister feels that his opponents have exploited his non-confrontationist attitude to tar his image.

Since charity begins at home, Vajpayee has decided to do some plain speaking with his political opponents at home. To begin with, he has convened a meeting of all the chief ministers on November 26, a day after the assembly elections, to discuss, among other things, inflation and law and order. Initially he resisted pressure from his allies to convene such a meeting before the elections because it would have been converted into a platform for political speeches. Now the prime minister feels that it is time to take on the defiant chief ministers and opposition leaders who have been making an issue of his alleged ineptitude and the deficiencies in his personality. Vajpayee has specially targeted the anglicised West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu who has been consistently defying the Centre on various issues, some involving the violation of human rights in West Bengal.

The prime minister's aggressive posture stems from a belated realisation that he has everything to gain and nothing to lose at this stage. If his party is routed in the assembly elections, he can set in motion a series of economic decisions which his successors may find difficult to reverse. For example, he has fixed December 30 as the deadline for starting work on the Rs 28,000-crore road development programme. In the unlikely event of his winning two of the three north Indian states, he will be in a position to ram through his revival package with a vengeance. He may even dump some of the allies who are either sabotaging his economic agenda from within or giving him a hard time in cabinet meetings. In both these scenarios he has taken a hard-line stand. He has not factored in any concessions to either allies or enemies.

Nevertheless, there is plenty to justify scepticism about the prime minister's new initiatives. In the past, Vajpayee has always stopped short of taking on his defiant allies. He made a series of announcements earlier but most of these have not been implemented even after six months. Above all, he has not been able to reign in an unresponsive bureaucracy. If he doesn't deliver now, the BJP won't get another chance in the near future.

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