Quote:History-maker In his eighty-seventh year, A.B.Vajpayee's greatness grows, says N.V.Subramanian.



Los Angeles, 29 December 2010: On the occasion of A.B.Vajpayee's eight-seventh birthday, two interesting questions pose themselves. Why is Vajpayee considered a successful prime minister although he never saw a fourth term? And why is he in a class of his own that his immediate successor, Manmohan Singh, can never hope to attain?



Vajpayee's success as a prime minister is a bit of an oddity in Indian politics. He was not only the only non-Congress prime minister to complete his term, but he did so despite being a sort of (poetic) loner in his own party, the BJP. Vajpayee had more friends outside the BJP than within it, and he never saw eye-to-eye with the BJP's parent organization, the RSS.



Part of the credit for Vajpayee becoming PM should go to L.K.Advani, who proposed his name for the PMO before his own. It is also true that he later came to regret his magnanimity, because public sympathy attached to Vajpayee when his first attempt at prime ministership failed after thirteen days. When later, Vajpayee's thirteen-month government collapsed after J.Jayalalithaa pulled out, he had generated enough of a wave to come back a third time. This wave is significant because it came about without a tidal event such as an assassination, a huge corruption scandal-triggered negative vote, etc.



A fourth term eluded Vajpayee for a complex set of reasons but they cannot take away from his success as prime minister. It is a feat that he could deliver despite, by the early phase of his third and only full term, facing nasty opposition from Advani, his previous backer, with the support of the RSS. People forget that Advani put RSS pressure on Vajpayee to make him deputy PM. The Loh-Vikas Purush controversy set off by Advani's minions brutally exposed Advani's desperate prime-ministerial ambitions.



But the undercurrent of public sympathy that carried Vajpayee to the PMO transformed into the NDA's overall support for him, which was discussed in an earlier piece (Commentary, "Drift & despair," 24 December 2010) by this writer. There is nothing to suggest that Vajpayee used the NDA against the BJP. He was not a schemer for personal gains. But unintentionally, he built such a constituency for himself with the NDA, with his integrity, decency, humility and moderation, that the BJP was powerless to depose him, if it ever came to that.



Another aspect of Vajpayee's success, which will head to the second question contained in the opening paragraph related to Manmohan Singh, concerned his extraordinary ability sustainably to cohere and anchor a coalition government for the first time in India. He had intimate knowledge of the failures of three Janata and two Third-Front governments in addition to his own inability to put together two lasting BJP-lead coalition administrations before he hit success with the NDA a third time.



Prior to Vajpayee's unique NDA success, the failures particularly of two non-Congress Third-Front governments had given a TINA advantage to the Congress party, which consequently made it arrogant and imperious and put the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty in false indispensible light. The sun has still to set on the dynasty, but by Vajpayee and the NDA's success, the Congress so-called high command slightly was humbled to accept the necessity of a UPA. But Vajpayee's contribution was greater. Quite outside the Congress-non-Congress grid, he brought coherence and stability to a coalition government for the first time in India. He gave an ineluctable alternative to non-dynastic politics.



Indeed, in a significant way, Vajpayee and his close friend, the late P.V.Narasimha Rao, succeeded in their separate but organically-linked efforts to keep India united. Narasimha Rao kept India territorially integrated in the deeply unsettling immediate post-Cold War period when the Soviet Union disintegrated and similar designs were advanced on India. On the other hand, by giving considerable tensile strength to coalition politics via the example of the NDA, Vajpayee brought a degree of unity to divisive Indian political crosscurrents, thereby firming the country's federal foundations.



Given Vajpayee's tremendous successes overcoming great odds, it is powerfully pathetic to see Manmohan Singh go down despite some advantages. Granted that the length and life of Manmohan Singh's prime-ministership shamefully has always been determined by the pace of Rahul Gandhi's learning for and grasp of that job. But his inherent timidity has denied Manmohan Singh the capacity to maximize on his limited opportunities. In an earlier commentary, this writer had alluded to a "Vajpayee phase" enjoyed as well by Manmohan Singh, when both men won public sympathy because of internal party opposition to them. But there was (and is) a qualitative difference in the internal party opposition faced by both Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, which (has) produced vastly different results.



The quality of Vajpayee's opposition has been described in the previous paragraphs. For himself, Manmohan Singh faced not so much opposition as scorn- and derision-laced apathy to his prime-ministership from within his party, because he had been nominated to that job by the empress of the Congress, Sonia Gandhi. One could argue that Advani was somewhat in Sonia's position when he proposed Vajpayee for prime-ministership, because the BJP was with him. But equally, Advani lost the prime-ministerial race once Vajpayee got the job. Try as he might, Advani could not wrest it.



But in Manmohan Singh's case, it is different. Sonia Gandhi can (hurtful as this is to write) drive him out of the PMO whenever she chooses. She conditionally made Manmohan Singh PM, the condition being that Rahul Gandhi would succeed him whenever he chose. Being utterly loyal to the Nehru-Gandhi family, and without a political base of his own, Manmohan Singh kept to his allotted parish. But Vajpayee has been an outstandingly independent politician and parliamentary leader, with many personal political and Lok Sabha victories to his credit. After Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and possibly Rajiv Gandhi (on account of his mother's assassination), Vajpayee very likely is the most nationally-renowned former prime minister.



In truth, there is very little to compare between Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, although both are coalition prime ministers. By the strength of his personality, Vajpayee wrought and moulded the coalitional NDA. Manmohan Singh, for his part, was merely asked to lead the UPA government by Sonia Gandhi. To be sure, it was an advance in coalitional experimentation (even if unintended) to have a technocrat head a government, but it has proved an unqualified disaster.



The more you evaluate the multiple dimensions of Vajpayee's prime-ministership, the deeper you are impressed by the multifarious brilliance of it. There is the downside of Gujarat certainly. But Nehru is ranked among great prime ministers despite the Jammu and Kashmir UN blunder and the nineteen sixty-two debacle (his much-reviled embrace of mixed economy suited the times) while the Emergency and Operation Bluestar cannot detract from the pugnacity of Indira Gandhi's leadership. History promises to be enviably friendly and sumptuously generous to A.B.Vajpayee, and nobody should grudge that.



N.V.Subramanian is Editor, www.NewsInsight.net, and writes internationally on strategic affairs. He has authored two novels, University of Love (Writers Workshop, Calcutta) and Courtesan of Storms (Har-Anand, Delhi). Email: envysub@gmail.com.

Quote:Per some insider news, INC has contracted two top election surveying agencies. One of them is Nielsen. IB also does independent surveys. So there are three surveys that happen periodically. INC's election stragety includes the following:



(1) Divide opposition votes where possible by means of funding or creating parties like MNS, Chiranjeevi, TRS, Gondor party in TN etc. For example it funded Deva Gowda party to put Yadav candidates across Bihar assembly seats. Most people does not even know this JDS contested in more that 140 seats in Bihar.

(2) EVM - It is no more a conspiracy theory espectially after Hariprasad's revelation. To get what it got in 2009 all it needs is about 4000 polling booths. The trick is identifying which booth to be rigged.

(3) EC is very helpful with a planned and extended polling schedule so that the riggers can be transported from one phase to next phase

(4) Create smokescreens for plausible deniabilities

(5) Using the huge loot, bribe and move its base to polls. In a 50% polling, actually congress voters will vote upto 80%. It wins the seat with less than 30% of votes polled and 15% of total electorate.



Now here is what going on in the nation as there is serious move by INC to go for polls after budget session:

(1) INC probably will allow the goverment to fall to remove MMS

(2) It has already did all the surveys and pretty well marked the booths to be rigged.

(3) Nielsen released a doctored survey that has a headline INC is decreasing but still has 230 UPA seats putting INC at 190

(4) it created hindu terror as smoke screen to salami-slice BJP in its states. Five from MP, Five from Gujarat, Bihar etc.

(5) It may reach 260 to 275 seats on its own to make the Yuvraj as PM.

Quote:It has 207 in the current LS. It may reach 245 to 250 which is only 40 more seats.

Quote:INC to win Punjab, Himachal,

Quote:"In spite of nearly 85 years of service to the nation, when it comes to the Sangh's image before media and many people, it is a matter of image vs reality."

Quote:For his doctoral research at Cornell University, political scientist Tariq Thachil looked at links between educational services provided by the RSS and political support for the BJP, and found that more schools meant more votes in tribal areas where public services were otherwise poor.



Mr. Thachil, now an assistant politics professor at Yale University, said there are several kinds of Sangh-affiliated educational services. Some are urban and fee-charging, such as the Saraswati schools, and others are free, the Ekal Vidyalayas, or one-teacher schools. Then there are childcare centers, known as Bal Kendras, that offer parents supplementary or after-school services. In tribal areas, something called the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram provides educational services, often through boarding schools since villages are often far apart and poorly connected.



Although some of these programs have been around for decades, they really spread in the 1990s “in an attempt to integrate sections that were not considered part of the Hindu base,” said Mr. Thachil in an interview Thursday.