BJP Future - 7

[ramana]

Link:

http://www.newsinsight.net/archivedebate...recno=2084

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.