COLUMN

The end of a myth

After a year of misgovernance, Vajpayee's image has taken a knock, and it is unlikely to recover from the effects of the knock.

PRAFUL BIDWAI

WHEN the Atal Behari Vajpayee Government was sworn in a year ago, large numbers of Bharatiya Janata Party supporters, especially those among the urban middle classes, nurtured the hope that it would distinguish itself in at least four respects, despite the limitations of coalition politics. First, Vajpayee would give a sense of purpose and direction to governance; at minimum, his BJP component would function with cohesion and unity. Second, it would control or mitigate lawlessness and disorder; to the extent the BJP is a "disciplined" party, it would be well-placed to do this. Third, it would demonstrate its ability to rule without the network of patronage, coteries and institutionalised corruption associated with the Congress(I). And fourth, it would impart dynamism to the economy after it barely escaped contracting the Asian flu.

That hope lies in tatters today. What we have is an unsteady regime without moral purpose or legitimacy, run by a bunch of insecure, petty and fractious politicians, which stumbles from one crisis to the next - each month, in some months each week.

"Rollback regime" describes the kindest view one can take of the Government's proclivity to undo what it itself set out to do in one-step-forward-two-steps-back manoeuvres. A more realistic view is that it is a regime suffused with cynicism and skulduggery, which has totally failed to do anything meaningful as far as the popular interest goes. It has not only allowed self-serving politicians to feather their nests, but injected new kinds of venality into Indian politics.

The Union Cabinet is so deeply divided even on basic issues of national security and economic policy that it dare not discuss them - as happened with the nuclear tests, telecommunications, and culture. The "party with a difference" is so disgracefully driven by personality considerations that one of its high-profile Ministers, Uma Bharati, boycotts her own office because she hates her senior Minister's guts and declares that Vajpayee "is not my Prime Minister". The Govern-ment is held to ransom not just by the BJP's allies - as Jayalalitha has repeatedly done - but by its cohorts in the Sangh Parivar.

Vajpayee may make all the conciliatory noises he wants on Indo-Pakistan relations and the religious minorities. But his own bosses and colleagues in the Parivar ensure that they do not amount to much. Within weeks of the Lahore bus trip, L.K. Advani had made his inglorious "Akhand Bharat" speech at the Wagah border. And the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's Pratinidhi Sabha in Lucknow decided to "revive the Hindu agenda" aggressively, threatening even to "forbid" Hindus from attending institutions run by the minorities. The Sangh's Number Three, K.S. Sudarshan, on March 13 went as far as to allege that Sonia Gandhi's "sudden entry" into active politics a year ago was guided by "certain foreign powers which did not want India to emerge as a strong nation". The paranoia, and the message of defiance of any "soft" line, could not be clearer.

This Government has deviously manipulated and undermined India's democratic institutions. It stooped to the lowest possible level in rigging and arbitrarily transferring litigation pertaining to Jayalalitha away from the special judges. It has handled Doordarshan and All India Radio especially crudely. It has also hacked away at what little integrity there was left in some of India's topmost social science institutions. It packed the Indian Council of Historical Research and the Indian Council of Social Science Research with Hindutva supporters of dubious academic competence.

ON law and order, BJP-led governments at the Centre and in the States have performed abysmally. As Mumbai goes under mafia rule, Uttar Pradesh sinks deeper into the quagmire, with crime rates that outpace even Bihar's. The less said about Gujarat - where Christians have been systematically brutalised in over a hundred incidents, and where Hindutva mobs have fused into gangsters - the better.

What happened to cartoonist Irfan Hussain marks an altogether new turn. It may only be a coincidence that Hussain was a Muslim, and that he was particularly vitriolic in his recent political caricatures, especially of Bal Thackeray. But the fact that he was targeted and tortured, and stabbed 28 times, suggests that the motive was not robbery. This raises disturbing issues, as do the reports of a person claiming to be a Shiv Sainik threatening two other cartoonists in Delhi. The reports have been denied. But then, the Sena officially denied that its top leadership had instructed Jai Bhagwan Goyal in Delhi to vandalise the Kotla cricket pitch. There are too many similarities with patterns of eliminating media critics seen under Right-wing regimes, say, in Latin America for people to be sanguine about this terrible episode.

As for dependence on cabals, coteries and patronage networks, this Government has reached new lows. Most of its senior Ministers have their own close coteries, starting with Vajpayee's Pramod Mahajan-Jaswant Singh group, ably backed by his foster-daughter's husband, assorted bureaucrats, and media spin- doctors such as Sudheendra Kulkarni. The Advani faction has its own operators, from K.N. Govindacharya and S. Gurumurthy to Mohan Guruswamy all the way down to senior and middle-level journalists. The Government has not taken a single major economic decision without the involvement of some business group or the other.

As for corruption, the Government is hard put to answer the serious charges levelled by Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat and by Mohan Guruswamy, whatever the latter's motives and his own business links. The stakes - whether in permitting global despository receipts, writing off bad bank debts (Rs.2,800 crores last year alone), allowing telecom fee defaults, or forcing public sector oil firms into joint ventures with private groups who milk them - are so high that even a fraction of one per cent translates into scores of crores. And we may be talking about 10 per cent-plus.

The Government has made a horrible mess of the economy, returning it to its pitiable state in 1991 - by its Finance Minister's own admission. Besides mishandling - for example, of onion and urea prices - , it stands accused of profligacy and an anti-poor orientation. The Centre's revenue deficit has reached a record high of 3.4 per cent. So utterly parasitical is the Government that it has to borrow Rs.314 crores a day just to stay alive. All macro-economic indicators have gone haywire. The Central Plan outlay fell short of the target by 16 per cent. There is little productive public investment happening in the economy.

The Government has botched up social sector schemes, including the Jawahar Rozgar Yojna, and reduced real allocations to health. The poor will also have to bear the burden of additional indirect taxation, inflation and low growth, coupled with rising unemployment. Other recent measures, such as 30 to 40 per cent increases in issue prices under the public distribution system, and hiking of postal rates and rail fares, will adversely affect the vast majority, further widening income disparities. The current boom in the share markets, which reflects business' short-term gains, is unlikely to last.

The Government's balance-sheet, then, is largely negative. The person singularly responsible for this is none other than Atal Behari Vajpayee. It is because of him that there is no cohesion in the Cabinet. It is he who out of his paranoia decided not to take into confidence the Home and Defence Ministers over Pokhran-II. It is he who has played ducks and drakes with economic decision-making. It is he who called for a "debate" on conversions at the height of harassment of Christians, thus encouraging the forces that burned alive Graham Stewart Staines and his two sons.

IT will simply not do for Vajpayee's apologists to take any of the following three lines of defence, denial or diversion - namely, that he is helpless in the face of the Sangh Parivar; that some of the bad decisions of his Cabinet are due to individual Ministers' failings; and his Government has had to reverse some of its decisions because the Opposition is not cooperative enough - as, most embarrassingly, on Bihar. Vajpayee is a part of the Sangh Parivar. Whether it lets him function freely is a matter internal to it; it does not concern the larger public. After all, the public did not vote for the RSS. Vajpayee cannot both declare that "the Sangh is my soul", and then whine about the Sangh's high-handedness. If he cannot dispense with the Sangh's cadres at election-time, it is only natural that the pracharaks will demand their pound of flesh. Vajpayee's duplicitous approach of riding the Sangh piggy-back, and of farcically protesting against the Sangh's intolerance, will not work.

VINO JOHN
Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee addressing a public meeting in Tiruchi on March 21, organised as part of the State conference of the BJP.

Vajpayee should know that the failings of individual Ministers, for example, Uma Bharati or Jagmohan, are secondary to the overarching principle of collective responsibility of the Cabinet under the Westminster system. In the final analysis, the Cabinet, specifically the Prime Minister, is responsible for what his/her government does. It is childish to blame any particular Minister for the Bihar fiasco or the mess over telecom rates. It is equally futile to blame the Opposition for doing what it is meant to do - namely, oppose the Government. It is its legitimate function to do so, albeit responsibly, seriously. The BJP must have been out of its mind to put all its eggs in the Congress(I) basket and count on its biggest political rival to oblige it on Bihar. This speaks of political immaturity, even stupidity.

Vajpayee is wrong to think that he would be forgiven for his ineptitude, and what Dattopant Thengdi called his "mediocrity", and his cynicism, because of his "liberal" middle class image.

The middle class "honeymoon" with the Vajpayee image may be over. The "liberal" mask sits on Vajpayee's face uncomfortably after the display of terrible cynicism through Pokhran-II and the BJP's communalisation of the polity. Vajpayee, do not forget, has never wavered about his primary loyalty to Hindutva and the Sangh. His anger or remorse over the demolition of the Babri Masjid only lasted a few weeks. After that, he, like the public-school educated Jaswant Singh, was back in line with the Sangh.

When it comes to the crunch, the tendency to recite Urdu couplets quickly fades away. Saffron takes over.

Those who counterpose Vajpayee to the Parivar are gravely mistaken. They are six of one and half-a-dozen of the other, two aspects of the same phenomenon. Their popularity ratings differ.

Vajpayee's may be a little higher than the BJP's. But these cannot shore up the BJP's vote, which peaked at 25 per cent and has been rapidly falling ever since. There is no easy way the BJP can reverse this decline. It is no longer in a position where its opponents' mistakes redound to its advantage. On the contrary, its negative vote piles up day after day. The party's base is fast shrinking down to the upper caste core. Other Backward Classes, Dalits and Adivasis are likely to vote against the party in U.P., Maharashtra, Gujarat. Even the gains it made in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka are eroding, according to recent surveys.

The Vajpayee Government continues to totter in power because of a stalemate. The BJP's allies are unwilling to desert the floundering coalition only because they are not sure the Congress(I) will include them in an alternative alliance. The Congress(I), for its part, is unsure of winning an early mid-term election. It remains extremely weak in U.P., Bihar, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. So it does not seem to be in a hurry to pull down the Vajpayee coalition.

But this uneasy and transient situation cannot last. Each day it is prolonged, the BJP is liable to get increasingly discredited as venal, unprincipled and power-hungry a party as any other, and twice as communal. As a BJP admirer said, Vajpayee and Advani could not have dreamt some years ago that they would be in power one day. True, but the dream may be coming to an end, never to appear again.