M.D. Nalapat
MANIPAL, India, May 27 (UPI) -- Former
Indian prime ministers A.B. Vajpayee and P.V. Narasimha Rao are close friends,
but while Vajpayee is low on intellect and superb in chemistry, the father of
economic reform in India is the opposite -- high on IQ, low on EQ.
Meeting Vajpayee is a delight. The man
always smiles and looks at you in a way that makes you feel that his existence
was spent waiting for you. Every now and again, there is the emotion-laden hug
that warms you to the man. Each of Vajpayee's gestures give off a soft glow but
the words actually spoken by him are seldom Einsteinian. They usually consist
of self-evident homilies such as, "peace is better than war" or
"progress does more good for humankind than stagnation."
Useful propositions perhaps, but not
entirely unknown. Going through the thousands of speeches made by the Bharatiya
Janata Party regime's prime minister, it is difficult to locate any that deal
with issues in a manner other than goody-goody.
The 79-year-old Atal Behari Vajpayee has
been blessed by the angels all his life. They allowed him to lead the existence
of a lotus-eater, continuing even in his just-concluded job as a relaxed
man-about-town who has thus far remained untouched by controversy.
It is not that he ducked when exposes
were flung his way; there has never been any need for such exertions, despite
the reality that the Vajpayee government was the most graft-ridden that India
has seen since 1947.