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.
The explanation for the impenetrable
Teflon lies at least partly in his ability to win friends, especially among
media tycoons, and the way state-controlled media paid hefty honorariums to top
editors to produce talk shows that nobody watched.
It also is based in his ruthless
suppression of the few publications that ran exposes, such as tehelka.com, the
Internet newspaper whose financiers were packed to jail after it ran a series
on graft in defense purchases.
Until he took office for 13 days in 1996,
Atal Behari Vajpayee had never had to handle governmental responsibility, and
during the six years (1998-2004) when he presided over the government of India,
there were trusted people close at hand to take over the actual work of running
things.
In fact, those wanting favors seldom
disturbed Vajpayee. Indeed, they would have found it difficult to meet the man
in a one-to-one setting, so jealously was access to him guarded. They would
need go to Principal Secretary Brajesh Mishra or to Vajpayee's son-in-law
Ranjan Bhattacharya, to negotiate for a favourable decision. Every few days,
Mishra would go to the prime minister and get him to sign dozens of orders in
the space of a few minutes.
Vajpayee would then go back to his
favorite pastime, shooting the breeze with intimates, often intimately. The
man's appetite for life's goodies has never been a secret.
Ever since he ascended to significant
political influence in the 1950s, Vajpayee's routine revolved around many daily
sessions of leisurely conversations with those who he felt comfortable with. As
the man is uncomfortable with English, preferring to speak in Hindi, this has
meant that only those with fluency over this language have penetrated his inner
circle. Almost no one in his circle represents India's developed south.
Vajpayee is a man for whom intimates can
do no wrong. He appointed the head of his granddaughter's school to the
chairmanship of the National Commission for Women, one among a slew of
appointments from among his personal favorites. He is an intensely personal
human being, who values relationships above all else, which is one reason why
so many cronies found their way to key positions from 1998 to 2004.
He wants those around him to have a
chemistry that is pleasing to him, which is why it is mostly good news that he
has gone. Even while the country was turning away from the BJP and its allies,
those around him told him how much he was loved, how indispensable he was in
the eyes of the voter. That is why the defeat of May 13, 2004, came as a
surprise.
Like former U.S. President Richard Nixon,
Vajpayee shies away from direct confrontation with individuals. He prefers to
leave that work to subordinates, most notably Mishra, who has picked up
numerous enemies for faithfully implementing the prime minister's wishes, much
like former Nixon Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman.
The man has an instinct for the soft
option, which is why he personally ordered the surrender to terrorists that
took place at Kandahar in January 2000, after an Indian Airlines Airbus A-300
was hijacked in Kathmandu. Tough action is something that the poet and pacifist
rebels against.
Small wonder that he went ahead with
measures such as the twice-extended unilateral cease-fire in Kashmir in 2001
that gave the terrorists operating there a huge boost in their ability to
conduct lethal attacks.
The Teflon always remained in place --
even while his hand-picked generals slept on their watch and permitted the
Pakistanis to begin infiltrating into Kargil during the winter of 1998. Far
from being blamed for this, Vajpayee reaped an electoral harvest as a "man
of action" in the 1999 elections when he was really just getting back
territory that had been grabbed by the Pakistanis thanks to Indian negligence.
It was hyped up as a major victory.
Three out of four ministers in Vajpayee's
Cabinet came from the most backward states in India, and it showed. Although
hailed an a reformer, the reality is that after the Narasimha Rao era
(1992-1996), it was the brief period in office of H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K.
Gujral (1996-1998) that saw the introduction of almost all of the reforms for
which Vajpayee later took the credit.
This included the opening of
infrastructure and power to private enterprise, and the freeing of telecom from
state monopolies. The measures undertaken during Vajpayee's six years
(1998-2004) have been modest, with both the patents bill as well as labor
reform still left to be done.
The petroleum sector is mired in controls
that have made petroproducts in India the most expensive in the world, after
Cuba and North Korea. The economic sectors that have taken off -- such as
information technology and biotech -- are precisely those that got incubated
from 1995 to 1997. Indeed, in these the (usually hidden) role of Vajpayee's
government has often been negative, backing players known for their denotations
to his party.
In information technology, the Vajpayee
government seems to have tried to help favorites against companies such as
WIPRO, a professionally managed enterprise that refuses to shower cash on the
political class.
An emasculated media has ensured that
only credit has flowed to Vajpayee, not blame. Of course, the encomiums have
come from what may be called "Cocktail Alley," the clubby mesh of
officials, diplomats, businesspersons and journalists that the Foreign
Correspondents Club in New Delhi mistakes for "Indian opinion." This
is the only section of society that Vajpayee feels at home in, as indeed does
his friend Sonia Gandhi.
Despite his origins in the lanes of the
small town of Gwalior, Vajpayee is principally a man of India's capital city.
It is in New Delhi that he has spent practically his entire life, collecting
goodwill and other useful bric-a-brac from individuals.
There is little that Vajpayee prefers more
than spending an evening with the beautiful people, exchanging confidences with
them, delighting in their small talk. While such interaction was frequent
during the decades outside government, for a while -- in the 1998 stint --
Vajpayee's interaction with the beautiful world of the creative got sharply
reduced.
Since the 1999 election returned him to
power, Vajpayee has spent most of his time doing what he does best --
socializing.
His artistic temperament makes it a chore
to attend meetings, where he is silent except for an occasional witticism,
which invariably sends those assembled into peals of laughter even while they
are unable to hear just what it is that he has said. A leader without any
inhibitions about delegating power, Vajpayee left the nitty-gritty of running
the party and the government to his permanent deputy, L.K. Advani, and to
Brajesh Mishra. In the past, former Finance Minister Jaswant Singh was part of
this core group, which also contains former Law Minister Arun Jaitley.
A man comfortable only with the cosmic,
Vajpayee is impatient with those who bring thorny issues before him for a
decision. He expects those working for him to present him not with problems but
with solutions that he can then speedily and cheerfully endorse. A look at his
calendar will show repeated meetings with the same, small group of intimates,
and huge amounts blocked off for personal time.
Vajpayee is a mirror that reflects those
he is in the process of meeting.
The man can appear to agree with any of
those interacting with him. Thus, he can nod sagely at an activist of the Viswa
Hindu Parishad who wants the immediate construction of a temple on the site
where the Babri Masjid stood, and minutes later sob in anguish to a Muslim
leader who recalls the day when the structure was pulled down in the presence
of Vajpayee in 1992.
There is, however, a darker side.
Under his rule, governmental agencies
were used by people acting in Vajpayee's name to fix their critics. As the
just-defeated prime minister never accepts criticism of his intimates, they
have the freedom to act at whim and do.
During the past six years, even junior
functionaries working in his office have used the name of the prime minister
for favors ranging from securing jobs for stenographers to admission in
engineering colleges.
Under Vajpayee, the prime minister's
office was once again as all-powerful as it was under Indira Gandhi, a person
he admired almost as much as he did her father Jawaharlal Nehru.
Fortunately for those indulging in
money-making activities, opposition parties were generally silent on the doings
of his associates. In contrast, Narasimha Rao was repeatedly hauled over the
coals, even after he left office.
There is no chance that any such
persecution will follow Vajpayee or his men, who have been careful to keep open
excellent lines of communication with the other big party, Congress. Mishra,
for example, is close to both Natwar Singh as well as Arjun Singh, two
confidantes of Sonia Gandhi.
Under Vajpayee, economic liberalization
did not come in big leaps as it did under Manmohan Singh, but on a case-by-case
basis. There has been little "big bang" liberalization, such as the
transfer of powers to the state governments or the introduction of a
value-added tax, measures promised "within a year" in each of the
last five.
As for foreign policy, India under
Vajpayee has come into the radar not because of any action of his but because
of two factors: the rise of China, which has made many in the U.S. eager to
develop India as a counterweight, and the boom in software and IT services.
It is the "ordinary" Indian
rather than his team that has made a part of India shine, a development for
which Vajpayee's poll managers tried to grab the credit and failed.
For years he indulged Sonia Gandhi,
seeing her as the guarantee of his continuance in office, protecting her from
prosecution on charges ranging from the smuggling of antiques to the taking of
funds from the KGB.
He believed that so long as Sonia Gandhi
was the leader of the Congress Party, BJP rule was safe. The 2004 election
proved this to be wrong.
For the first time since he took over the
leadership of the BJP (then the Jan Sangh) 53 years ago, Vajpayee's veneer has
begun to disappear. His own party has decided that he does not have the fire in
him to make a good leader of the opposition.
The Manmohan Singh government is facing a
daunting task, and it is the job of the opposition to ensure that it is brought
to account whenever it goes off course. A man of Vajpayee's forgiving and
forgetful nature is not up to this, even were he physically capable of doing
so. Hopefully, this darling of the fates will retain his dignity before history
by saying a graceful goodbye to public life.
-(M.D. Nalapat is professor of geopolitics at the Manipal
Academy of Higher Education in India.)
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