The speech Vajpayee may never make

Here is the speech we may not quite hear on Thursday, August 15, when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee climbs up the ramparts of the Red Fort to start yet another birthday party for India:

Friends (in the BJP), Indians (in cities and villages) and countrymen (across the world)!

You were kind enough to elect me, and support me if you could not vote, in a general election three years ago because I was the Prime Minister of economic reform, the Lahore peace initiative and Kargil.

Since then reform has tripped over uncertainty, while those old-fashioned rogues and sharks who hover over public money have continued to steal and loot thousands of crores with impunity, bribing their way through any problem, laughing their way through media and politicians, and fattening the foreign accounts of men at the head of financial institutions who sold their trust unit by unit and betrayed blue chip companies like IDBI chip by chip.

In self-defence I will say that I did not create this scum. I inherited this class from decades of misrule and corruption, of deals between money power and political authority at the cost of your development, your jobs, your schools, your hospitals, your roads, your hunger.

Where my self-defence collapses is in the fact that I too did nothing to heal this corrosive cancer that has gnawed at the heart and soul of our country. Our tryst with destiny was not meant to suffocate in sleaze.

I am guilty of indifference. And I will tell you the reason for my indifference. Because my own party, which was born and nurtured in puritan zeal, has become a mob of sleazebags. I know many of you – let's make that most of you – do not share the ideology and beliefs of men like Shyamaprasad Mukherjee and Deendayal Upadhyay.

I mention these names because they were my leaders when I was a young man with a dream. I have become an old man now, and I am not certain whether I have the courage to dream any more... But even those who would not want Shyamaprasadji and Deendayalji to lead India will admit and accept that they did not enter public life to split the scum with hyenas.

They were honest men who died with less in their bank accounts than they had inherited. What a tragedy therefore that my lifetime colleague and deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advaniji should be giving orders to BJP leaders to compete with the Congress in petty corruption.

My petrol pump is smaller than yours! Your scam is bigger than mine! My Ram Naik is nothing compared to your S.M. Krishna and even watch out for this one, Manmohan Singh!

Ha ha ha. What a sight we must be to voters who thought that we were capable of their trust, who believed that we knew the meaning of a faded word known as integrity. I am truly sorry. As Prime Minister of the country, as leader of the BJP, I know that the buck, even the corrupt buck, stops here.

You made me Prime Minister, as I said, because of reform, the promise of transparency, the hope of peace and a dream of prosperity. Instead, I have become Prime Minister of Tehelka, sleaze, scams, petrol pumps and Narendra Modi.

I must say a deliberate word about Tehelka, particularly since I have been re-reading my friend Advaniji's prison diaries, written when we were in jail together. Normally people do not advertise prison terms.

We are proud that we went to jail during Mrs Indira Gandhi's Emergency in 1975 – I wonder how many of you even remember that blot of shame in our nation's history.

Emergency

If you do not know about the Emergency, ask your parents, ask your teachers to drill that memory so deeply in your mind that it becomes an imperishable part of your consciousness. We must never forget, if only to ensure that it never happens again.

Advaniji has written so eloquently about those nineteen months of dictatorship, censorship and terror. I remember when we won the elections in 1977 and Advaniji became minister for information and broadcasting in Morarji Desai's government, he taunted all those journalists who had surrendered before Indira Gandhi, who had compromised.

Advaniji told them that when Indira Gandhi had asked such journalists to bend, they had crawled.

I cannot believe that it is the same Advaniji who is inflicting a reign of terror on selected journalists from Tehelka, whose only crime is that they exposed outrageous and scandalous corruption in defence deals.

I cannot believe that I am keeping quiet while journalists are being arrested on whimsical excuses. I have always respected those who live by the pen. Alas, I have not been able to live on my poetry, but I think my pen may have served my country as much as my politics, if not more.

What further irony in the fact that we are being vengeful against journalists in order to protect a shining hero of the Emergency, my old colleague George Fernandes. How time makes dwarfs out of giants.

As a collective gesture of atonement, I am asking the home ministry to drop all frivolous cases against Tehelka, and to end the harassment and persecution that has replaced accountability.

My colleagues in the BJP have made me Prime Minister of Narendra Modi as well. I did not want this. As I said in Parliament I had made my mind up before that party conference in Goa, where everything went wrong, including my own speech, that Modi should be told to resign.

I should have trusted my instincts instead of being cowed down by those who wanted victory at the cost of principle. The BJP has been called a communal party. But till Gujarat I could hold my head high and claim that the BJP, when in power, had never permitted any largescale communal riots.

Of course we could not stop communal incidents, including those engineered by members of our own party. But we ran responsible governments. We did not use state power to encourage lynch mobs. That was a Congress speciality.

I slipped on blood shed in Goa. After the contemptible barbarism of Godhra I should have ensured that a community was not punished for the wild misdeeds of a few. Revenge is no answer to barbarism. We criticised Rajiv Gandhi after the massacre of the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984. There was provocation then as well. But we took a moral position and I am proud we did so.

I cannot reverse time but I do want to ensure an election that is held without the slightest hint of terror and fully participated by every citizen. Gujarat will be placed under President's Rule till a new elected government is sworn in. As will be Kashmir.

The tensions generated over Kashmir constitute the gravest danger to our subcontinent. It is a crisis that is eating away our present and could destroy our future. You, I hope, will agree I have done my best to find peace ever since I was fortunate enough to become Prime Minister of this great nation.

Acting upon our commitment to the people as clearly outlined in our manifesto, we made India a nuclear power. The world tried to browbeat us; today it has accepted our nuclear status as a legitimate right of an important nation.

But we cannot be a true world power without being a powerhouse economy. And a great economy is impossible without the will to release our national wealth and energy for infrastructu