Vajpayee can still recover lost ground

Dear Reader,

I am looking for Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the person whom I have known - or at least I had thought so - for nearly 35 years. He was liberal, open and by no stretch of the imagination pro-Hindutva. He and LK Advani represented two different streams of thought - Vajpayee shunning the hard line while Advani associating himself, overtly or covertly, with Hindu chauvinist forces.

I felt unhappy whenever Vajpayee stood at attention at the RSS parades for the sanchalaks to prove that he was as obedient to them as any other in their ranks. Still I believed that his approach towards the RSS was more realistic than real. Sometimes he would himself say that he was a swayamsevak.

I too wondered whether he was only a 'mukut' (a mask) as an RSS ideologue once said, behind which was an embodiment of saffronised thoughts. I rationalised that he did not believe in the RSS philosophy and went along because of his past association.

I did not like his leaving the Janata Party, a product of the struggle against the emergency, preferring links with the RSS to a party with pluralistic ethos. When he joined the BJP I was confident that he would carry his liberal thoughts wherever he went.

I recall when he visited London in 1990 - I was then India's High Commissioner to the UK - Advani's rath yatra to Ayodhya was in progress. I asked Vajpayee somewhat sarcastically why he had come here when the rath yatra was on in India. He said: "Those who are Ram bhakt (devotees), have gone to Ayodhya but those who are desh bhakt, have come to London."

The reaction was so spontaneous and so transparent that there was no doubt where his heart was. I know of a stage in his political career when he wondered whether he fitted into the BJP. I believed that he was the right man in the wrong party and that he would change one day.

But I find him changing and tilting towards the saffron forces. I can understand the pressures exerted on him within the party. I can understand his isolation. I can understand his exasperation. But I cannot understand his giving up without joining battle. He is the same Vajpayee who had picked up the phone and had told the then Gujarat chief minister Keshubhai Patel to drop the anti-conversion bill.

I feel sorry for Vajpayee when he seeks temporary solutions to the situations he should fight against. His stand that there should be either a settlement between the two communities over the Ram Janambhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute or a court verdict is commendable. But it showed him in a poor light when he compromised with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) at Ayodhya, even though he averted the confrontation.

Sending a civil servant from the PMO for receiving the two 'shilas' (stones), which would be used in the construction of the temple, is nothing by itself. But the VHP has interpreted it differently. It has asked the two stones to be placed on the 67-acre land around the disputed site. He should have been firm from the beginning and sent a no-nonsense message. But he wilted.

Earlier, he used to stand out in the Sangh parivar crowd. Now it is becoming increasingly difficult to spot him there. Vajpayee the man has become Vajpayee the mukut.

Vajpayee's antennas were so sensitive at one time that he would know where to go to pacify people. Now they do not seem that sensitive. Or how do you explain that he postponed his visit to Ahmedabad for five weeks? That some consideration weighed with him is evident. But this itself indicates a change.

He was unsparing in his criticism of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and the authorities when he went to Gujarat. But when he summoned Modi to New Delhi, he was lenient. He was a chief minister who had miserably failed to cope with the situation, even if the allegations of his complicity were wrong. And here was the prime minister who did not utter even a word of criticism in the open. The PMO was at pains at that time to tell the media in private that Modi was put on the mat. Maybe, he was.

The horrified public, particularly the Muslims, expected the removal of Modi, or at least an open reprimand of a person who neither protected their lives nor their property, let alone their dignity.

Vajpayee must be naïve if he has not seen through the pattern in the pre-planned rioting. Modi would have been a chastened person if he had been taken to task in the first instance. He reportedly asked Hindus the other day to "protest."

No wonder, another round of disturbances took place. A Hindu girl was stripped and killed because she was married to a Muslim and a Hindu woman was murdered for having saved Muslims. Even if Modi is sacked now, the blot will remain.

A bit of the old Vajpayee flitted before my eyes when at the launching of a book, he said it would be better to keep one's distance from the kind of Hindutva which was being practised by some. He was critical of Hindu fundamentalism.

But there he stopped. This is his problem these days. He stops where he should begin. His government has taken no action against the VHP or its other militant wing, the Bajrang Dal. The Prevention of Terrorist Ordinance (POTO) has been made into an Act.

What for? No communalist has been detained. One person recently interned was Yasin Malik of the Hurriyat Conference in Kashmir. He should be tried in the open court if the government has firm evidence. The invocation of POTO raises serious doubts.

Still the same Vajpayee asked the Gujarat government to stop the VHP's provocative plan to carry the ashes (asthi) of the Godhra carnage victims in a procession throughout the country. Like Advani's rath yatra, it would have ignited communal passions all over.

Vajpayee's stint as the Janata Dal foreign minister was so accommodative that till today it is remembered in Pakistan as the golden period of relations between the two countries. He talked of soft borders although Morarji Desai, prime minister at that time, nipped the move in the bud, saying that the softening of the borders would mean an influx of spies.

Today, Vajpayee is intractable. It is understandable that after the bus journey to Lahore, he felt he had been stabbed in the back when Kargil was forcibly occupied by Pakistan. It is also understandable that Pakistan's continued cross-border terrorism does not allow him to withdraw the forces from the front.

Still just as he has made gestures to Islamabad through the visit of Information Minister Sushma Swaraj and Planning Commission Deputy Chairman K.C. Pant, Vajpayee should restore the train, bus and plane services. Without people-to-people contact, the problems will remain insurmountable because the governments of both countries lack the will to solve them.

Whether in the context of people-to-people contact between India and Pakistan or attitude to the Hindutva forces, Vajpayee is getting less and less convincing as days go by.

The defeat of the BJP, first in Punjab, then in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and now in Delhi, is the defeat of those forces which Vajpayee resisted first and accepted later. He can still recover lost ground by confronting the fundamentalists.

Sometimes I feel as if he is traversing a path which is not to his liking but does so because he has no better alternative. H