Parliament’s premier
How should history judge Atal Bihari Vajpayee? As is the case with Rajiv Gandhi and P V Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s legacy is forever marred by his complicity in events that twisted India’s trajectory towards division and divisiveness. There were three such events, so darkly powerful that the years of their occurrence are seared into our national consciousness: 1984, 1992, and 2002. Rajiv Gandhi cannot be forgiven for 1984, and for overseeing an election campaign based on hateful anti-Sikh rhetoric; Rao not just for 1984 — for which he bore primary responsibility as home minister and the man who ran the Delhi police — but also for the Babri demolition of 1992. Vajpayee tried for over a decade to dissociate himself from Babri, insisting that the Ayodhya campaign had been led by others; but recordings exist of a speech to kar sevaks in Lucknow days before they attacked the mosque, and they are not the words of a man urging calm.
And as for the founding tragedy of our times, when the Gujarat Model was born amid blood and fire in the winter of 2002, Vajpayee cannot evade responsibility. He knew a dreadful line had been crossed. That knowledge suffuses his voice in the famous video in which he reminds Narendra Modi, sitting smiling and unconcerned by his side, of “rajdharma”. The Gujarat chief minister replied: “Just as I have been doing”, his voice ringing in turn with the eager willingness to forge his own facts that has been the hallmark of his subsequent career.
So Vajpayee dissociated himself from Babri, and benefited from it, given that it propelled the BJP to power even as it discredited all its other leaders. He dissociated himself also from Gujarat; he turned away from doing the right thing and dismissing Modi, allowed Modi to run an election campaign steeped in Islamophobia; and was hurt by it. It is not true that ‘India Shining’ cost Vajpayee the 2004 election. Alliance politics did. And Vajpayee knew who to blame: From his retreat in Manali after his loss, he insisted that inaction on Gujarat was what had cost the BJP power, and called for Modi to go.
Whatever his culpability in these events, I think thus Vajpayee deserves more credit than either Rajiv Gandhi or Rao. Neither of the two Congressmen even bothered to apologise for their acts; truthfully, it appeared neither was ever even that reflective about them. Vajpayee, most charitably, lacked courage both in 1992 and 2002; but at least he acknowledged what he and his party had done wrong.
And, unlike both those others, he had one great virtue: He had spent most of his time in Opposition, and thus thoroughly understood the importance of Parliament, of liberal democratic restraint, and of the politics of compromise. There’s one clip of him speaking in the Lok Sabha that is doing the rounds at the moment, in which he points out that governments may come and go, power might change hands, but Indian democracy must be preserved. He understood that the quality of a democracy is most visible when at these moments of transition; that democracies are not about who gains power, but about how those not in power are treated. Can you imagine Rajiv Gandhi, secure behind his record majority, having the humility to say to the Opposition that governments might come and go? Can you imagine Modi or Amit Shah, the gurus of “Congress- mukt Bharat”, admitting that power might change hands? It was not Vajpayee’s poetry, his easy-living manner, his conviviality that ensured he was popular on both sides of the aisle and the master of “coalition dharma”. It was his respect for Parliament, for those who disagreed with him inside and outside his own party and coalition — a respect born of decades as a parliamentarian — that caused him to become the first leader of a coalition to complete a term in office.
I do not want to mythologise those long-ago days of Vajpayee’s government, as some are doing. Frankly, it failed as often as it succeeded. Like Rao, Vajpayee got cold feet on real reform, rolling back amendments to the Factories Act that would have allowed India, by now, to rival China as a manufacturing power. His government began the giveaway of natural resources and licencing irregularities, with its controversial actions on the telecom sector. And his party happily sought to saffronise textbooks and universities, under a human resources development minister who was, let us agree, not India’s most progressive.
But, in the end, I think it is fair to say that he sought to deepen India’s democracy. He was a politician, a parliamentarian, and a persuader — not someone who thought he was born to rule. That is why he, today, is being mourned across the political spectrum. As for his successor, the man who he blamed for his loss? Well, Narendra Modi hopes he will be remembered as India’s greatest and most beloved Prime Minister since Nehru. But right now, it looks he won’t even rise to Vajpayee’s level.