Brajesh Mishra ran Vajpayee government: Dulat
he eclipsed even Cabinet ministers.” Everyone who worked in the PMO and who ever worked with him never complained about him. “He was good with people, he was clear headed, quick on the uptake, quick on deciding, he knew how to get things done and he never wasted time.” And yet he was an extremely relaxed person and gave enough freedom to others to work.
Dulat said that Vajpayee, on the other hand, managed the coalition very well and had fabulous skills. One such instance was when the then Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee had stormed out of a Cabinet meeting, after which Vajpayee went on a foreign trip. It was a custom those days that senior officials and ministers would greet the Prime Minister on his return. “Mamata was at the airport and she was the first in line. As Vajpayee came in, she bent down to touch his feet, as was her habit. He caught her hand and gave her a hug. That ended all problems with her party, the Trinamool Congress. Vajpayee could do that.”
Paying compliments to the former Prime Minister, Dulat has written, “Vajpayee fulfilled Plato’s ideal of the perfect state in which philosophers were kings and kings philosophers.” He was not only an astute politician but a poet and philosopher as well as unparalleled orator. Recalling his first exposure to Vajpayee’s oratory, the author states how he moved the crowd into raptures during his trip in 1978 as the Foreign Minister to Kathmandu. He started his speech with “Jis desh ke kanker, kanker mein Shankar ho...” which sent the crowds into raptures. Vajpayee mesmerised the packed house and most of the Nepalese women came out with moist eyes. “Not only in Kathmandu but everywhere he went and spoke as in Lahore in 1999 and Srinagar in 2003 he held the crowd in thrall.”
The unique thing about Vajpayee was that he never allowed himself to be led by the bureaucracy. For instance, if you leave it to bureaucrats, things like relations with Pakistan will not improve how much personally you may want to improve them — a clear example is Dr Manmohan Singh’s tenyear tenure as Prime Minister. “When Vajpayee took the bus to Lahore, it was not a bureaucratic decision; it wasn’t a whim either, but it was a decision driven by the prime minister himself, with the supporting homework being done by the bureaucracy. And who would have thought that within two years of Kargil, Vajpayee would invite and talk to General Musharraf.”
Dulat, who comes out as a keen observer of men and statecraft, has also drawn comparisons between Vajpayee and P.V. Narasimha Rao and found several similarities between them. “The two of them were keen on a breakthrough in Kashmir, and in this both were willing to look beyond Farooq Abdullah: in the mid 90s, Rao placed his hopes on Shabir Shah, while Vajpayee favoured Omar Abdullah over his father.” “Rao was like Vajpayee, a smart strategist and must be given credit for a couple of things. For one thing, after the shock of the militancy erupting in 1990, whatever opening we in the government made — talking to all Kashmiris, no matter who they were — the credit goes to Narasimha Rao. His approach was not at all hampered by any baggage. There was a time when separatists or Kashmiris going to the Pakistan High Commission would be harassed by the police and agencies. In May, 1995, Pakistan president Farooq Leghari came to Delhi for a SAARC summit and he invited Hurriyat leaders for a meeting. We at the IB tried to dissuade them and the result was that two went and two did not go while one reported sick.”
However, Rao’s view was that “What’s the big deal? If they want to go there, let them. It’s not a big deal.” This opening up started in Rao’s time as before that anyone who visited the high commission was suspect. Rao said, “Nahin aane dijiye, jaane dijiye. Why are we doing this? There is no need.”
Rao was never too impressed with intelligence work. Part of it was because his Congress predecessor Rajiv Gandhi was impressed by the intelligence community, and his tenure is remembered as the best it has ever been for Indian intelligence. “But it was mostly due to Narasimha Rao’s notion of intellectual superiority, and the attitude that there was nothing new that the spooks could tell him.”
Dulat has also dwelt at great length on how Rajesh Pilot was given the responsibility by Rao to interact with the Kashmiris and his relationship with the then Governor General, Krishna Rao and Farooq Abdullah and the games that went on in Kashmir. While Rao gave Pilot a lot of independence, he also occasionally would tighten the screws on him through S.B. Chavan, Pilot’s senior. Pilot once confided in Dulat and said about Rao, “This old man is too sharp, too bloody smart. Calls me and tells me, Home Minister, how are you? And makes me feel that I am the Home Minister and then uses Chavan to undercut me.”
Dulat’s book also provides an insight into how the intelligence agencies and government functionaries work. One such disclosure is about how the Crisis Management Group during the IC-814 hijack episode got busy blaming each other while the aircraft flew out from Amritsar, leaving the government with no options but to give in to the terrorists’ demands. He further talks about the turf war in the various agencies and gives an account of in- depth understanding about Kashmir and its affairs. His observations about the Kashmiri thought process is both revealing as also depict his expertise on the subject.