Atal Bihari Vajpayee: A Man for All Seasons

by Kingshuk Nag

The party won 232 seats even as the Janata Dal was reduced to a tally of 59. A Congress government headed by P.V. Narasimha Rao, who was in retirement mode before the elections and had not contested the polls, came into office.

The Muslims do not oppose it.’ He also said that on the fateful day of 6 December 1992, L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharti were in Ayodhya ‘to protect the Babri Masjid not demolish it’.

In its 18 December 2000 issue, India Today carried an article on the subject of Atal’s statements that said sarcastically, ‘One of the hallmarks of a successful politician is that he should mean all things to all men.’

Then Harshad Mehta, the prime accused in the stock exchange scam of 1992, claimed that he had been to Narasimha Rao’s house along with an industrialist and had personally paid ₹1 crore in cash. This payment was a donation to the Congress party but was naturally seen as quid-pro-quo for letting him off the hook. Numerous other scandals like the fertilizer scam and the sugar scam tainted the Narasimha Rao government. All this dented its image.

Veteran political analysts recall that the 1996 elections were the first where the effects of the expenditure limits set by the Election Commission and its ban on loudspeakers began to be seen.

Atal accepted the offer from the president and became the first BJP prime minister of the country on 16 May 1996.

This was the first time that a political speech was being telecast on television to an audience across the country, which sat riveted before the television. Atal, in his poignant speech, harped on the politics of negativism and reactionary politics: ‘That is politics to stop us at any cost by making untouchables of us—this is not healthy politics.’

The tests were conducted in Pokhran, a small desert town in Rajasthan. The first nuclear tests, during the time of Indira Gandhi, had also been conducted there. The tests this time were more comprehensive. It now appears that to boost his sagging image, Narasimha Rao had also planned a nuclear test in 1995. However, American satellites, that keep a tab on developments across the world, had picked up signals about a possible test and

the US administration had convinced the Rao government to abandon the idea. This meant that Atal’s men had to conduct the test very carefully and ensure that there were no signs that a nuclear test was being planned. Extra precautions were taken by the nuclear scientists led by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (later to become the president of India) and the army commanders who were involved in the operation. As a result, the world at large only knew about the tests after Atal hurriedly convened a press conference at his residence post the event. People in India reacted positively, and even the stock markets went up. The Congress party, however, alleged that political motivations had fuelled the test.

About two years later, Musharraf said that Nawaz knew everything and had been briefed fifteen days before Atal’s trip to Pakistan. How far this is true remains a matter of speculation.

Operation Vijay in May 1999 and was able to clear the Pakistani infiltrators and reclaim the heights on 26 July 1999.

nitty-gritties

In fact, Alex Perry wrote in TIME magazine, on 26 April 2004, that Atal’s plan to ‘visit Pakistan to talk with Musharraf in Islamabad and the agreement to end half a century of war and hostility’ had only one parallel in modern history and that was Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s 1977 mission to Jerusalem.

It was K.S. Sudarshan, the number two person in the RSS.

This was after the next president of the Jana Sangh, Mouli Chandra Sharma, started taking steps that the RSS felt were making the party look like the Congress. Control over the Jana Sangh was taken through the secretary of the party, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya.

‘Atal was soon to be a poster boy of the RSS—a young man who was a great orator. Golwalkar came to believe that this was the kind of person that the Jana Sangh needed to expand fast. Golwalkar was aware of Atal’s weaknesses when he was appointed as president of the Jana Sangh, but chose to ignore them because in his opinion he was the ideal man to lead the party,’

significantly advised the RSS to formally enunciate

‘Atal gives Sangh a lesson in diversity’.

But we said that so long as Pakistan holds one cent of our land we will not talk. What does Soniaji want to say? When she was in Italy I had started doing parliamentary work. I know about my countrymen more than you. Who are you to tell about the Sangh Parivar pressure?

riots. Thus Atal was stymied. Modi, as is widely known, was a core RSS man who had become the chief minister of a state without being a legislator or an MP.

This holds true for the physical sciences, but in the field of policy reforms and political moves, while every action leads to a reaction, the reaction is not equal to the action.

Trouble intensified on the VSNL issue when, two months after the sell off, the Tatas used ₹1,200 crore, of the reserves of VSNL to buy into Tata Teleservices Limited (TTL). The knives were out and within the party too Communication Minister Pramod Mahajan got into a conflict with Arun Shourie, the man who had overseen the sale of VSNL.

group; Maruti, where the government divested its equity to give controlling interest to Suzuki (with whose collaboration the company had been set up);

The first company to be sold off, however, was Modern Food Industries that produced Modern Bread, and it was purchased by Hindustan Lever.

Panagariya also alluded to the fact how reforms, during the tenure of Narasimha Rao, were undertaken a little defensively but under Vajpayee it was different. ‘Atal was a liberal man, although some of his ministers like Shourie were right wingers,’ says Paranjoy Guha Thakurta.

A senior official, who was working with the finance ministry during the Atal period (but does not want to be named), says that there was a clear and well-defined strategy. This included emphasis on industrial, agricultural and rural growth, efforts towards revival of exports and development of infrastructure.

‘It was a well-conceived programme. And Atalji deserves full marks for implementing the programme that sought to connect the industrial, cultural and agricultural centres of the country,’ says Jagdish Shettigar, the then convener of the party’s economic

Bangaru Laxman, the president of the BJP, was caught on tape taking bribe for pushing through a defence deal to buy night vision binoculars in a sting operation by a news magazine. Defence Minister George Fernandes, a close associate of Atal’s, was also accused of buying coffins for the martyrs of the Kargil conflict at exorbitant rates, in what was termed as the coffingate scandal.

In the an episode of the widely viewed Walk the Talk programme with senior journalist Shekhar Gupta, the RSS boss said that Atal should make way for a younger leader. ‘I have

been saying that he should go and let younger faces emerge. He should stay as senior advisor only. Age is a factor after

Beginning with dementia, the man with a golden tongue now suffers from Alzheimer’s. Atal is also suffering from the effects of long-term diabetes.

His admirers cut across ages, and even many of the younger generation view Atal with respect and are influenced by his life.

‘All the parties were like planets moving around the omnipresent Congress party that was akin to the sun and it seemed that there would never be a sunset for the Congress party. It was thus remarkable for someone like Atal Bihari Vajpayee to stick on and actually prosper. This is a mark of his statesmanship,’ says Amit Chaudhuri who grew up in Delhi during the 1960s, a time when many political parties and numerous opposition politicians rose and fell and disappeared into oblivion without being able to leave any mark.

He also believed that ‘you can change friends but not your neighbours’, and that is why he aggressively pursued peace with neighbours like Pakistan.

Kumara Guru of the Indian School of Business in Mohali, who was still a student when Atal was prime minister, says, ‘He was Teflon coated and evoked great confidence in people. They reposed faith in him. No charge against him ever stuck. In fact nobody would even think of charging him of [sic] anything negative. This is the hallmark of a great individual. I think he was greatly underrated as a reformer.’

For this reason, he did not divide Andhra Pradesh to create the state of Telangana and refrained similarly from bifurcating Maharashtra to create Vidarbha.

Further Atal was described as ‘larger than the political size of his party. He is in it and above it, keeping his moral system beyond the grasp of real politik even beyond the demands of his own party. He has changed the grammar of leadership.

He was the man who linked the now-past Nehruvian era to the now-upon-us Modi era. He was the link between the first republic that was and the

second republic that is in the works. Without someone like him straddling the two eras, the Indian republic would not be what it is now.