The gamble has paid off so far. Vajpayee has now stolen from Advani the Hidden Agenda. Thus he has trapped his enemies within and detractors without. The Face itself has become a Mask now. Gorbachev failed because his glasnost was not a mask. Vajpayee will fail because the Face can’t be like a lifeless Mask.
But one may still ask why it was necessary for him to throw away the mask. Could it not have been better for his image to be in the company of liberals than in the company of the Babri Demolition Task Force and alleged Staines killers?
Rationally speaking, yes. But rationality does not determine the behaviour of those who have lived their life in an ideological-organisational cage. They feel lonely at the top. That is why, all of a sudden, throwing propriety and rationality to the wind, he addressed sants, mahants and sadhus in America to declare that he was a swayamsevak first and prime minister later. With that statement he had crossed the rubicon. Now he could not return to the virtual reality of the nda. The statement on Ayodhya and thereby ripping apart the mask was perhaps a psychological necessity. It was an effort to come out of the political loneliness. At the beginning of the year, he was a hero, a victor of the phony war in Kargil, a unifier of the unstable 24-party front and an icon of sorts. As the year came to a close, he looked like a Halloween mask.
Kumar Ketkar
Editor, Maharashtra Times
