The Eclipse Of Vajpayee

The cabinet reshuffle is clearly to prepare the BJP for the spate of state assembly elections next year and the parliamentary elections in 2004. How else does one explain bringing an ageing film-star who has advertised whisky in the past as health minister or removing the most articulate minister in the cabinet and making him the BJP spokesman? But there is a tragic sub-theme to the changes of portfolio. This is the party’s abandonment of Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee’s moderation and pluralism in national policy and its return to the monolithic Hindutva line of 1985 to 1991.

The most telling evidence of this is to be found not in the new appointments to the cabinet (although three of the four new entrants to the cabinet are from the BJP while the fourth is from the even more rabid Shiv Sena) but the concomitant elevation of former Bajrang Dal chief Vinay Katiyar to head the party organisation in Uttar Pradesh, and the designation of Uma Bharati for the same post in Madhya Pradesh. It is also visible in the formal elevation of L.K. Advani to the post of deputy prime minister. Advani is by no means a hardline proponent of Hindutva but no one did as much to give the ideology credibility and legitimacy in 1990 as he. Ever since then, Advani has been the bridge between the BJP’s parliamentary party and its organisational wing. In the NDA government, he has been the man who has brought the BJP’s concerns to the attention of the NDA and exerted himself the most to ensure that they are not ignored.

The reasons for the eclipse of the Vajpayee line are not hard to find. Ever since it came to power at the Centre, it has lost each and every state election it has fought. One by one, each of its bastions has crumbled: Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in 1998, Maharashtra in 2000 and Uttar Pradesh this year. The alarm in the party rose to a panic in December 2001 when the party lost a number of bye-elections in Gujarat. The voting pattern in these bye-elections revealed that the party was in imminent danger of losing the February ’03 state assembly elections in Gujarat. Though the BJP’s failure to emerge as the largest single party in UP did not come as a surprise, for the ideologues in the party it was the last straw. They ascribed all the defeats to the party’s decision to forsake the Hindutva platform that had led to its meteoric rise between 1991 and 1998. Only a return to that platform, they asserted, would restore the party’s fortunes.

The Sangh parivar’s ideologues couldn’t be more wrong. A return to Hindutva will not brighten the BJP’s prospects in the next elections (except just possibly in the crypto-fascist state of Gujarat). Hindutva only gave the initial fillip to the party between 1989 and 1991. By aggressively championing the cause of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, the BJP was able to increase its share of the vote from 11 per cent to 21. But since then, its voteshare has remained static. The steady growth in the strength the coalition it has headed has resulted entirely from an increase in the number of parties in it.

That Hindutva does not have the capacity to increase the strength of the BJP on its own was proved by the four state assembly polls in BJP-ruled states in November 1993. Held in the shadow of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, at a time when many people felt that the BJP governments in these states had been unfairly dismissed, it should have romped back to power in all of them. Instead, it lost the elections soundly in Delhi, Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, and barely managed to claw its way back to power with the help of independents in Rajasthan. Those elections showed that Hindutva had not been among the issues that had motivated the voters.

The BJP’s decline is not a product of Vajpayee’s moderation but of widespread disenchantment with the party’s failure to change a system of governance universally regarded as corrupt and extortionate; the disappearance of jobs, the breakdown of the judicial system and the rapid deterioration of health, education and other infrastructural facilities previously available. The BJP did not admittedly create the mess it inherited. But it also did nothing to change it.

It is doubtful whether any change in the composition of the government at the Centre can lift the disenchantment. But the present batch of changes could easily worsen governance and deepen it further. Jaswant Singh has been shifted from external affairs and a completely inexperienced minister put in his place at a time when the country is smack in the middle of an unresolved confrontation with Pakistan. This has disrupted a whole range of vital personal equations that Jaswant had established with various world leaders when India needs the latter to make Pakistan live up to its commitments. Arun Jaitley has been moved out of the law ministry at the precise moment when he should have been personally overseeing the implementation of the act that he piloted through Parliament to break the logjam of cases in Indian courts and end delays. Advani’s formal appointment as deputy PM gives him a veto power over decision-making on important policy issues. While this had existed for some time, its formalisation has reduced the prime minister of India to the status of a lovable figurehead.

The only hope of a change for the better rests in the use Jaswant might make of his new portfolio. He had earned an enviable reputation for himself as a member of Parliament’s standing committee on finance, and has a sound grasp of economics. He could use his much greater clout within the government to tackle the structural imbalances that have locked the economy into an unprecedented stagnation. But his arrival in the finance ministry has been accompanied by a paean of praise for the health of the economy, its high growth rate, its enviable stability and the excellent job done by his predecessor that seems designed to dissuade him from undertaking any structural reforms. If he falls a prey to this ersatz complacency, he too will end doing nothing.