400 days of Vajpayee

It follows that the path charted by Agni-II is also irreversible. The world has not accepted us as a nuclear weapon state (NWS). In the cute terminology of international diplomacy, we are, therefore, not a nuclear weapon state but a state with nuclear weapons. The Vajpayee government has also placed us on record as the first state possessing nuclearweapons to have declared itself in favour of the time-bound elimination of all nuclear weapons by all nuclear states. By, however, failing to endorse the 1988 Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan, and not tabling any alternative plan of its own, the government’s commitment to elimination remains a mere declaration of intent.

If the incoming government is a Congress government, Sonia Gandhi and the Pachmarhi declaration are already on record that any Congress endorsement of the CTBT would be integrally linked to at least the commencement, if not necessarily the conclusion, of negotiations in the Geneva-based Conference on Disarma-ment on a treaty for the elimination of nuclear weapons along the lines sign-posted in the 1988 Action Plan.

The bus ride will be seen by history to have been more hype than substance. A dramatic gesture like that must, to be meaningful, signal either the beginning or the conclusion of a process. The visit to Lahore was neither. There was already a dialogue on; so nothing new was begun. Thedialogue is aeons from a conclusion; so there was nothing to be ended.

The Lahore Declaration is of no substantive significance: if it were, Lahore would have been not a declaration but an agreement, like the Shimla Agreement. Nothing has happened in the two months since Lahore to show that India-Pakistan relations are moving with any deliberate speed to any point they would not have, in any case, otherwise rea-ched. The historic significance of his journey is not international, but domestic: it will enable post-Vajpayee governments to claim the BJP’s blessings for improving India-Pakistan relatio-ns. The task before any incoming government will, therefore, have to be to address itself to Indo-Pak relations, not public relations.

The Budget is all right as far as it goes, and, therefore, will, in no significantly altered form, go through. The recovery in the economy is a statistical illusion and a stock market myth. Any incoming government will have to significantly correct the course the economy hastaken in the last three years. First, the precipitous fall in Central Plan outlay, far and away the most important instrument for stimulating demand and sparking general economic resurgence, will have to be raised. Second, the reform process must be pursued undistracted by the bogus argument over the saffron meaning of swadeshi. Third, lip service of the BJP kind must yield to a solemn and sincere commitment to agriculture and rural development (including genuine Panchayati Raj).

Finance ministers of the last three years have converted themselves into ministers of corporate affairs; corporate affairs are important but not to the neglect of the submerged two-thirds of the economy. Fourth, the external balance: next only to stagnating industry, stagnating exports are the worst of the legacy an incoming government will inherit. Although this has hardly been noticed in the media, it is the Cauvery that drowned the Vajpayee government.

The blinkered, larg-ely North Indian coalition which Vajpayee st-artedputting together in March 1998, did not care to even raise Cau-very. It was Jayalalitha who insisted on the inclusion of this vital economic lifeline of the South in the coalition’s National Agenda for Governance. Ramakri-shna Hegde’s guffaw would have alerted a Prime Minister more se-nsitised to the priorities of the south to the critical importance of this matter to his most important ally, the AIADMK. Instead, she was sought to be mollified by a touch of deft drafting.

That Vajpayee had no intention of addressing with any seriousness the question of the implementation of the Cauvery Tribunal Award was established by his ignoring the issue until his hand was forced by the pre-Independence Day crisis which overtook his government. He reached out over his principal ally’s head to her arch political foe and without even consultation with her fostered an accord which might have saved his tryst with unfurling the national flag from the ramparts of the Red Fort but has not given to the farmers of the Cauverydelta a drop of the entitlement of water they secured through the Tribunal’s interim award.

Jayalalitha was quick to point to the defects of the accord, not once but twice, in detailed statements issued after the accord was concluded and soon after the solitary, and singularly infructuous, meeting of the Cauvery Authority. What is worse, her arguments were never refuted nor was she taken into confidence about her concerns. How utterly inane is the accord is evidenced by the fact that the Authority has not been able to agree on even where to measure the flow (at the Billingudlu outlet point in Karnataka or the Mettur inlet point in Tamil Nadu), nor on how the flow is to be measured.

In consequence, after the conclusion of the accord, Karunanidhi’s figure of Cauvery inflows is half J.H. Patil’s figure of outflows! Thus, the first meeting of the Authority was summarily terminated and no meeting has been held since the inaugural. Yet, the Cauvery accord is being touted as one of the great achievements of thegovernment. In a democracy, it is essential to sustain the parliamentary majority that legitimises the right to govern. From March to December 1998, the "weak, vacillating, compromising" Vajpayee understood this – and survived.

Then he started listening to editorialists and columnists to forget the essential opportunism of his coalition and start governing as if he were really his own man. It has taken just 100 days from the bang of Vajpayee’s riposte to the RSS at the Bangalore National Executive in January to the whimper of his exit in April. Which is why the rule book for Parliament instructs MPs to address the chair and never look to the Press gallery.

Aiyar is a Congress party official but these views are his own