Anniversary angst

At a public rally in New Delhi on Friday to celebrate the third anniversary of his government, Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee claimed for the NDA the achievement of having provided a stable government for three years. He can certainly draw satisfaction from the fact that he has succeeded in managing a fairly unruly coalition, comprising some 24 variegated entities, for a period that has far exceeded the life-span of other coalitional ventures of this kind. Whether they were the post-Emergency Janata Party forays into power, the V.P. Singh dispensation or even the experiments presided over by H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral, coalitional governments have had a short and brutal existence. The relative longevity of this one, therefore, is no mean testimony to the sense and sensitivity of the prime minister and his proven ability to take people along with him.

Of course, it is one of the ironies of the BJP government, that while it has been able to manage its external relations with disparate political groups fairly efficiently, it has met with conspicuous failure when it came to the BJP’s own fraternal organisations. These have proved to be a particularly raucous bunch of politically ambitious outfits, all of them claiming for themselves a special perch in the power hierarchy. Theirs has been a constant, unremitting attempt to capture the nation’s attention by any means possible. Political scientists have pointed to the traditional divide between party and government — the first, ever conscious of its obligations to its constituency, the other, bound by the expectations of the citizen. In the present case, there is a twist to the script. Here, apart from the divide between government and party, there is the divide between party, government and the outfits that comprise the parivar. But unlike the first two entities, the last does not have democratic legitimacy. It is this that makes their continued interference in government untenable and irksome.

The RSS demands action on Ayodhya, knowing full well that the BJP has put the issue on the backburner. The VHP’s Ashok Singhal demands that Brajesh Mishra be sacked and the post of principal secretary abolished, despite the fact that he has no locus standi on such matters. Anybody and everybody among these busybodies believe it is their birthright to take potshots at the prime minister. During Thursday’s dinner meeting to untangle the knotted skein that the relationship between the government and the parivar has become, the RSS — playing the honest broker — apparently extracted a commitment from the BJP leadership that the parivar will be consulted at all stages of government policy making. This is both preposterous and unconstitutional. As an anniversary gift to himself, the prime minister should tell his unruly parivar just where it gets off.