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Journalism of Courage
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 BJP8217;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 nation8217;s attention by any means possible. Political scientists have pointed to the traditional divide between party and government 8212; 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.
