Ayodhya soundbites

Decoding Vajpayee is, as we have already noted in these columns, a dangerous pursuit. The Wordsworthian dictum that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling comes powerfully to mind whenever the microphone is placed before him.

It could be a case of primeministerial poetics or poetical primeministrics (take your pick), but the next thing that invariably follows the oratory is a great hullabaloo in the national echo chamber we call Parliament. But the cruel suggestion that he was merely parroting somebody else’s lines had Prime Minister Vajpayee cut to the quick.

Which self-respecting wizard of words, both written and spoken, would want to be saddled with the charge that his nouns and verbs, not to speak of pronouns and participles, are not his very own? “I am not under compulsion or pressure from any group,” he thundered in response.

So what, precisely, did the prime minister mean when he stated the other day that “we shall build a Ram temple to fulfill Paramhans’s last wish”? Vajpayee, himself, has just clarified what he had really meant was that “the Ayodhya issue could be resolved either through negotiation or a court verdict”. Now that the last word on the issue has been pronounced (for the moment), let’s move to another topic, shall we?