Cryptic crossword

Atal Bihari Vajpayee has famously said that he writes poetry to 8220;make sense of my world8221;. The rest of us, in contrast, spend our t...

Atal Bihari Vajpayee has famously said that he writes poetry to 8220;make sense of my world8221;. The rest of us, in contrast, spend our time trying to make sense of his words. Because Atalspeak, at its best, can be what Winston Churchill once said about Russia8212; it is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The latest verbal conundrum that the prime minister has presented to the nation is, of course, that comment in an interview to Der Spiegel, the German weekly. So what exactly did he say? That he would quit if his third and final attempt at reconciliation with Pakistan failed? Does that mean that he would 8220;retire8221;? And is that the same thing as seeking 8220;political sanyas8221;? It can go on and on, this exercise in deconstruction. And it doesn8217;t help when the speaker, when asked what exactly he meant by those words and who he meant them for, flashes a Sphinx-like smile and says: Maine apne liye kaha tha I said that for myself. For him it is clearly politic to be poetic.

Of course, such poetic licence can have many in high dudgeon, especially if they tend8212;like the fiery edit-writer of the Shiv Sena8217;s Samnaa8212;to take everything in a most literal sense: The prime minister8217;s latest statement reflects his 8216;8216;defeatist psyche8217;8217;, he/she thundered. Perhaps so, but perhaps not. Vajpayee has often used words both as a cloak to confuse others, and as a shield to protect himself. Notice how he does it. Once when asked, in the Indo-Pak context, whether war clouds were on the horizon, he looked up and observed asmaan khula hai the sky is clear. Or when required to upbraid Narendra Modi after the Gujarat riots without quite upbraiding him, he took recourse to the expression that Modi should practice 8216;8216;rajdharma8217;8217;.

Of course, the danger of misinterpretation is always present and there have been many occasions when Vajpayee has been constrained to press the erase button. Take that controversial remark made at New York8217;s Staten Island when he declared emotionally that he had always considered himself a 8220;swayamsewak8221;. Shortly thereafter came the clarification: What he had meant was that he was India8217;s 8220;pratham sewak8221; and that he had always considered himself a 8220;swayamsewak of India and her people8221;. Indeed, words, for a man who loves them, can be both bouquet and noose, both triumph and trap.