Hopeful, Atally hopeful

And all this while we had thought that it was Atal Bihari Vajpayee who was the poet in the party. At the BJP’s national council meeting last week, Vajpayee’s party colleagues, to the last man and woman, proved that they too had unsuspected skills of poetic composition within them as they poured their hearts out in praise of him. It was a performance that combined the caramel hues of a mushaira, with the dulcet tones of a durbar; it was a virtual stampede to touch the high chords, a veritable wallowing in sound and imagery.

If L.K. Advani was first off the block with his fulsome praise for the prime minister’s governance, Venkaiah Naidu with characteristically overblown rhetoric characterised him as the “statesman India adores and the world admires”. If prodigal son, Kalyan Singh, made up for lost time by evoking Vajayee’s name in the same breath as he did that of Lord Ram’s; temperamental daughter Uma Bharati did one better by regarding him as Lord Vishnu. She begged him to contest from Bhopal since Uttar Pradesh already has “Ram in his abode at Ayodhya”. While Shahnawaz Hussein, in keeping with his status as the party’s only Muslim MP, waxed eloquent about Vajpayee’s secular credentials and put him in a bracket higher than Nehru’s; Sangh Priya Gautam reminded everyone that Vajpayee is next to Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi in promoting peace. Pramod Mahajan talked of Vajpayee proving to be a Don Bradman of Indian politics and Sushma Swaraj bent over backwards in praise of Atalji’s leadership.

Call it brand imaging or consensual cult-creation, but the purpose really is to ride to victory on the larger-than-life image of the prime minister. It recalls that other moment when Vajpayee was being projected as the “man India awaited”. The slogan then was a tentative “Ab ki bari, Atal Bihari”. Today the tentativeness is gone, it is full-throated confidence that’s on display now: “Jan, jan ki pukar, Atalji ki phir sarkar”. Whether this calibrated sycophancy will do the trick, we’ll have to wait and see.