The BJP has concluded that it cannot possibly go into the next elections on the record of the NDA government. With public disillusionment mounting on every aspect of governance — from the genocide in Gujarat to the crumbling of the economy, to the false starts in Jammu and Kashmir and the stand-off with Pakistan — the RSS has prevailed on the BJP to start the process of distancing itself from the NDA in the expectation that the BJP on its own agenda will do better than if it is identified with the flotsam and jetsam of the alliance it leads. In any case, the sangh parivar was never happy at having waited fifty years to come to power only to implement someone else’s agenda. They gritted their teeth and bore it because it was believed the NDA could over time be veered around to the sangh agenda. There was, however, such impatience to reach that stage that by the end of 1998 itself Nagpur started growling at Race Course Road. Vajpayee’s unhappiest birthday surely was the one he had to endure on December 25 that year with the guns of the RSS booming around him and the VHP preparing for its Dharma Sansad a few months later at which he was to be denounced as an apostate. It was Jayalalithaa who came to Vajpayee’s rescue then. Her withdrawal from the NDA concentrated the sangh parivar’s mind wonderfully on the fragility of their hold on power. The NDA came bouncing back to win convincingly the mid-term elections of October 1999. In my first column for this paper after that election I wrote that the threat to the new government came least from a divided Opposition and not much more from any prospect of a division among its allies than from the forces of the parivar lurking behind the scenes and furiously tugging at the marionettes they believed they had placed on stage. Striking success in governance or victories in by-elections could have indefinitely postponed the reckoning between Vajpayee and his parivar. But half-way into the term of the present Lok Sabha, Vajpayee has nothing to show for his years in power but survival. The NDA government is still there. And the allies can be manipulated to keep Race Course Road saffron. But beyond that there is a void. The miracle promised by Yashwant Sinha’s budget of 2001 has proved a mirage. Scams and swindles more than reform and renaissance have marked economic performance. The IT revolution has ended in a stock-market bust. Agriculture stagnates. Industry is in the doldrums. Foreign investment has become the channel for ever more innovative — and remunerative — forms of corruption. Infrastructure development is reduced to an argument over railway zones. Arun Shourie is happily selling off what he did nothing to create. Disinvestment has fuelled little but shriller and shriller rhetoric. At the hustings, the NDA has steadfastly maintained its record of losing every Assembly poll — bar Goa — that it has contested. Starting with Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in the twilight of 1998, it has since been defeated in Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, Karnataka, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Manipur, Arunachal, Assam, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Uttaranchal and Punjab. In Kerala, of course, it was no show. It is becoming increasingly clear — to the parivar as much as to anyone else — that the 1999 Lok Sabha victory was Pervez Musharraf’s gift to Vajpayee. If Kargil had not taken place, the NDA would long have become part of the furniture of the past. In 2003 or 2004, Advani will be there to lead the BJP into battle. Ranged against him will be 5000 years of India’s composite civilisation Poor economic performance and poor political performance have been compounded by failure on the foreign policy front. The alliance so diligently pursued with the United States has restored Kashmir, for the first time since 1965, to the agenda of the UN Security Council and given us the pleasure of listening to Clinton lecture us — in the Central Hall of Parliament of all places! — on Kashmir being an area of ‘dispute’, which term we had hotly contested till Billy Boy shut our collective mouth. Plus virtually weekly descents by sundry US officials come to wag their fingers at us. Jaswant Singh rushing in post-September 11 where angels had hitherto feared to tread has not led to our becoming the favoured one in the White House but to the co-option of the world’s worst terrorist state as the principal ally in the White House’s war on terrorism. Pakistan has shown us the limits of our manouverability over cross-border terrorism. And after the scare the nation got at the prospect of nuclear war, our bomb is not as reassuring as it seemed that Buddha Purnima night in May 1998. So, with nothing to report but setbacks and abject failure, the sangh parivar has got its puppet prime minister to signal that the NDA party is over and the BJP can go back to where it truly belongs — the parivar and its Hindutva. That is the import of the elevation of Lal Krishna Advani to the post of deputy PM. He is no flunkey. He is now Prince Regent. Vajpayee may continue to reign. It is Advani who will henceforth rule. To this end, the gauleiters of Hindutva have been put in place: Narendra Modi ensconced in Gujarat; Vinay Katiyar at the head of the party in Uttar Pradesh; Uma Bharati imminently in Madhya Pradesh; and Venkaiah Naidu as the titular Czar of the party with Arun Jaitley as his Rasputin. The parivar is back in business. Vajpayee will gently fade away. Advani’s strident Hindutva will overtake the idiom and practice of governance. Some of the more conscientious secularists in the NDA might be left with no alternative to cutting the branch on which they perch. There are, however, enough secularists of the George Fernandes kind to keep the Devil at supper. This might — or might not — precipitate an early election. But whether the next Lok Sabha election comes in 2003 or 2004, Advani will be there to lead the BJP into battle. Ranged against him will be 5000 years of India’s composite civilisation. I have little doubt it is India which will win.
