Vajpayee, Part II

You have misread your own worth, you couldn8217;t define yourself differently. Andthe acts of difference 8212; bombs of national confidence and the bus of history-seeking defiance 8212; lay so starkly distant from the reality of everyday governance, in which the abiding motifs were Sanskrit, onion, Joshi, George, Jaya, Nagpur and the lengthening prime ministerial pause. It took so long for Vajpayee to get himself animated, to realise the folly of self-inflicted victimhood, to come to terms with his own worth.

So today, believe him if he says that he cannot accept martyrdom, that the only theme of the perceived alternative is the personal rather than the public, in spite of the full knowledge that it is all his own making. For, what is Jayalalitha if not an extravagantly enlarged idea of the wronged-woman-in-search-of-justice? The realm of the public in Jayalalitha8217;s politics is unreal, it is a repudiation of the very idea of Dravidian exceptionalism. For Jayalalitha, it has always been a very personal struggle of Kancheevaram bathos.

She has come a long way from the culture-specificrebellion of E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker, from Annadurai8217;s institutionalisation of that Tamil-First, Tamil-Alone, Tamil-Supreme rebellion as DMK, even from the MGR-Karunanidhi duo8217;s translation of that rebellion into a celluloid sizzler. She has migrated from the mise en scene of pulp frisson into the psychodrama of Dravidianism not to enhance the dark-glasses-and-fur-cap politics of MGR, but to write her own mythology in a script free of Dravidian heritage. Chief Minister Jayalalitha was Our Lady of Kitsch, a silk-and-shoes diva whose fury was sulphuric, whose benevolence was truly gigantic: indulge me, you bastards, I8217;ll make you happy.

Indulge me, Jayalalitha has been telling the Vajpayee government ever since she descended from cardboard supremacy into the power-sharing lotus. Indulgence meant Karunanidhi8217;s head and freedom from corruption charges. But she could nationalise her fears and paranoia. Hence words like Bhagwat and Fernandes and missiles, words which have a national resonance. Nothing surprising,it was inevitable. Only the BJP looked surprised. The party has spent the best part of its life in power for the management of Jayalalitha. It was such a waste, all that energy misspent on something with which BJP could not have ever had a culturally compatible co-habitation. And the biggest irony was that it took a Jayalalitha, the highest beneficiary of the BJP8217;s initial insecurity, to highlight the other security risk not strategic, purely political called George Fernandes.

The Lohiaite is the archetypal wrecker of Indian politics. The Vajpayee government minus Jayalalitha means a redeeming kind of lightness. The George within is permanent tension, for the socialist8217;s autonomy cannot co-exist with the responsibilities of power. Revolutionaries, even after retirement, need either a self-serving enemy or a cause-friendly friend across the border. If Jaya has made herself impossible to manage, hasn8217;t George too? From Bhagwat to China-obsession, Fernandes has taken free speech much beyond the collectivevoice of the coalition. Minister Fernandes may be a far cry from the socialist of reckless romance. But, he has an ideology to preserve, a certain commitment to the cause. This cause has come in direct conflict with the cause of the BJP government. Why is it that Vajpayee is not realising it?

Well, the exigencies of the coalition. Today, as his government seeks a confidence vote, that too with so much confidence, he has his chosen moment to redefine the ethic of survival. He is confident of surviving. But survive to keep your honour as well as mandate intact. For, today, we have an idea about Vajpayee and his government, but we have no idea about the alternative. We know that this confidence vote has been necessitated not by an act of misgovernance but by an act of miscalculation, or misperception. We know that the alternative talk is as repulsive as the main talkers.

Talkers like Harkishen Singh Surjeet, who, in communism8217;s afterlife as a ghost story, is the Count without a Transylvanian prop. He smellsblood today, but what does he want, apart from BJP Undone? Still, you can understand the communist in the age of coalition, or, at least, you can understand Surjeet in the time of Delhi-in-distress. To understand him you only have to rewrite an old Moscow slogan: Lenin is more living than all the living. In Delhi today, the communist is not the only one who is more living than all the living. Quite a few heartland jesters, of social justice variety, have joined the comrade to make the alternative possible. In India, the easiest thing is not governance or the accumulation of ideas but the formation of government, which, we are made to believe, is an activity independent of the people. For, do you know anything about the Congress or its president at this moment, except that the party can form a government?

There is a government, and it has the people8217;s mandate. This moment is for it to renew its mandate, without the unbearable burden of a Jayalalitha, and, hopefully, with the bearable embarrassment of aGeorge Fernandes. The leader is one who can afford to lose a government for the sake of the people. In India it is so easy because there are so many others who can make one at short notice.