Vajpayee’s High Five

And Vajpayee, more than any other single factor, provides the glue that keeps the separate parts together. Mamata Banerjee might fight the BJP in West Bengal but will swear by Vajpayee’s leadership at the Centre. As will Karunanidhi, Chandrababu Naidu and Farooq Abdullah. Opportunism is too facile a reason to explain the stability of the NDA regime, for if opportunism and a craving for power were the only things that mattered, the Janata experiment would not have floundered. That the NDA government is a genuine coalition and not a minority government “supported from outside” by a larger party has obviously helped. But Vajpayee’s laissez faire style of leadership has helped a lot more.

What makes Vajpayee’s feat a genuine rarity is that he seems a lot stronger at the end of five consecutive years in office than when he began. Most incumbent prime ministers lose their sheen over time. Vajpayee, however, appears to be in a better position today than he was even a year ago. Despite the Gujarat carnage that has left an indelible stain on his rule, NDA allies still stand by him; despite his endless oscillations on most everything, his public stature as a leader has grown; and despite the periodic swipes by the Togadias, Thengadis and Sudarshans, the Sangh Parivar as a whole has decided to back and bless him.

So what makes Vajpayee tick? How has he managed to mean all things to all people without coming across as a scheming hypocrite? The irony of Vajpayee’s success as leader is that he lacks all the obvious traits of leadership. Unlike his two favourite prime ministers, he has neither the implacable convictions and patrician authority of Jawaharlal Nehru nor the decisiveness or dictatorial streak of Indira Gandhi. Instead, ambiguity and ambivalence have always been his hallmark: ‘‘flip flop flip’’, that about sums up his policies. Be it Ayodhya or Iraq, he can say one thing one day and quite the other on another day, or he may say nothing at all — specialising in the meandering speech, the half-in-jest innuendo, the oblique allusion that leave his audience guessing.

But it is this very ability to speak in two voices and sound sincere in both that makes Vajpayee the leader that he is. If Vajpayee’s real talent lies in managing contradictions, it is because he is a man of deep and abiding contradictions himself. He has never given up the ideology he imbibed as a young man in the RSS shakhas, but neither has he shed an innate ability to get on with people who have beliefs other than his own. He gives everyone under him a long rope but, ultimately, calls the shots. He is laidback to a fault but cannot take an iota of personal criticism lying down.

Long before the NDA experiment came his way, Vajpayee was a man of consensus, a builder of coalitions. Though an RSS man, Vajpayee started his political career as Jana Sangh founder S.P. Mookerjee’s private secretary and after his mentor’s death assumed the mantle of the “liberal” leader of an illiberal party. It was not in the narrow confines of party organisation but in the cut and thrust of parliamentary debate that Vajpayee learnt his politics. From his very first election to Lok Sabha in 1957, he was always the pre-eminent leader of the Jana Sangh in Parliament. And from 1967 onwards, he insisted that the future of the Jana Sangh lay in forming coalitions with even non-like minded parties. In 1977-78, he was a peacemaker in Morarji Desai’s fractious cabinet and when the BJP was founded in 1980, he claimed that it was the heir to the Janata Party (not Jana Sangh) for it had been true to the values of the JP movement.

The strident Hindutva opted by the BJP after the 1984 debacle left Vajpayee in the cold, for stridency has never been his style. He can be neither stridently secular nor stridently communal, earning enemies in both camps but winning the middle ground in the bargain. It is this talent, honed over many decades of public life, to reach out to a much larger constituency than the Sangh Parivar can ever do that makes Vajpayee so indispensable in this coalition era. And no one knows this better than his deputy, L.K. Advani. Advani may be a master strategist but Vajpayee has the makings of a statesman, Advani may command the respect of the cadres but Vajpayee can reach out to the masses, and Advani may make most of the runs but Vajpayee —as long as he is able and willing — will always be his skipper.

Vajpayee, many opponents fear, is far more dangerous in the long run for he promotes the divisive ideology of his brethren in an avuncular, affable and insidious manner. Govindacharya may have been exiled but his famous quip likening Vajpayee to a mukhota refuses to go away. Vajpayee’s mask, though, is a little more complex. It is not something he puts on and off at will. Like a Kathakali dancer who paints his face day after day, year after year, and fuses his persona into the character he seeks to portray, Vajpayee too has merged himself into the mask of ambiguity he has worn for so long. It is the mask that maketh the man and therein lies his strength and our vulnerability.