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Journalism of Courage
The BJP, which is the successor of Syama Prasad Mookerji’s Bharatiya Jana Sangh and the political affiliate of the RSS, has had many Hindutva figures in its ranks over the years such as L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Kalyan Singh, Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, and Yogi Adityanath. However, the party’s journey from the Jana Sangh to the Modi era would not have been possible without a leader who could speak the hegemonic language firmly put in place by Jawaharlal Nehru: secularism.
Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who passed away in 2018 and would have entered the centenary year of his birth on this day, made a unique contribution to the BJP that came at a time when it was struggling to find legitimacy as Nehruvian secularism had become political commonsense. Nehru, as PM, had sidelined Purushottam Das Tandon, a conservative Congress leader from UP, and taken charge of the party in 1950. There were Congress conservatives such as Sampurnanand, D P Mishra, and Seth Govind Das in the Hindi-speaking states. Congress governments in the north Indian states also banned cow slaughter in the late 1950s and early 1960s and promoted Hindi. But it was Nehru who steered, sometimes alone, Indian secularism to the status of the defining idea of India for decades to come.
The Jana Sangh had little in its arsenal to shake the Nehru government. Too far a turn to the Right was met with universal condemnation and soft conservatism was a non-starter in front of Congress conservatives in the Hindi belt. However, the man who had the most intimate connection with Nehruvian parliamentary ethos and the RSS’s thinking was a young Balrampur MP, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1957 when Nehru was PM.
None could articulate Hindu conservatism as convincingly as Vajpayee who had a rare flair for Hindi. But his influences were eclectic. He served as private secretary to Mookerji, internalising the moderate Hindutva of the anglicised politician. Mookerji quit the Hindu Mahasabha in November 1948 over its refusal to admit non-Hindus as members. It was at that time when a young Vajpayee learnt the tricks of the trade to negotiate Nehruvian India.
Then there was the influence of Nehru himself who was somewhat fond of the young Jana Sangh MP. Vajpayee would reminisce till the 1990s that when he would take on the first Prime Minister in his speeches in the Lok Sabha, Nehru would never lose his temper. He once accused Nehru of having a duplicitous personality (mila-jula vyaktitva) but when the PM met him during a banquet the same evening, he commended Vajpayee for his speech.
The opportunity to see the world of Hindutva from the secular prism and the world of secularism from the Hindutva prism made Vajpayee adept at speaking the Nehruvian language without getting drawn into it. This was to benefit the BJP immensely in the future.
Vajpayee was active in the days of non-Congressism in the 1960s, when he and Deen Dayal Upadhyaya diluted core ideological issues — with the one exception of a sadhus’ protest outside Parliament in 1966 for a national ban on cow slaughter — and went into electoral arrangements with Lohia socialists, Chaudhary Charan Singh (after Singh quit the Congress post-1967), the Congress (0) after the Congress split in 1969, and the Swatantra Party. The Samyukta Vidhayak Dal governments of UP and Bihar in 1967, a result of this deft alliance building, also had the Communists.
The JP movement of the 1970s, coming a few years after the landslide victory of Indira Gandhi against a grand Opposition alliance in 1971, was also about several Opposition parties coming together on the ground. The Janata Party experiment of 1977 after Emergency — when the Jana Sangh, the Congress (O), the Lok Dal, and the socialists merged to form the Janata Party — saw Vajpayee in power for the first time as Minister of External Affairs. He would recount in Parliament in the 1990s that he saw a framed photo of Nehru in the corridor of the ministry missing. He asked officials where it had gone. He got no reply but the photo was later put up again.
When the Janata Party came apart on the issue of “dual membership” — Vajpayee and Advani were both ministers and RSS swayamsevaks — and Indira Gandhi returned from political oblivion, Vajpayee founded the BJP in 1980, steering it towards Gandhian socialism as a motto. Rajiv Gandhi stormed to power with 400 seats in Lok Sabha in 1984 riding on the sympathy wave following Indira’s assassination. The BJP won just two seats, with Vajpayee losing to Madhavrao Scindia in Gwalior.
Within two years, Advani was party president and Vajpayee receded somewhat from the political arena. “Aajkal main khali hoon. Kaam ki talash mein hoon. Party ne mujhe adhyaksh pad se hata diya hai aur Gwalior waalon ne Lok Sabha se meri chhutti kar di hai (I am without work and looking for work these days. The party has removed me as president and Gwalior has sent me out of the Lok Sabha),” a smiling Vajpayee told a Pune audience while speaking at an event in the mid-1980s to commemorate V D Savarkar.
The BJP under Advani passed the Palampur resolution in 1989 to back the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and Advani launched his Rath Yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya in 1990, giving the BJP an electoral headstart for the 1990s and turning Indian politics bipolar. The Babri Masjid was demolished on December 6, 1992, with Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, and some others present in Ayodhya.
Post-Babri, Vajpayee’s days in political wilderness were over and he was deployed to defend the BJP in Parliament. He marshalled all his experience to defend a party that none was willing to touch. He spoke an inclusive language without being overtly secular. Rather, he showed secularism to be ‘‘natural’’ to mainstream Indian ethos: “Dharmnirpeskhta is desh ki ghutti mein hai (Secularism is part of the core ethos of India).” He mildly rebuked the Opposition to an electorally rising BJP, often using the words, “Matbhed hona chahiye par manbhed nahin (there should be disagreements but not dislike).”
In the 1990s, television as a medium started becoming a round-the-clock affair. As Parliament proceedings were being beamed live into living rooms, an aspiring middle class discovered Vajpayee the wordsmith. His inclusive talk was appreciated by BJP supporters, as it was spoken in earthy Hindi that was culturally attractive to them, and also by opponents who saw in him a graceful politician. Some of his opponents even called him “the right man in the wrong party”. If Advani had given the BJP an electoral edge amid political isolation, Vajpayee gave the party institutional acceptance.
It was now Vajpayee who had to lead the BJP. Advani himself announced his name as the party’s face in 1995 — towards a tenuous power that came with coalition compulsions. Acutely aware that the BJP had breached a critical mass and the Congress was on the decline, regional parties, whose politics entails both a distinctive regional character and the need to share power at the Centre, were looking for a safe way to embrace the BJP. The answer was Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the face. In the late 1990s, a slogan was coined: Baari baari sabki baari, Ab ki baari Atal Bihari (everyone gets a chance one by one; this time it is the chance of Atal Bihari).”
Finally, Vajpayee struck gold as he ran two coalition governments from 1998 to 2004, managing to do business with everyone from Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi to Mamata Banerjee. He had sweetly struck down the discourse of Nehruvian secularism and brought the BJP to the centre of Indian politics. He bowed out in 2004, when the Congress returned to power, buoyed largely by a shock defeat of Chandrababu Naidu, an NDA partner, in Andhra Pradesh. Vajpayee was ailing and last appeared in public on his birthday in 2007, when this correspondent met him.
The Vajpayee era now is well and truly over. Under Narendra Modi, Nehruvian secularism has been replaced by Hindutva as India’s ruling ideology and the Congress has been in terminal decline for nine years. The Opposition, however, has not a single Vajpayee in its ranks, someone who can negotiate a hegemonic ideology and do business with it without getting drawn into it.
