No well-known Indian has cut so tragic a figure in the wake of the demolition of the Babri structure in Ayodhya as Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The prime minister too has been in an unenviable position. Indeed, his dilemma has been far more painful.
Unlike Mr Vajpayee, he is obliged to deal with problems resulting from the demolition. But that very obligation prevents him from putting his anguish on public display.
Comparisons are seldom wholly apt. But they are occasionally helpful. In this case, it may not be too wide off the mark to compare Mr Vajpayee with Pandit Nehru. Pandit Nehru felt lost when Gandhiji abruptly called off the civil disobedience movement after the Chauri Chaura incident.
He did not know where to look for solace in the confrontation between the Mahatma and Netaji Subhash Bose. He found it extremely painful to go along with Gandhiji in the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 when he believed that the very future of human civilisation was at stake. And just as Pandit Nehru stuck to the Mahatma and the Congress, Mr Vajpayee will stay on in the BJP.
That is not all. Those who watched with care Mr Vajpayee’s performance as minister for external affairs in the Janata government, will testify that Pandit Nehru was his model. Similarly those who remember his role in steering the BJP towards “integral humanism” and “Gandhian socialism” will agree that this frame of reference is not very different from Pandit Nehru’s.
Like Pandit Nehru, Mr Vajpayee too can cope with people in a mass best from the safe distance of a rostrum. The hurly burly of street demonstrations is not suited to his temperament though he has had to engage in it.
Pandit Nehru would have loved to confine mass politics to elections every five years and make the Parliament House the sole agency for determining the political future of individuals as well as parties, as is broadly the case in Britain. And Parliament is where Mr Vajpayee is at his best. But while Mr Vajpayee has much in common with Pandit Nehru in terms of personality, the situation he faces is very different from that the latter faced after independence. Here it would be more pertinent to compare Mr Vajpayee’s dilemma with that of Mr Narasimha Rao.
To recognise the validity of this proposition, we have only to disregard the twin facts that they belong to two different parties, one in power in New Delhi and the other in opposition, and one is in the office of prime minister and the other is not in command of even his own party.
After August 15, 1947, Hindus had reason to be reasonably content. They had worked for independence and they had got it. They wanted a state in which Muslims would not exercise the right to veto and they had got it. On the surface, they were opposed to partition but mainly because their leaders had not told them that the price of “unity” would be intolerably high.
Indian polity would not have taken the turn it has if the economy had been a success story; if planning had not spawned a regime of Byzantine regulations and of unbelievable corruption from top to bottom. And if the dominant westernised elite in control of the state machinery, media and academia had not been so divorced from the country’s cultural roots and had instead tended them. But these have been facts of life.
Issues have got confused because they have been wrongly framed. In reality the issue has not been “appeasement” of Muslims. It has been the contempt the Hindu elite has shown towards Hindus who have lived by old mores.
This has been like adding insult to injury. The story has not been as stark as in the former Soviet Union but it has been similar. It was bound to provoke a response. That response has been with us in one form or another since the late 1960s or early 1970s. Events in Ayodhya since 1986 should be seen in the context of the decay of the old order and hopefully the birth pangs of a new one. Mr Vajpayee is a product of the old order even more than Mr Rao.
Economic Times, 8 January 1993