How will history remember Vajpayee? His single most important contribution is this: he embarked on the ambitious project of effectively bringing to an end a system of apartheid in Indian politics. No major political party was to be an untouchable from now on.

Apartheid is a system of separate development. In some ways it was a horizontal apartheid, reflective of the stratification in the social order. But the more politically contrived was the vertical apartheid dividing the secularists from the communalists, placing the minorities in the predicament of being a static vote bank for one group and an irritant for the other.

The division between the secularists and the communal was not always a mere political contrivance. There were real differences. Did webecome independent after two hundred years of foreign rule or after a thousand years? Was the medieval period one of benign rule, at least partially, or was it an uninterrupted chronicle of invasions and desecration of temples?

The Muslim angst on this count was succinctly articulated by Shibli Noamani: "All you have chosen to remember from the annals is that Aurangzeb was anti-Hindu and an oppressor! You have forgotten everything that was positive." The remarkable fact is that this struck a responsive chord with the majority of Hindus. It was political Hinduism, like political Islam, which was narrow and pernicious. To this extent secularism was never in danger in Hindustan.

The danger arose when the dominant political party, the Congress, fell back on an incantation of ``secularism'' as a means of keeping in its fold the substantial minority vote bank, raising images of a pampered minority and thereby inviting a Hindu backlash. The consequence of these convulsions was that the Congress kept the communalagenda centrestage, even while screaming "secularism". The BJP, in other words, was to a large extent a beneficiary of communalised politics sustained by the Congress over a long period.

The Congress (and other parties including the Left) sought to isolate the BJP as an untouchable in this framework of political apartheid. This communalised politics reinforced the communal divide at the social level which, in turn, aggravated communal politics. It was a vicious circle. The Muslim, in a mofussil area, did not (could not) distinguish between a Congress Hindu and a BJP Hindu. Hindu was a Hindu.

Let me give you two examples of the apartheid this bred. In speaking to a packed hall in Allahabad University in 1990, (30 per cent of whom identified themselves as Muslims by a show of hands) I asked whether any Muslim in the audience had ever visited a Hindu home and vice versa? The response was a deafening silence.

About the same time communal riots broke out in Aligarh. Some Hindi newspapers reported that theinjured from the city were being murdered by the doctors in a medical college in the university. On reaching the university, I found a group of journalists form a semicircle around the local BJP MLA seated on a cane chair outside a building on the periphery of the campus. Not one of the reporters had verified the facts from the medical college. Why? Because the university precincts were the abode of the demonised "other". Only when I prodded them did they venture inside -- and the lie about hospital murders was nailed.

The fall of the Babri Masjid will go down as the most important turning point in contemporary political history. Individuals and formations were jolted out of their stupor. The Congress was exposed for its sham secularism.It is at this stage that Vajpayee pitched his tent in the middle ground, occupying the turf being vacated by the Congress, reaching out beyond the apartheid line. Unnerved by Vajpayee's audacity to unshackle himself from dogma, his own partymen furtively whispered muk hauta(mask).

The "mask", meanwhile, spiralled, into the spaces, way above those who called him mukhauta. Today if Vajpayee were to break with the BJP, the coalition he has supervised, however wobbly, would stay with him. Could you ever have imagined Ram Vilas Paswan reinforcing a coalition which accepts Vajpayee's leadership? This is an unbelievable extension of his acceptability.

Paswan's is a sub-plot deserving explanation. His targets within his OBC politics were Laloo Prasad Yadav and Sharad Yadav. He helped push Laloo out of the Janata Dal; Sharad Yadav diminished himself. On the national scale he saw the BJP anoint Mayawati as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, but the Congress variety of upper casteism preferred the India International Centre image of Inder Gujral when Paswan (so he thinks) would have been a more durable candidate for prime ministership. Now Paswan is squarely in the NDA, his eyes on the short term cabinet berth and visions of a prime ministership at some later date.

All of this isgalling for the Sangh Parivar except those with a political sense. I suspect the media has got an inaccurate focus on L.K. Advani. He, I am told, sees the advantages of occupying the middle ground. He is only a trifle more wary of the strategic consequences of tactical adjustments. But wariness is not denial.

Vajpayee has broken out of the apartheid system. He is acceptable to an ever wider coalition, bearing a faint resemblance to the one the Congress once contained in itself. Just look. Rajiv Gandhi's best friends are with Vajpayee.

And they must know the strengths and weaknesses of what they have abandoned. If Rajiv's buddies have gravitated towards Vajpayee what magic will keep Jitendra Prasada, Pranab Mukherjee and Narain Dutt Tewari among a host of others glued to Sonia Gandhi?

In these circumstances, Vajpayee faces a twin challenge: First, to pull as much of the Sangh Parivar as is willing to see the light onto the middle ground. Second, to set a national agenda for a "tolerant society" withinthe framework of a strong, federal India.

There will be two contradictory pulls operating on him. You can send the boy out of the country; you cannot send the country out of the boy. Vajpayee's nursery was the hard core Sangh Parivar. But Ghalib said that no man of vision has ever pleased the faith of his ancestors. Posterity will judge Vajpayee on this basis: will he adhere to his background or to an evolving vision?