All pawns, no bishops

HEDGED in from all sides, his government torn with contradictions, his governance discredited in the eyes of the country as never before, Vajpayee, through his week-end reshuffle, has tried to do an Indira Gandhi: prove to the world (and to himself) that he really is the Boss. Will it work? Can he stare down his infuriated NDA partners, brush aside his BJP rivals, scorn his betrayed sangh parivar and get away with it? Yes, perhaps - if he is an Indira Gandhi.

But Vajpayee is no Indira Gandhi, neither in personality nor in daring, nor in age, nor in energy, nor in historical circumstance. Indira Gandhi single-handedly took on the Congress establishment at the Glass House in Bangalore in 1969 (as the Mahatma had done at Tripuri in 1939 and Nehru in 1950-51 after Nasik) before going on to take the country by storm at the elections of 1971 — Woh kehte hain Indira hatao/Mein kehti hoon Garibi hatao. This was as Gandhiji went on to storm the people after thwarting Netaji’s lunge at a second term — Karenge ya Marenge. And as Panditji had done when he ousted Congress President Purushottam Das Tandon and the party’s Somnath coterie before banishing them to political vanvas in the first general elections of 1952 — If any man raises his hand against another, in the name of religion, I shall fight him till the last breath of my life, whether I am in government - or outside (Ram Lila Grounds, Gandhi Jayanti, 1951).

Is Vajpayee’s latest cabinet reshuffle comparable to any of this? In one sense, yes. He has put his NDA partners, the sangh parivar and his detractors in the BJP on notice that He is the government. No consideration other than personal loyalty to the prime minister has determined who remains, who goes, who moves up, who moves out. Proven incompetence, as in the case of Arun Shourie, has not come in the way of elevation. There would be delightful irony, if there were not a terrible slight to the country involved, in Singapore Airlines marking the minister of disinvestment securing cabinet rank by choosing that precise moment to pull out of the disinvestment process — the latest in a long and never-ending line of foreign investors wanting to have nothing to do with Shourie’s wayward ways. Remember the US multinational Alcoa pulling out their Balco bid at the last minute because of Shourie’s blatant partisanship in inter-corporate wars?

A gravely tainted reputation has not stood in the way of another Vajpayee loyalist, West Bengal’s Tapan Sikdar, retaining his portfolio in the ministry of communications notwithstanding France’s Alcatel joining the snaking queue of investors quitting the country because they are sick of governmental venality masquerading as patriotism in the BJP dispensation. So with Tehelka-implicated Rajiv Pratap Rudy. Cleanliness in governance has no role in the reshuffle. On the PM’s chessboard, there are no bishops, only pawns. Vijay Goel’s startling appointment to the Prime Minister’s Office has less to do with Goel throwing out a poor family from the Neharwali Haveli for Musharraf to get an unobstructed view of his pre-Partition home than the need to replace PMO’s hitherto civil service nexus to big business with a political channel. More experienced hands in this line of work, such as Goel’s seniors in Delhi politics, former chief ministers Madan Lal Khurana and Sahib Singh Varma as also ex-chief executive councillor Vijay Kumar Malhotra have missed the bus because they are their own men, not servitors to the prime minister. Another Dilliwali cut to size is the meretricious ex-CM Sushma Swaraj, threatened with take-over in the name of convergence by the merging of information technology with communications under that other Vajpayee faithful, Pramod Mahajan (would you buy a used cell-phone from this man?)

Which brings us to those who have been ousted from their favoured bailiwicks — Ram Vilas Paswan to make way for Mahajan, Sharad Yadav because he stood up to Shourie, and Maneka Gandhi because she believed, however eccentrically, in what she was doing. All NDA partners. The losers are almost to a man non-BJP. The winners are all BJP. Neither the Trinamool nor the PMK is rewarded. Even Om Prakash Chautala remains uncompensated for losing out to Ajit Singh. Not a single non-BJP minister is moved up — or to greener pastures.

The only BJP loser is Jagmohan but that’s because he defied the prime minister in the ministry of communications and then alienated everyone in urban demolition. Readers with uncertain memories need to be reminded that Jagmohan refused to do PMO’s bidding when, in the middle of the Kargil war, Vajpayee decided that private telecom operators, that is, the richest multinationals in the world and their Indian partners, the fattest fat-cats in the country, should be allowed to break their contractual obligations and migrate from licence fees to revenue-sharing even if the gross loss to the country over the next twenty years would be the humongous sum of Rs 1,58,000 crore. We won at Tiger Hill even as we lost at Sanchar Bhawan. Jagmohan has twice over paid the price for his probity.

Vajpayee has also signalled the sangh parivar that he cares little for their preferences or prejudices. So, Yashwant Sinha is retained in Finance although the economy is swirling down the vortex. And Satya Narayan Jatiya is thrown out because on labour reforms he echoes the views of the parivar’s acerbic trade union leader, Dattopant Thengadi.

This could be the Beginning. But it is actually the End. Because Vajpayee is not the master of his house, as Indira and Nehru and Gandhi were of theirs. Vajpayee is a prisoner of his coalition. The coalition is now split down every one of its many fissures. He is not even the master of his own party — for the sangh sulks and Advani plots. Vajpayee could go to the country, as Indira before him, but a crumbling coalition is no platform from which to launch a premature general election. So, his rivals know they must oust him now — or forever hold their tongues. This, therefore, is Vajpayee’s last hurrah. His political epitaph has been quoted by T.S. Eliot at the head of ‘Gerontion’: Thou hast neither youth nor age/ But, as it were, an after-dinner sleep/ Dreaming on both.

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