A convenient memory

The unctuous hypocrisy of Atal Bihari Vajpayee

Mani Shankar Aiyar

THE prime minister, it would seem, is afflicted with political Alzheimer’s —selective memory loss, where he clearly remembers what happened a long time ago and conveniently forgets yesterday. He never fails to recall that he has been in Parliament for over 40 years. Not, of course, the Lok Sabha, but Parliament — because the people have defeated him almost as often as they have elected him, and when rejected at the hustings, Vajpayee has invariably slipped in through the backdoor of the Rajya Sabha. Moreover, he has hopped more constituencies than a frog in the spring-time. True, Indrajit Gupta entered the House five years later, but at least he continuously represented the same constituency of Midnapore for all but one short term, and P.M. Sayeed might have come to the Lok Sabha a decade after Vajpayee but he has never since failed to represent Lakshadweep. So Vajpayee’s claim to parliamentary longevity as his particular USP is unusually suspect.

Vajpayee’s Hindi is so good that to make sure I understand every word I always switch to the simultaneous English translation channel when he makes an important speech. I, therefore, heard his Hindi description of the Congress stand in the Budget session rendered into English ‘‘humbug’’. Not that the statement is un-parliamentary. And not that I have not myself used it. But what right has such a pot to describe as ‘‘abusive’’ the legitimate protests of any kettle, whatever the kettle’s hue? And wherein lies the Opposition’s ‘‘humbug’’?

Vajpayee says that in his 40 years in Parliament he has never heard the kind of blunt charges brought against him and his ministers. Oh, yeah? Let us go back to the beginning of his parliamentary career — 1957. The language controversy erupted and the Jan Sangh launched itself into describing as ‘‘traitorous’’ the objections of the DMK to imposing as the sole official language of the country a regional tongue spoken by a minority of Indians. Did Vajpayee rein in his followers? On the contrary, one has only to read the Vajpayee-Annadurai clashes to savour the harshness of Vajpayee’s barbs. Nothing much wrong with that, but why can the man not take what he gives?

Vajpayee’s political Alzheimer’s most dramatically manifested itself during the Kargil war. He arrogantly dismissed without discussion the Congress demand for an emergency session of the Rajya Sabha. Yet, it was the same Vajpayee who on October 26, 1962, had led a delegation to demand of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru the convening of an emergency session of the Rajya Sabha. The demand was made even as our jawans were reeling back from Thagla ridge to Sela, and the Chinese were infesting Walong, massing menacingly in the middle sector, and over-running our forward posts in Ladakh. In the midst of all this, the ‘‘patriotic’’ Vajpayee demanded the immediate convening of the Rajya Sabha. The noble Nehru conceded the request. And Vajpayee unleashed his verbal vitriol in his usual unbridled manner.

Vajpayee may have ridden the populist wave by describing Indira Gandhi as ‘‘Durga’’ when she won the Bangladesh war (which Vajpayee now is assiduously engaged in losing) but has he forgotten that in the run-up to that war, when Indira Gandhi was quietly making military and diplomatic preparations for the decisive blow, he huffed and puffed like a fretful volcano, spewing forth his oratorical lava? Next, the Navnirman movement of 1974, which took the vocabulary of viciousness to unheard-of heights. Vajpayee and his Jan Sangh did nothing but inflame the abuse which reverberated in the streets and ricocheted in the chambers of Parliament. For the first time ever, the House was shut down, by Vajpayee & Co, for what still remains the longest shut-down in the history of our Parliament. And the man whines when the Opposition shuts him out for a mere two working weeks. As Nixon once advised his men, if you cannot stand the heat, you have no business being in the kitchen.

The elections of 1977 brought Vajpayee to the Treasury benches. The very first act of the new government was to spring from jail without completing the trial of the ‘terrorist’ whom Vajpayee was destined to name as his Raksha Mantri 30 years on. Both were part of the nefarious nexus which abused Indira Gandhi day in and day out — until their own abuse of each other brought tumbling down their ridiculous house of cards. Where were Vajpayee’s now much-touted parliamentary manners when his own Treasury benches went on and on about Indira Gandhi stealing a chicken in Manipur? Indira Gandhi did not squeal like Vajpayee. She took it on the chin, went to the people, and rode triumphantly back from Belchi to power.

In the turbulent aftermath of the people’s decisive rejection of the Janata Party, Vajpayee re-invented himself as a ‘‘Gandhian socialist’’ and his party as the Bharatiya Janata Party. He did not, however, re-invent his infinite capacity for muck-raking. Without let or hindrance, he baited the prime minister of the day. Now that it is his day, why does he so resent and take so personally the baiting of the prime minister by the Opposition? That, after all, is the duty of the Opposition.

Has a mere three years in Race Course Road so robbed him of his memory of his own behaviour in Opposition? Was it not he who not only repeatedly disrupted parliamentary proceedings but led the boycott of Parliament for all of two sessions? I take the reader to April 1987 — Bofors. That was when Vajpayee joined hands with the Mir Jaffers and Raja Jai Chands of the Congress to criss-cross the country sloganeering, ‘‘Gali gali mein shor hai/ Rajiv Gandhi chor hai.’’
Has Vajpayee even once, just once, shown himself ever to rise like a lotus above the filth in which he grows in the 14 years that this untreated sewage has flown through the country? Then why is he so hot under the collar when I — for it is I he has in mind when he complains of ‘‘Congress MPs’’ — fling back the same abuse at him by raising the slogan, so much more true than the original.

Vajpayee’s complaints are, indeed, ‘‘utter rubbish’’. His unctuous hypocrisy must end if democracy is to be restored to the rails. He has shown himself unfit to be even the chairman of the Gwalior municipality, let alone prime minister of this great country. It is the games that he plays through the likes of George Fernandes and Pramod Mahajan and the odious Subramanian Swamy that has poisoned our politics. His accelerated departure from our political life is the necessary pre-requisite for restoring decency and decorum to our democracy.