Reflecting on Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s “Kumarakom Musings” a few years back we ran an editorial in The Financial Express entitled “Atal Bihari Nehru”. The seeds of Vajpayee’s Nehruism are finally bearing fruit today. The extant environment of optimism in the country, the improved performance of the economy, the improving relations with our neighbourhood and the so-called “feel good” feeling are the fruition of a series of political, diplomatic and economic initiatives taken by Vajpayee in a Nehruvian mould.

While granting his detractors and critics, both on the political Left and Right, their due, it is difficult to deny the fact that Vajpayee is the first prime minister after Pandit Nehru who has evolved into a “statesman” even while in office. Indira Gandhi may have been more popular at the height of her charisma and appeal but she had not become a “statesperson” while still in office. Rarely, therefore, has an incumbent prime minister entered an election campaign with greater esteem than is the case today with Vajpayee.

It is entirely understandable that the opposition political parties would want to question the optimism about “India Shining” and the “feel good feeling”, and recall the fact that the Sangh Parivar’s own have in the past described Vajpayee as a “mask”. There will be political disputation about Vajpayee’s commitment to development and liberal politics and he will have to carry conviction with his sceptics for them to vote for him. But the fact remains that Vajpayee has so far succeeded in taking the political battle into his enemy’s camp by merely taking over their agenda.

The essence of the Vajpayee Revolution in Indian politics has been the “Congressification” of the Bharatiya Janata Party via the instrumentality of the National Democratic Alliance. Many commentators have used the phrase “Congressification” as a pejorative to show that the BJP has failed to be a “party with a difference”, that many of its ministers are as corrupt as the ones who have blotted the Congress record in office, that the politics of expediency has gripped the BJP as much as it did the Congress.

All this is true, and so obvious. What is material, however, is the fact that Vajpayee has demonstrated so clearly to his party that its sectarian and divisive platform of the past cannot provide the route to lasting power, even if it did work well for a Narendra Modi in Gujarat, and that the future for the BJP lies in occupying the political “centre”. It is a lesson that Pandit Nehru learnt early in life, that India can only be governed from the political “centre” — what former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao dubbed the “Middle Path” in his perceptive address on the subject to the Tirupathi Session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) in 1992.

While political entities at the fringes will always worry about the politics of the country and its policies veering either “leftward” or “rightward”, and the received wisdom of political analysts is that Indian political discourse has shifted to the “Right” with the ascendence of the BJP and the pursuit of market-oriented economic policies, the fact is that it is the politics and economics of the “Middle Path” that have in fact survived the test of time and India will always return to this Nehruvian middle even if it lurches Left or Right from time to time.

The reason why Vajpayee looks so winnable today in the run-up to the general elections is that he has taken the BJP to the Nehruvian “middle” by pursuing the economics and politics of “inclusivism”, recalling the Nehruvian dictum of “unity in diversity”. This did not happen overnight. His thinking along these lines was so evident in his “Kumarakom Musings” and his “Thoughts from Manali” and in every action he has pursued on the political, diplomatic and economic front, with the singular exception of his decision to back off on the demand for the resignation of Narendra Modi after the communal conflagaration in Gujarat.

It is this Nehruvian politics of inclusivism that now encourages so many credible Muslim leaders to want to support him. It is the diplomacy of persuasion that has endeared him to people in Pakistan and China. It is his economics of gradualism in reform and activism in infrastructure building that is building the foundations for “India Accelerating”.

The critics of “India Shining” and “India Accelerating” draw our attention to the “downside”. But the downside has always been there. In a continental and civilisational nation of a billion people, every statement and its opposite can be proved to be true. But few can dispute the fact that the movement so far has been forward, towards a better life for more.

What marks the current phase of economic acceleration is that it is happening at a time when the politics of inclusivism and accommodation have once again come to the centrestage and India is trying to relate to itself and the outside world on terms that it sought to define at the time of Independence. Self-reliance, equality between peoples and nations, liberal democracy and freedom of enterprise.

It is true that we did stray from this path from time to time, we lurched Left and we swayed Right. Mistakes have been made, but some lessons have also been learnt. The biggest lesson learnt was the one Vajpayee did, not from a Guru Golwalkar but from a Pandit Nehru — that this nation can only be governed from the political “middle”, that unity is possible even in diversity, that one is not easily swayed by the winds of opinion and enterprise blowing in and out of open doors and windows.