Vajpayee’s lost legacy

Vajpayee’s lost legacy

The space for the liberal Hindu is shrinking in today’s politics.

In the last fortnight the ruling BJP has made every effort to make sure that memorials of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee are raised to the same heights as Nehru-Gandhi memorials once were. From planning museums and statues, to the well-publicised Asthi Kalash Yatra or carrying Vajpayee’s ashes across the country, there are also plans to rename towns and roads after Vajpayee. The send-off to Vajpayee was marked with the ultimate symbolism of homage when Prime Minister Narendra Modi walked behind Vajpayee’s hearse all the way from party headquarters to the funeral venue.

But beyond the symbolism, has BJP in its 21st century avatar truly embraced the plural impulses of a prime minister who, even while remaining rooted in the RSS-Jana Sangh movement as a proud swayam sevak, tried to create (in however patchy a fashion) a political identity for the Hindu liberal?

A ‘what if’ may be interesting here. What if Vajpayee had not lost the elections of 2004? In his first term, as his critics accuse, he spoke of ‘rajdharma’ but chose at critical junctures to prefer compromise over conscience: Gujarat 2002 being the example. But if Vajpayee had won in 2004, his political stock may have been far stronger than in 1999 and perhaps he could have moved to quell Hindutva hardliners and strengthened BJP’s push for a modern liberal identity. At the moment, Vajpayee’s achievements are being used by those forces within the Hindutva movement, whom he had once tried to counter.

Vajpayee’s counterattack was unobtrusive, conveyed through a mix of enigmatic poetry and rapid moves on economic reforms. Yet for all his perceived ‘weakness’, Vajpayee clashed repeatedly with then RSS sarsangh chalak KS Sudarshan and Swadeshi Jagran Manch, by refusing to let the sangh call the shots on economic and cultural issues. Vajpayee sought to dilute the Hindu rashtra by reaching out to the ‘other’ be it Kashmiris or Pakistan. But for the Vajpayee liberal Hindu moment to be truly successful, it needed a second term.

Right of centre political movements across the world are increasingly shifting towards the extreme. Even in the welfare state of Sweden where elections are due, the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats party tied to neo Nazi ideas is growing. Conventional right wing movements are getting outflanked by nationalist, populist and exclusionary agendas. Rightist parties are thus seeking to adopt extreme causes as smart strategy: the anti-immigrant or anti-minorities ‘nationalist’ battle cry is seen to deliver more votes than ‘normal’ rightwing positions.

But in Vajpayee’s time the wide alliances that BJP was able to craft served to locate the party on a centrist line. Today, without the need to appeal to a wider coalition, the right wing agenda is getting drawn inexorably towards extremist slogans which galvanise foot soldiers and excite angry voters.

Here are some questions that the party needs to ask itself if it truly wants to honour Vajpayee’s legacy beyond building statues and renaming roads. Would Vajpayee have felt the need to rename Mughalsarai Station as Deen Dayal Upadhyay Junction or rename Aurangzeb Road? Would Vajpayee have tried to change Christmas (his own birthday) into Good Governance Day or rejected participating in iftaar parties? Would Vajpayee, a non-vegetarian in his food habits, have pushed for beef ban diktats?

Would he have allowed Union ministers to use language like “ramzadon” and “haramzadon” or allowed them to threaten “go to Pakistan” or allowed them to garland those convicted for lynching? Would Vajpayee have dubbed his critics antinational? Would Vajpayee have allowed gaurakshaks to feel empowered enough to have a licence to kill, or indeed allowed mobs acting in the name of love jihad or moral policing to get away without a strong note of disapproval? Would Vajpayee, the quintessential parliamentarian, have allowed the cut and thrust of legislative debate to be constricted by the brute strength of treasury bench numbers? A modern identity will continue to elude BJP as long as it is dependent and unwilling to face up to those within its ranks who seek to establish a puritanical ideologically driven Hindutva state. In Bengal, the Left aristocracy eventually had to pay for the depredations of its cadres at the grassroots. Vajpayee failed to win in 2004 because although for a brief period his leadership cult towered over RSS, he gave up trying to reshape the organisation post 2002, perhaps realising that he didn’t have the capacity or the resolve to stand up to his detractors in the sangh.

To win in 2004, Vajpayee needed to win over the swing voters, or the middle of the roaders who were most offended by the Gujarat riots. To do so he would have needed to practice his rajdharma as an inclusive model of governance instead of just preaching it. If he had still won, his rajdharma may have gained more heft. But history denied BJP and Vajpayee this opportunity.

Vajpayee represented BJP’s modern moment when he tried to nudge the party towards a fuzzy ill-defined centre, breaking away from dogmatism and trying to appeal to a wider constituency. But however much today’s BJP may mourn his passing, the rise of the party’s 21st century aggressively muscular avatar is a defeat for Vajpayee. The question can be asked, if the former PM had been alive and well, would he have been a member of BJP’s marg darshak mandal, confined to the margins of public life as his lifelong comrade LK Advani is? The valourisation and deification of Vajpayee in death is in stark contrast to the diminishing value of his true legacy within his own party.