(The writer was an aide to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Comments are welcome at sudheenkulkarni@gmail.com)
Who has been the most admired among the 15 Prime Ministers India has had so far? The answer is a no-brainer. It was Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. As a towering leader of India's freedom movement, and later as the principal architect of modern India, Nehru scaled a height in the hearts of Indians that remains unequalled till today. Notwithstanding the hate-Nehru campaign unleased by some supporters of the Sangh Parivar in recent times, and notwithstanding the mistakes committed by Nehru himself, the mass adulation he commanded in his time is incontestable.
His daughter Indira Gandhi was also widely admired as a strong-willed leader. But that admiration was tinged with fear. Moreover, some of her actions made her the target of strong opposition. Rajiv Gandhi became immensely popular when he became Prime Minister, riding a sympathy wave, in the wake of his mother's tragic assassination. However, he, a good-hearted man and a guileless politician, lost much of his popularity in the wake of the Bofors scandal. His lack of maturity cost him dearly.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, on whom the Bharat Ratna is conferred today by President Pranab Mukherjee, comes after Nehru as India's most admired Prime Minister. However, his place among former Prime Ministers is unique in many ways. Unlike India and Rajiv, he did not have the advantage of belonging to a "dynasty". His rise in Indian politics was entirely due to his own innate talent, striving, struggle and sacrifice. He became the first genuinely non-Congress leader to win the people's mandate to lead India.
The party he belonged to before the Emergency - Bharatiya Jana Sangh - had only a marginal presence in India, both numerically and geographically. Yet, Vajpayee as the leader of the Jana Sangh was even then a widely admired national leader. In terms of the power of oratory, no other Prime Minister, not even Nehru, comes anywhere close to him. His meetings used to attract huge crowds even in non-Hindi areas. The fact that he is also a top-notch poet contributed to people's adulation for him. He had the rare ability to command the respect of even his political opponents. For example, Anna Durai, who led a powerful anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu, once said that he would welcome Hindi if the language was as charming as the one spoken by "my friend Vajpayee".
Vajpayee was one of the heroes of the anti-Emergency struggle (1975-77) that restored democracy in India. His short stint as India's External Affairs Minister during the Janata Party's rule was outstanding. The sincere efforts he made to normalize India's relations with Pakistan and China laid the foundation for the subsequent steps in this direction by successive governments. In particular, his move to ease visa restrictions for Indians wanting to travel to Pakistan, and vice versa, endeared him to Indian Muslims and also to many people in Pakistan. This is not what they had expected from a leader who had belonged to what was widely perceived as a "Hindu" party.
These days it has become the favourite pastime of a section of supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party to malign secularism and to emphasise the "Hindu" identity and agenda of their party. How completely antithetical this is to the worldview of Vajpayee who founded the party in 1980! The disintegration of the Janata Party - partly due to in-fighting by certain power-hungry leaders and partly due to the continued Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) affiliation of erstwhile Jana Sangh members of the Janata Party - had convinced Vajpayee that both he and his newly founded party, BJP, had to move away from the "Hindu-only" image of the Jana Sangh.
It is instructive in this context to remind today's BJP leaders and supporters that Vajpayee wrote a courageous article titled "All responsible for the Janata crisis" in Indian Express on August 2, 1979. Even though he did not hold the RSS responsible for the crisis in the Janata Party, his words of advice for RSS leaders are highly relevant in today's context when a new equation of uncertainty and tension is emerging between RSS and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
"...the RSS, claiming to be a social and cultural organisation, should have taken greater pains to demonstrate that they did not seek a political role. Patronising a press that takes sides in the sordid politics of power, involvement in youth bodies that interact with political parties, participating in trade union rivalries such as the one which recently brought enormous misery to the people of Delhi by callously cutting off the water supply - these do not help the RSS to establish its apolitical credentials.
It is possible that some people genuinely feel apprehensive about the RSS. A certain onus accordingly devolved on the RSS, an onus that has not been discharged effectively by the RSS. Its repudiation of the theocratic form of the state was welcome, yet the question could legitimately be asked - why does it not open its doors to non-Hindus?
The other course of action open to the RSS could be to function only as a Hindu religion-cum-social-cultural organisation wedded to the task of eradicating the evils, revitalising it to face the challenges of modern times. The kind of selfless service that the RSS has rendered in times of natural calamities has endeared it even to its critics and has established beyond doubt its capacity for constructive work for ameliorating the suffering of those who are in need of help. Such an organisation will draw support and sustenance from members of various political parties as has been the case with institutions like the Arya Samaj." (Emphasis added.)
At the BJP's founding conference in Mumbai in 1980, the person Vajpayee invited as the chief guest was a Muslim - Mohammed Currim Chagla, the widely respected former justice of the Supreme Court. Chagla predicted in his speech that Vajpayee would someday become India's Prime Minister.
Vajpayee's misgivings about the Ram Janmabhoomi movement launched by the BJP, in close cooperation with other RSS-affiliated organisations, are well known. His brief 13-day stint as Prime Minister in 1996 further convinced him that the BJP needed to mainstream itself as a party wedded to secularism. The result was the formation of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). His performance as a two-term Prime Minister heading the NDA government between 1998 and 2004 helped India become stronger in more ways than one.
According to me, the crowning glory of his Prime Ministership was not that he made India a nuclear weapons power. Nor was it the many landmark development projects he initiated. Rather, it was the sincerity and persistence with which he tried to normalise the situation in Jammu & Kashmir and to normalise India's relations with Pakistan. Despite Pakistan's betrayal in Kargil, he continued in his mission to establish peaceful and good neighbourly ties with Pakistan. He also established a framework for resolution of the border dispute with China. That framework, which has been carried forward by the governments of Dr Manmohan Singh and Modi, promises to yield a fruitful result.
I have no doubt that India's dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir would have been resolved had Vajpayee won a renewed mandate in 2004. The two principal reasons for the BJP's defeat in 2004 were: the communal conflagration in Gujarat in 2002 (which led to Muslim consolidation against the ruling party), and the disillusionment of the hardliners in the Sangh Parivar with Vajpayee.
Paradoxically, neither the BJP's defeat in 2004, and again in 2009, nor the fact that Vajpayee has been completely away from limelight due to his prolonged ill health, has diminished people's admiration for Vajpayee. The reason for this is the fact that here was a leader who always strove to rise above partisan politics, and also above the barriers in India's diverse society, for the larger good of the nation. Here was a leader of honesty and integrity who tried his best to bridge the inevitable contradictions in politics, always remaining faithful to the cause he believed in - the cause that had motivated him to leave the comforts of home in his teens and plunge into the uncertainties of public life.
In the highly, and increasingly competitive and confrontationist arena of Indian democracy, very few leaders have earned the Sanskrit epithet 'Ajaatashatru' - one who has only friends and no foes. Vajpayee is one of them. No wonder the entire nation has applauded the belated conferment of the highest civilian award on him.
Truly, the Bharat Ratna has been given to a Jewel of India.
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