The Hindu Business Line : The Vajpayee phenomenon

THE Bharatiya Janata Party complained to the Election Commission on March 29 that advertisements placed by the Sajhi Virasat Trust had maligned the Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, by alleging that he had acted as a "police informer" in 1942 during British rule.

This is hardly the first time such an allegation has been made in the run-up to the elections. Be that as it may, Mr Vajpayee's so-called non-involvement in the Quit India movement remains one of the most controversial aspects of his otherwise-affable and non-controversial personality.

Almost each and every opinion poll in recent years has placed Mr Vajpayee many notches above not only his political opponents, including Congress President, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, but also above his own junior in government — the Deputy Prime Minister Mr L. K. Advani.

The first individual to become Prime Minister of India without ever having been a member of the Congress party, the country's 10th, 13th and 14th Prime Minister's public life would have been remarkable free of controversy but for the contentious role he is supposed to have played during the country's freedom movement more than six decades ago.

A founder member of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh when it was formed in 1951 and a protégé of the first president of the party, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, Mr Vajpayee first came into the limelight on the national stage when he was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1957 from Balrampur, Uttar Pradesh, after having failed in an earlier attempt to enter Parliament from Lucknow in a by-election.

In 1957, he was just one of four successful Jana Sangh candidates in India although he had lost the elections from two other constituencies that year, forfeiting his security deposit in one of them.

In all, Mr Vajpayee has been elected to the Lok Sabha on nine occasions and lost elections twice. His losses came in 1962 from Balrampur and from Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh in 1984, when he lost to the late Madhavrao Scindia, in an election that saw just two BJP members being elected to the Lok Sabha.

Mr Vajpayee is perhaps the only individual who has been elected from no less than four different States: UP, MP, Gujarat and Delhi.

India's first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, impressed with Mr Vajpayee's oratorical skills, had publicly lauded him and had once said that he could even hold the highest position in the country — a prognostication that proved truly prophetic.

In 1971 after the birth of Bangladesh, Mr Vajpayee had himself compared the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, to goddess Durga. A few years later, during Emergency, the Indira Gandhi government jailed him along with many prominent political leaders.

Mr Vajpayee has often been perceived as holding views that are not always fully in tune with those of his party, even if he has remained content merely expressing a divergent view rather than aggressively countering his party's position.

Invariably, such differences have seen him espousing a moderate line against the hard Hindu nationalist positions of his party colleagues.

The most striking example of this divergence between Mr Vajpayee's position and that of his party came immediately after the Babri Masjid was demolished on December 6, 1992.

Mr Vajpayee described the incident as India's "darkest hour", while the rest of his party was busy celebrating privately or publicly, refusing to condemn the incident.

The perception that Mr Vajpayee's views are different from those of his party has resulted in some describing him as "the right man in the wrong party".

His liberal image has helped immensely in winning him support from outside the BJP's spheres of influence.

There are others who argue that such apparent distinctions between Mr Vajpayee's positions and those of other BJP leaders are no more than a elaborately played out charade scripted by the Sangh Parivar to appeal to both militant Hindus and to moderate sections.

For all the perceived or real differences with the BJP's official stance though, the Prime Minister has been his party's most acceptable public face.

Mr Vajpayee himself has not only denied that he has any differences with the ideology and the philosophy of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, he categorically wrote in an article entitled "The Sangh is my Soul" published in the RSS organ Panchajanya: "The single reason for my long association with the RSS is that I like the sangh, I like its ideology and above all, I like the RSS attitude towards people, towards one another... which is found only in the RSS."

The third paragraph of this article ends with a bland statement: "I also participated in the Quit India movement in 1942 and was jailed. I was then studying for my Intermediate examination. I was arrested from my native village Bateshwar in Agra district. I was then 16."

His political opponents have claimed that Mr Vajpayee's testimony before a magistrate on September 1, 1942, was responsible for at least one "freedom fighter" being sentenced to five years' rigorous imprisonment. Ironically, among those who had levelled this charge against him in 1989 was the late P. Rangarajan Kumaramangalam who went on to become a member of the BJP and a Cabinet Minister in Mr Vajpayee's government.

As a Congress MP, Rangarajan Kumaramangalam was a signatory to a letter signed by 52 MPs accusing Mr Vajpayee of playing a "nefarious role" in the Quit India movement.

On every occasion this charge has been raised since 1974 (when Blitz first published an article on the topic), Mr Vajpayee, his party and the Sangh Parivar have responded by dismissing the allegations as baseless. The controversy has, however, refused to die down.

In 1988, there was a investigation into this episode by a team of journalists from Frontline magazine. While it is true that Mr Vajpayee's testimony was not used as evidence in court, it is also equally true that he did sign a confessional statement absolving himself of any role in an incident that had taken place in September 1942 in which a government building at Bateshwar had been damaged by a group opposed to British rule in India. In that statement, Mr Vajpayee also named Liladhar Bajpai alias Kakua as one of those who led the mob that had damaged the building.

Clearly, therefore, while Mr Vajpayee was not directly responsible for Bajpai being sentenced to five years' rigorous imprisonment, he was also by his own admission not an active participant in the Quit India movement.

That Mr Vajpayee was arrested on the occasion was merely due to the fact that he, together with his brother, was among the crowd present on the occasion.

In defence of his having named Bajpai, Mr Vajpayee has clarified that his confessional statement was recorded in Urdu, a language he cannot read, and the statement was not read out to him later. However, Mr Vajpayee did confirm (in an interview with Frontline) that he had indeed signed the statement.

Liladhar Bajpai contended that though the confessional statement signed by Mr Vajpayee was not used as evidence against him in court, it was a major factor in his being sentenced as the Vajpayee brothers were, unlike the rest of their village, educated and hence, considered more dependable in their testimony by the police and the court.

He also suggests that the case of the prosecution very closely mirrored the testimony of the Vajpayee brothers.

The Prime Minister obviously possesses a highly complex personality — he has written poems expressing empathy with the victims of the nuclear holocaust at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and yet also decided to go ahead with conducting nuclear tests at Pokhran in May 1998. Mr Vajpayee has never quite adhered to the ascetic and austere image that many other leaders from the Sangh Parivar have sought to project. Will the real Mr Vajpayee stand up and be identified?

(The author is Director, School of Convergence, International Management Institute, New Delhi and a journalist with over 25 years of experience in various media — print, Internet, radio and television. This article is based on a section of a book co-authored by him entitled: "A Time of Coalitions: Divided We Stand" published recently by Sage Publications. He can be contacted at paranjoy@yahoo.com.)