The peacemaker departs

Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee passed away on Thursday evening after an over-decade-long struggle with debilitating and progressive neurological ailments. He was 93.

Vajpayee was admitted in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) here on June 11 for renal issues. His condition deteriorated on August 13 and he was kept on life support until he breathed his last at 5.05 pm. His last rites will take place at 4 pm tomorrow at Rashtriya Smriti Sthal here. The Centre has declared a seven-day national mourning.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi described Vajpayee’s death as the “end of an era”.

“Atalji’s passing away is a personal and irreplaceable loss for me. I have countless fond memories of him. He was an inspiration to karyakartas like me. I will particularly remember his sharp intellect and outstanding wit,” he said.

BJP President Amit Shah, along with the top party leadership and almost the entire Union Cabinet, paid homage to “Atalji”, as he was fondly called. Flowers used to decorate the party headquarters to celebrate Independence Day were taken down. The meeting of the BJP’s national executive, scheduled for August 18-19, has been cancelled.

Vajpayee was mourned across the political spectrum. A host of leaders — Congress President Rahul Gandhi and Chief Ministers Nitish Kumar (Bihar), Arvind Kejriwal (Delhi) and Mamata Banerjee (West Bengal) — lined up to pay their last respects.

Crowds milling around AIIMS through the day were testimony to Vajpayee’s enduring popularity and mass appeal.

That he had stopped appearing in public for years did not diminish the emotional connect of the BJP’s foremost leader had with the people he had kept in thrall for decades with his charm, ready wit and unique oratorical style.

Economic reforms

It was Vajpayee who rang in the second generation of economic reforms, at a time when the economy was only beginning to find its feet, eight years after the Narasimha Rao government ushered in liberalisation and other reforms.

Vajpayee had to take some tough decisions to ensure investor confidence and bring about stability to the economy. The privatisation of government undertakings, enacting legislation to cap the fiscal deficit, rolling out a new telecom policy and the ambitious Golden Quadrilateral highway construction programme were his legacy.

The trinity

The passing away of the BJP’s first among equals of the trinity — Vajpayee, LK Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi — when Modi leads a majority government at the Centre is somewhat reflective of the Hindutva party’s journey from the fringe to the political mainstream.

Vajpayee’s tenure as PM was a critical milestone in this journey. He steered the party at a time when the forces of Mandal defused the polarisation along communal lines that the politics of kamandal had sought to achieve with its Ram Janmabhoomi movement.

His genial mannerisms, light touch and easy camaraderie across the political spectrum made Vajpayee the fulcrum around which coalitions congregated in the 1990s, when the BJP was still struggling to shed its “ideologically untouchable” image.

KN Govindacharya’s provocative characterisation of his genteel colleague as a mukhauta (mask) may have been unfair to the only national leader in the BJP-RSS larger family who did not participate in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.

But Vajpayee certainly did lend acceptability and finesse to his party in the immediate aftermath of the demolition of the Babri mosque and the communal riots that shook the country in its wake.

Vajpayee lent the perfect rhythm, and built an enduring partnership, with the taciturn and more disciplined ideologue Advani, who led the Ayodhya rath yatra, a political roadshow that propelled the BJP’s growth.

Atalji was the more acceptable face of this formidable team, charming even those who were bitterly opposed to the BJP and its ideology.

Advani’s grief at the end of their decades of political partnership was palpable. “I am at a loss of words to express my deep grief and sadness today as we all mourn the passing away of one of India’s tallest statesmen…To me, Atalji was more than a senior colleague; in fact, he was my closest friend for 65 years,” he said.

It was Advani who led the chariot, groomed a second-rung leadership and manned the organisation.

Leadership mantle

Vajpayee attracted alliances, critical at a time when the BJP simply did not have the numbers to seize power.

So, it was on Vajpayee that the leadership mantle was bestowed by a reluctant RSS when the BJP came within sniffing distance of power in 1996. The 13-day government fell, followed by the United Front coalition governments of Deve Gowda and IK Gujral.

But the BJP had managed to signal its arrival at the centre, from the extreme right, and prove that it was a plausible national alternative to the Congress. It was only a matter of time when, after the 1998 general elections, a significant bloc of parties joined the BJP and Vajpayee was sworn in as Prime Minister once again.

His government this time lasted 13 months, until mid-1999, when AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa withdrew support and elections were once again announced.

But even within that short tenure, Vajpayee left a mark by conducting nuclear tests in Pokhran and starting a diplomatic dialogue with Pakistan at the same time.

The middle path

It was the paradox of Vajpayee’s personality, and the ease with which he could transcend political stances, that firmly etched the BJP and its ideological impression on the national political consciousness while still managing alliances with the socialists.

It was a style that straddled the middle path even if it actually peddled a hard ideological message.

It became Vajpayee and it was significant in an era when the BJP had not yet become one pole of the political spectrum and the Congress still dominated the provinces.

Since then, in the journey from Vajpayee to Modi, whom he obliquely rebuked for not doing his rajdharma in the aftermath of the communal riots in Gujarat in 2002, the BJP’s political journey seems to have reached its destination.

The change in the institutional sub-culture of the ruling party — from the charming swayamsevak Vajpayee with his easy humour to the more disciplined and severe pracharak Modi — signifies the hardening of lines. Vajpayee’s demise signals the end of those times, when these lines could be blurred.

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