There are not too many leaders who are looked upto by his/her followers and political opponents even when they are no more. Late prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee belongs to this distinguished group. A great consensus builder whose 99th birth anniversary is being observed today, December 23, he cobbled together a coalition of divergent political ideologies into a winning combination. It did not matter whether he was wielding the seals of office or was sitting in the Opposition benches, whenever Vajpayee stood up to speak, parliamentarians cutting across the political divide listened.
A great orator, if ever there was one, he spoke of the political ideology he espoused without deviating a whit from the high standards of parliamentary democracy. It could be taking a dig at Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on his China policy or reminding the late prime minister’s great grandson Rahul Gandhi to defer to Vajpayee’s years in the Parliament during which, as a Jan Sangh leader and a leading light of the BJP, he had entered into many a war of words with members of four generations of the Nehru-Gandhi family without hurting parliamentary democracy.
Arguably very few leaders understood that democracy goes hand in hand with difference of opinion though, in the process, no amity between the people’s representatives need to be lost. There were only a handful who had great respect for diversity. Vajpayee understood that India was a land of unmatched diversity. It is reflected in her geography, social structure, political landscape and her cultural life.
It is this appreciation that made Vajpayee an outstanding politician and a great Prime Minister. This was the man, setting aside his opposition to some of the policies of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the government she headed, who referred to Indira Gandhi as “Devi Durga” after India’s resounding victory in the 1971 Indo-Pak war.
He brushed aside intra-party criticism for this take on the then Prime Minister. It was the same man who refused to remove Nehru’s portrait which adorned the office of the Minister for External Affairs after taking his place as the new occupant of that office as part of the first non-Congress dispensation.
Vajpayee was never a man who would talk of a “Congress-mukt Bharat” like his present-day successor. It would have been arrogant, unseemly and myopic of him. Establishing complete dominance over others was never a Vajpayee trait. No community or organisation has ever succeeded in doing this. Vajpayee’s first tenure as a prime minister was of 13 days. He returned to this office to continue for 13 months and then a full term is a pointer to his policy of taking all on board. If some of them, like Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, parted company later, her quarrel was never with Vajpayee. Whether welcoming her to his Cabinet or stepping into her tile-roofed home in Kalighat, he always had a winsome personality.
Vajpayee was a believer in secularism. And it differed from the secularism used to grab minority votes. Nor was it a brand of secularism that defamed any religious community. It was comfortable on its own. It was a natural corollary to democracy and diversity. Vajpayee never refused to accept his being a Hindu.
Yet it was overlooked by some of his political opponents who never ceased to attack the BJP as a communal party. They were unaware that their tirade helped the BJP to gather more and more Hindu votes. It is a sign of Vajpayee’s foresight that he insisted on including “positive secularism” as one of the ideological commitments of the BJP in 1980 when it was founded. Like any true Hindu, he was never anti-Islam.
The nuclear test in 1998 showed the tougher side of Vajpayee. Then came the Kargil War when at the head of his government he fully backed the army, fully in defeating and driving back the enemy.
A year before he was on a bus to Lahore. Vajpayee said that one cannot change geography; he sought to change history trying to befriend an enemy. It was the same man who, a few years ago, was with the Narasimha Rao government when India needed a strong and united voice at the United Nations to defeat Pakistan’s machinations.
A wordsmith, Vajpayee was the right man for the job, one who could mobilize his language and prove the case for his nation. He will be remembered as one of the most enigmatic leaders to sit in the Opposition benches and adorn the Prime Minister’s Office, both. (IPA Service)
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