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R P Gupta floats a trial balloon

A lot has been said about Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister R P Gupta, most of which have been unflattering to him. However, the point remains: why would a media-savvy party like the Bharatiya Janata Party impose such a colourless personality on a politically crucial state like Uttar Pradesh -- especially when it is common knowledge that the state is into an election year?

The answer to that lies in Gupta's commitment to the core issues of the BJP brigade -- which have only been frozen, not abandoned by the A B Vajpayee led government. It is seldom that a chief minister has not given in to concerted strike, and the way Gupta's government held firm in the face of the recent, widespread agitation by electricity board employees shows there is more to the man than what the media would admit, or portray.

Still, more than his administrative finesse, Gupta is there for a purpose - which became evident when he went on to talk about the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, before he was muzzled by his seniors. But the timing of his statement is crucial: coming on the eve of the elections to Bihar -- which in reality is a dress rehearsal for Uttar Pradesh -- and Orissa, the BJP cannot be seen as a party that has sold out its soul. As the Jaywant Lele incident showed, who cares a whit about denials, what Indians remember is statements.

So Gupta and Gujarat -- which is as saffron as the best crop from the Kashmir valley -- are redefining politics, within a hundred days of the National Democratic Alliance being sworn in at the Centre. And, whether the BJP's key issues come to the fore or not depend not so much on the prime minister and his mild men, but on what the voters in Bihar, and to a lesser extent in Orissa, think of the incumbent state governments.

The RSS-BJP think-tank has thought a while before deciding that while Vajpayee-ism is all right to take the party to power at the Centre, what is going to matter in the heartland are not glib terms like Kargil, economic reforms, women's empowerment, I-T revolution et al, but Advani-ism. Which, in short, translates into Ram, Ram, Ram.

Possibly, if the outcome in Kandahar had been different, had the government gambled on 150 Indian lives and come out on top, Advani may have had to spend more time in the company of mothballs and other preservatives. But thanks to a moderate prime minister unwilling to bite the bullet, the home minister has been pushed to the forefront of the party's do-or-die battle.

And, Advani has shown in the past that in the party's dying hours, he is the miracle man.

And, he would have delivered Bihar and Orissa to the party, if only his party was not saddled with allies who believe their right to Patna and Bhubaneswar are greater than that of the BJP's. As the NDA has been slugging it out, the smile has returned miraculously to Laloo Prasad Yadav's face, months after he was written off, a decade after he stamped his OBC seal on Bihar.

February, thus, has the potential to rewrite the script that Vajpayee and his ministers have been following over the last 100 days.

Will a reverse in Patna mean the end of the Vajpayee regime? Not as yet, but surely it will mean a weakening of his moderate stand -- which will in turn impinge on the stand his alliance partners have so far taken over his regime.

It is a truism that despite the coalition era, despite the fragmented polity, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh decide the fate of the central government. The BJP is not in the PV Narasimha Rao mode, whose government survived miraculously -- or venally, depending on which way you look at it -- for a full five years despite state after state going out of the Congress party's orbit; it is not happy, either, merely with occupying 7 Racecourse Road on unfriendly lease terms.

The outcome of Election '99 showed that there is no external threat to the Vajpayee government in the 13th Lok Sabha, as there was in the previous House. But that should not be read as no threat at all to the government. There is a possibility -- remote at this point in time, maybe, but one that is bound to grow stronger in the course of this year -- that the threat may well come from the Treasury benches.

And, slam her for all you care, but the politically naïve Sonia Gandhi has, for once, read the signals right. And done the right thing by taking to agitational politics.

Saisuresh Sivaswamy