Commentary/Saisuresh Sivaswamy
Love him or hate him, V P Singh shows he cannot be ignored
Hardly anyone else provokes the kind of reactions that Vishwanath
Pratap Singh does among the electorate: Intense hatred over what
a lot many perceive to be betrayal on his part for implementing
the Mandal Commission report when his actual mandate was for catching
the Bofors thieves; or, total adulation for enfranchising the
dispossessed by doing what no other party had dared to do before
despite the fact that everyone, including the BJP, promised to
implement Mandal. There can hardly be anyone who falls in between
these two extreme reactions.
Written off as a political has-been by many, including myself,
pilloried as the prime minister who triggered off a caste war,
and ridiculed as the only premier in independent India to have
been voted out of office on the floor of the Lok Sabha, Singh
is a man of many parts. A sensitive poet, an artist of no mediocre
talent, no one can blame him for his tenure as prime minister
since he did have the candour, perhaps foresight even, to admit
earlier on that he would be a disaster in that high office.
Yes, it is a little incredible that the one person solely responsible
for elevating the Bharatiya Janata Party from the level of political
pariah with just two Lok Sabha members to a redoubtable position
in 1989 from which it has not looked back since, has been the
architect of the current anti-BJP consensus among political parties.
It was the pariah BJP that was the first beneficiary of his Mandal
move, it would seem. But then, Singh, as no other Indian politician
alive, is a consummate artiste when it comes to realpolitik. He
marches with the beat of the times -- be it the Bofors scandal,
the Mandal Commission report, anti-Congressism of anti-BJPism -- and
knows what it is that will work at any given point of time.
He was the man solely responsible for demolishing the Congress's
carefully cultivated votebank with one swift move that August
morning six years ago. As he had then claimed to this correspondent
in Bombay, "the real effects of Mandal will be there for
all to see... no party will get a clear majority in the Lok Sabha
for some time to come... the polity will go through a process
of intense churning (manthan).... regional and backward class
dominated parties will call the shots.... all this will take some
time to settle down.... maybe around 2000 AD the picture will
become clearer..."
Well, he was right. He did stir up the polity, naturally it is
only right that he is there in the thick of it now, trying to
find a modus vivendi between the Congress and the United Front,
even as his failing health is a cause for concern. Singh knows
that if his effort fails, no only will his efforts so far have
come to nought, but it will also bring the BJP to the centrestage
of Indian politics from which it is only a hair's breath away.
He knows that the only way to make amends for his error of judgment
in 1989 is to cobble together a viable formation that will not
only see through the end of the decade but also to into the next
elections against the BJP, jointly.
Will he succeed in his efforts? One never knows. He could succeed
in his attempts at emasculating the Congress party in the Hindi
heartland not only because he knew the ground realities there
much better than his rival Rajiv Gandhi who, lacking political
maturity and acumen, relied on the advice of those around him.
It was thus easy to decimate him and his party, but the BJP is
a different ballgame altogether.
The BJP is not run on the whims and fancies of one individual,
but on the collective wisdom of its think-tank, which comprises
men of understanding. You can deride them, you can adore them,
but you cannot wish them away. It is thanks to them that the BJP
has risen from the ashes, and is today knocking on the doors of
New Delhi.
That its rise has been corresponding with the decline
of the Congress party is not a coincidence, and this has been
Singh's biggest failure as a politician. He was able to finish
off the Congress, but in the vacuum created it has not been his
formation that has moved in as he hoped, but the BJP. And it is
this failure that he is trying to rectify from his hospital bed
in the capital.
Yes, Singh has been sincere in whatever he undertook, even though
his critics aver that he often used his sincerity as a garb to
cover his real intentions. They say he was sincere as Rajiv Gandhi's
finance minister, and just happened to stumble on to Bofors; he
was sincere as the defence minister, and the HDW scandal just
happened to tumble out of the cupboard; he was sincere as an opposition
leader, never mind the accommodation of the BJP; he was sincere
as a socialist, forget the fact that he presented India's first
truly capitalist budget.
As I said earlier, Singh is a politician first and foremost, not
a statesman, who knows that the real purpose of politics is power.
To seize it first and retain it after that, is the true intention
of the exertions one sees in the corridors of power. At the same
time, by keeping himself out of the fray -- which has effectively
blunted the criticism against him that he is power-crazy -- he has
elevated himself to the status of a rajrishi.
The permutations and combinations that are being worked out in
New Delhi and state capitals are the fallout of what this man
did six years ago as prime minister. Today he is working towards
fulfilling that legacy, only part of which has come true. It is
a rare politician who sets out to complete what he has started,
although everyone promises to do so, and he belongs to that breed.
Personally, I have no lost for the man, but in all fairness I
cannot deny him my grudging admiration for what he is trying to
do now.
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