What BJP Rule Meant - Coalition politics is greatest legacy of Vajpayee government

"What BJP Rule Meant Coalition politics is greatest legacy of Vajpayee government Christophe Jaffrelot For the first time in post-independence India, Hindu nationalists were in a position to rule the country between 1998 and 2004. The impact of this unique phase has not been assessed yet. The BJP had been voted to power to make a change after decades of Congress rule and two years of the Third Front. The Vajpayee government did make a change a few weeks after taking over by deciding on nuclear tests. Previous Congress governments had contemplated this move, but no prime minister after Indira Gandhi had gone ahead with it. This strategic shift may remain the only irreversible innovation of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Certainly the Vajpayee government introduced new measures but most of them have been undone by the UPA after 2004. Education is a case in point. M M Joshi, as HRD minister, tried hard to saffronise the textbooks and appointed Hindutva-minded ideologues in key committees. But all this is history today. In the economic domain, the real change had started before, with the Narasimha Rao government. The NDA simply made the evolution deeper and quicker, as evident from the “strategic sales” regarding a few PSUs which amounted to their privatisation. No significant reform of the labour laws took place, for instance. In the realm of diplomacy, the Vajpayee government accelerated the rapprochement with the US and Israel, but they were already on the Congress agenda, as the opening of an Indian embassy in Tel Aviv and an Israeli one in New Delhi showed in 1991.
Six years in office, in fact, might have changed BJP as much as BJP has changed Indian politics. The party was supposed to be allergic to caste politics because it divided India (and the Hindus), but Vajpayee toyed with the reservation issue the same way as his predecessors did — granting quotas to the Jats of Rajasthan who overnight became OBCs and a BJP votebank. The BJP was also supposed to be clean, but party president Bangaru Laxman himself — not to speak of the rest — was caught receiving bribe.
The real gift BJP gave to India was political stability through the setting up of a coalition pattern. Between 1989 and 1999, India had had five general elections and six PMs. Obviously, the old Congress system had gone, and nothing had replaced it. The BJP displayed remarkable flexibility by admitting that it would not be in a position to govern India alone and that it would have to dilute its ideology to make alliances. The creation of the NDA in 1998 will perhaps turn out to be a real milestone in Indian politics.
The BJP then made three major concessions
by putting on the back burner Ayodhya, Article 370 and a Uniform Civil Code. As a result, the NDA was in a position to prepare a common election manifesto in 1999 and the Vajpayee government lasted five years, something a non-Congress government had never achieved so far.
The Congress, though reluctantly, has emulated this strategy by shaping the United Progressive Alliance in 2004. Certainly it was not easy for Congress to admit that its decline was irreversible — at least in the short run — but BJP had set a pattern the party had to imitate if it wanted to compete successfully. The BJP, therefore, has helped Indian democracy to cope with the growing fragmentation of the party system — because of regional, communal and caste identities — which might have perpetuated instability at the Centre had not India entered the era of coalitions. Today, India looks like a more modern democracy because of a growing bipolarisation of politics which offers a rather clear choice to voters.
Each time Hindu nationalist leaders have been in office at the Centre, the sangh parivar has, however, been under strain. In 1977-79, ‘dual membership’ had been a key reason for the abortion of the Janata experiment. During 1999-2004, similar issues resurfaced. On one hand, the BJP was made of swayamsevaks who were supposed to pay allegiance to the RSS and its agenda; on the other, they were partners in the NDA framework who did not share their Hindutva-based ideology.
The RSS acknowledged what came to be known as the compulsions of coalition politics — so long as the organisation found reasons to rejoice in some of the decisions of Vajpayee’s government like the nuclear tests and the education policy. Things changed when some of the reforms contradicted the programme of RSS and of some of its other offshoots. Economic liberalisation, for instance, was harshly criticised by staunch advocates of swadeshi.
More importantly, the VHP never understood that no progress could be made regarding its plan to build a Ram temple in Ayodhya though its friends were in office. Gradually, the idea took shape that BJP had used the organisation to mobilise voters, but once in office, it was not willing to pay its debt. The relations between BJP and RSS — as well as VHP — turned really sour after the 2004 defeat that the latter attributed to the dilution of the party’s ideology.
Such tensions need not be overemphasised though. The sangh parivar survived similar drama in the late 1970s-early 1980s. It proved then that it was truly resilient and it is showing the same kind of quality today. However, the tenure of the Vajpayee government reconfirmed the deeply ambivalent nature of this movement: it cannot win power alone, but it refuses to share power either.
The writer is director of CERI, Paris.