The Hindu : Vajpayee as a wartime leader

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Opinion

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Vajpayee as a wartime leader

By Harish Khare

A grave responsibility rests on the Prime Minister to see to it that anti-Pakistan feelings do not get reduced to anti-minority hysteria.

HAVING BEEN denied success as a peacemaker, Atal Behari Vajpayee has now scripted for himself the role of a wartime leader. From Lahore to Kargil, and, again, from Agra to Kaluchak, waging war has proven as problematic for him as making peace. After all, nothing in Mr. Vajpayee's long public innings has prepared him for either of the two roles. Yet, as the Prime Minister, he finds himself having to summon individual qualities as well as to tap the institutional resilience of his office to meet the exacting demands of war and peace. The question is: will Mr. Vajpayee succeed — or, more pertinently, will he be allowed to succeed — as a wartime leader when he was denied a modicum of success as peacemaker? The same very forces and individuals who worked overtime to stymie his efforts at peace-making would see to it that he fails in this critical hour too.

There are three aspects to wartime leadership: executive, political and inspirational. The executive part is the easiest, even though over the last four years the Vajpayee Government has not exactly earned a name for itself for sustained administrative grind; from the Home Minister down to the junior-most Minister of State, the tendency is to confuse television bytes for administrative accomplishments, and with few exceptions, most of Mr. Vajpayee's colleagues have proven incapable of quiet and diligent ministerial homework. Mr. Vajpayee himself has earned a reputation for not being much inclined to be bothered with the nuts and bolts of administrative decision-making. But now as a wartime leader, Mr. Vajpayee has to demonstrate that he can quarterback a massive mobilisation of national resources and talent. The inherent powers and prestige of his office would make it easy for him to undertake this role; all that is needed is a willingness to be in charge of the wartime show. It is the political part that could be problematic because it would mean a change of pace in Mr. Vajpayee's operative style. If in the past he failed as a peacemaker it is because he never insisted on controlling the agenda; and, the obvious lesson is that he would come a cropper as a wartime leader if he does not firmly take charge of his agenda. Controlling the agenda, in the present context, means controlling the rhetoric, colleagues, image, policy, the Sangh Parivar, and the Opposition. Prime Ministerial control, calibration and coordination of words and actions are the keys to success.

As a master communicator, Mr. Vajpayee should normally be in control of his own words. Unfortunately, of late, he has often spoken in contradictory terms; and, what is more, he has frequently taken to complaining that he was misunderstood. This is a strangely inexplicable complaint from a man who has reached the highest political office in the land on the strength of his ability to spin words, phrases, cliches and metaphors into comforting dreams and tantalising promises. A wartime leader does not have the luxury of issuing clarifications and caveats. More than measuring his own words, the Prime Minister would need to tell his senior colleagues to experience the joy of golden silence. For once he must tell L. K. Advani that the Home Minister of India would not lose his stature or effectiveness if he did not hit the headlines every day in the hourly television news bulletin. And, then, someone would have to restrain the garrulous Minister of State for External Affairs, who cavalierly keeps talking about the use of nuclear weapons; rather than acting as a team-player, the Minister keeps mixing his roles as a Kashmiri, as a National Conference boss and as Mr. Vajpayee's Minister. And, then, there is a Defence Minister who goes around detailing a war timetable to foreign correspondents. Not to be left behind is Uma Bharti reciting incendiary war-poetry in the company of Mr. Advani. In this age of nuclear stand-off and global spin, the "enemy" and the international community cannot be faulted if they fail to decipher correctly our intentions from the Prime Minister's babbling Cabinet colleagues. Outside this unruly ministerial crowd, the Prime Minister would need to have a word with the hotheads within his own party and the madcaps in the rest of the Sangh Parivar. As long as Mr. Vajpayee needed shrill domestic rhetoric to impress upon the rest of the world that he was under pressure from his own political backyard to put an end to Pakistan's state-sponsored terrorism, the tough talk from the BJP had its uses; but, now, there is an imminent danger of these old men of the Sangh Parivar, insistent on playing out their deadly fantasies towards Pakistan, trying their uninformed best to deprive Indian diplomacy of its creative potential. War cries from Jhandewalan cannot be allowed to distract from the obligation to use military power responsibly and imaginatively.

In other words, if the Prime Minister has to succeed in his latest role as a wartime leader he would have to control the policy and all its nuances, without letting the demagogues, within and outside the Cabinet, run away with images and rhetoric and thereby steer the agenda into waywardness. For example, it was most ill advised for the Prime Minister to have allowed himself to be flanked by the father-son Abdullah duo during his press conference in Srinagar; this thoughtlessness or, worse, mischief simply diluted the Prime Minister's promise of "free and fair elections". He is particularly fortunate to have an Opposition that is more responsible and more mature than his own political companions and ideological cohorts. Mr. Vajpayee has to be demonstratively in charge of the political direction of his own Government and party. He has an opportunity to reclaim the ground he lost in Goa; now is the time for the Prime Minister to complete his own unfinished agenda in Gujarat by sending Narendra Modi packing. Mr. Vajpayee has to cleanse his own reputation of the Modi stains before he can possibly hope to succeed as a wartime leader.

Beyond these executive and political tasks that Mr. Vajpayee must address, he would need to attend to the most crucial requirement of mobilising the national mood in a manner that is both inspiring and morally uplifting. In recent months, he has allowed himself to be pushed by excessively partisan colleagues and comrades into a confrontationist corner. No Prime Minister can lay claim to the support and cooperation of political rivals in times of war without himself eschewing partisanship.

Above all, the country — as well as the rest of the world — needs to hear from the Prime Minister that the war option is being talked about from the moral high ground. The nobility of our purpose — defence of a secular, pluralistic, democratic order — has to be articulated. Mr. Vajpayee would be doing himself and the country as great disservice if he were to allow the current mood of national frustration and anger over Pakistan's terror-centric habits to degenerate into an unabashed jingoism of the old Sangh Parivar variety. A grave responsibility rests on the Prime Minister to see to it that anti-Pakistan feelings do not get reduced to anti-minority hysteria. As a wartime leader, it will be incumbent upon Mr. Vajpayee to see to it that the conflict with Pakistan does not deepen the existing fault-lines in our polity.

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