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Halo Wanted. Apply Within.

"What wrong did this man do?" asked the full page ads that appeared in newspapers soon after April 17. You remember, that was the day India's current government lost its legitimacy in Parliament. Now I know it's been over a month since then, but I have an excuse for not writing this earlier. I spent much of the month marvelling at the gall of a party that would put out ads like this. There is not a single political party in this land that is free from the stink of sleaze and crime. But there is one, nevertheless, that longs for a halo around its head.

That's the party of the man in the full page ads. Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his Bharatiya Janata Party.

The ads have him looking out benignly at you. What wrong did he do, and you can hardly help thinking: could someone who looks quite so avuncular ever have done anything wrong? At all? Perish the thought! -- which is exactly what uncle's party wants you to do. And then your eye travels down the page, to a rogues' gallery of five photographs. Sonia, Mayawati, Laloo, Subramanian Swamy, Jayalalitha. "Ask Them", the ad advises you. Ask Them what wrong the dear avuncular uncle did, that is. And just to nudge you along the path all right-thinking people must take on seeing this ad, the captions below the rogues' gallery contain such eye-catching words, judiciously applied, as: "Chanakya." "Chandragupta." "Kalyug."

You are not meant to miss the contrast between such words and the one that is used for everybody's favourite uncle: "Atalji.." Always "Atalji." And for good measure, "the true leader of India."

With the rogues' gallery, of course, comes a catalogue of the nasty tricks the rogues got up to in booting Atalji's Government from power that April 17. Jayalalitha "asked for votes in Atalji's name and then used the very same MPs for betraying him." Mayawati "lied to the people and the country." And so on. You can guess the rest.

Oh yes indeed, what wrong did this man do? In a word: enough. I went over some of it in a column some weeks ago, so please forgive the repetition. It does bear repetition. It does bear recall.

Let's see, where shall we start? Mayawati? OK, Mayawati. In my memory, and I believe it stretches back to before Mayawati hit the big screen of Indian politics, there is not one thing this winsome lass has done that would make her worthy of trust. Believable. Credible. She has run election campaigns in tandem with one party, announcing even while she does so that she intends to dump that party after the election. Time and again, she has abused the BJP, not kept her promises to them. What's more, she revels in this very untrustworthiness, believing it to be a badge of honour. She is that curious beast in our politics: a weasel who is proud of being one. And I am conscious, as I say this, of the slur I'm attaching to the fair name of the weasel family.

If Mayawati "lied to the people and the country", that's just about what any ordinary Indian expects from her. The wrong is entirely Atalji's, for believing this woman in the first place. That is, if he did believe her in the first place. There is the little matter, that I quoted once before, of what a BJP MP from Karnataka has been telling rallies in that state, as reported in The Times of India on April 22: Mayawati "got money from us and them but ditched us."

Wrong, we were looking for? It stares us in the face.

Next, Jayalalitha? OK, the Big Lady from TN. Much the same reasoning, if that's the word, applies as with Mayawati. This lady has also proved that she has no use for promises and words such as "trust." Besides, she is neck deep in a series of scams involving amounts carrying so many zeros you think you are seeing double.

You would think a man who so badly wants a halo would have said something like: "I will not have anything to do with a woman on trial for corruption, even if that prevents me from forming a government." Instead, the "true leader of India" very consciously and cynically joined hands with the lady before our last Lok Sabha election. Then he spent much of his year in power helping her in her efforts to wriggle weightily off the hook of the cases against her. He even put his Attorney General, Soli Sorabjee, to the task of undermining the special courts the Tamil Nadu government set up to try those cases: Mr Sorabjee has spent months arguing in the Supreme Court that they were unlawfully constituted. Naturally, now that uncle's new alliance in TN is with the party in power there, such efforts are a thing of the past. Suddenly Jayalalitha must indeed be tried by those special courts.

And for that little extra dab of opportunism, try this: uncle and fans ridicule Sonia for joining hands with Jayalalitha in a joint search for power. Spot on, uncle. We agree with you. That's what they did and power is what motivated them. But you did exactly the same thing just over a year ago, also in search of power! I ask you, what is it that makes one grab for power stink, but the other smell of roses? (And while we're about it, may we please see an end to the frantic finger-pointing about people harbouring a lust for power? Power is what politicians want. Lusting for it is what they do. It is what we must want them to do. And the ones who pretend to be uninterested in it are lying).

Wrong, someone said? It's here, in full-figured life.

But there's more too. Atalji the genial uncle was quite happy to watch as my state, Maharashtra, was given as CM a man accused of murder in a case that is still on appeal. He looked on benignly as our largest state, UP, turned a gaggle of thugs and goons into the biggest cabinet of ministers Lucknow has ever known. He was quite content to make a hero of a man, Sukh Ram, who has thereby escaped any punishment for the corruption he had become synonymous with only two years ago. (Millions rolled into bedsheets, no less). Atalji was similarly benevolent towards two other stalwarts of the North: Om Prakash Chautala who disgusted us a decade ago with his crimes in Meham; and Bansi Lal who disgusted us two decades ago with his crimes during the Emergency -- the very same Emergency that jailed Atalji and company, the same one they fought so valiantly.

Why stop there? Atalji's year in office saw a leap in attacks on Christians by people tiring of attacks on Muslims. His own Home Ministry's Annual Report for 1998-99 tells us that such attacks went from 30 in 1997 to 84 in 1998. The Home Ministry also informs us that in some of those 84 cases, it was a "coincidence" that the victims were Christians. I don't know what this means, but perhaps the good uncle does. His most famous reaction to such attacks? That we should debate conversions by missionaries. In other words: blame the victims. Just by coincidence, I'm sure.

The "true leader of India" did show us what justice meant to him in his 1996 stint as Prime Minister. In those 13 days, he asked the Maharashtra government to reinstate the Srikrishna Commission that was conducting an inquiry into the Bombay riots of 1992-93. He deserved all the applause he got for that decision. Yet what happened when he came back as prime minister in 1998? The Justice submitted his report a month before Atalji took office; his own alliance government in Maharashtra wriggled for six months before tabling it in the Assembly; when that happened, that government's then chief minister and his puppet-master launched a vicious attack against report and author, calling both biased against Hindus. Like every other report about every other inquiry, this one too has been shelved and forgotten, with no action taken against those who murdered a thousand Indians six years ago.

Through all of this, Atalji maintained a studied silence. He wanted the inquiry resumed in 1996, but watched as its report was torn to shreds in 1998. Not one word has he uttered about it.

What wrong did he do? Plenty, and plenty more.

Through the year, we were treated to a steady stream of issues that all turned magically into patriotism tests. Nuclear bombs, first. (The ones that were supposed to enhance our security but have not prevented us from approaching the brink of war in Kashmir yet again). You didn't like the bomb, you were "anti-national."

Songs, next. (This is true). The argument over the Srikrishna report in the Maharashtra Assembly somehow became an argument over singing "Vande Mataram", and of course only those who sang it were patriots. Then there was "Saraswati Vandana", and now singing that one made you a patriot.

As those dulcet strains faded away, it was the need to debate religious conversions. And that mutated into the pronouncement from various people, one Ashok Singhal among them, that Christians and Muslims have "extra-territorial loyalties." With one master-stroke, some 140 million Indians were defined as anti-national! Not even their possible liking for the bomb, or their willingness to sing songs, could save them! What genius!

Most recently, it's foreign birth. Now all you have to do to be certified a patriot, in case you somehow missed all the other opportunities, is to pronounce that India cannot have a person born abroad as PM. That's all. You don't have to sing it, either.

I have no idea what's next in the patriotism stakes. Whatever it is, I know Atalji's party, his government and his followers will be jumping up and down screaming it. Governance by puerile patriotism test, that's what we've had from "the true leader of India."

And we're asked: "What wrong did this man do?"

I'm pessimistic about every possible government that we might have on our heads come September. But when one as venal as this yearns nevertheless for a halo, there's just one thing to say. Good riddance.

Dilip D'Souza