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The road not taken

Last weekend I was in Agra for a day, listening to a group of US Congressmen and parliamentarians from other parts of the world, including India, sharing their experiences. What amazed me was that their concerns, their self doubts, their uncertainties were almost identical to mine. Are we doing what is expected of us? Can we do more? What are the ways by which we can reach out more to those people who vote us in? How can we fulfil their growing expectations? In fact, what is the perfect match between public expectations and personal ambitions?

If you cut a swathe through the rhetoric, you will find one simple fact staring you in the face: Politics is not an easy game. In fact, it's no game at all. It is a tough, difficult minefield that you tread cautiously, very cautiously in the hope that in the end of it all you will find some sense of fulfilment. What happens more frequently however is that as you go along, things around you change. They become tougher and tougher and, instead of the proverbial pot of gold you expect at the end of the rainbow, you end up finding that the rainbow itself has vanished.

Look at our most recent prime ministers. V P Singh, Chandra Shekhar, P V Narasimha Rao, H D Deve Gowda, I K Gujral. Each of them makes a perfect study in despair. Each began with so much goodwill and opportunity and, instead of taking advantage of the serendipitous circumstances that brought them where they were, they basked in their own glory and wrote themselves out of the history books.

Singh, for instance, fought one big C very bravely, corruption. But he ended up introducing another big C into our political life, casteism. It is difficult to say today which is worse. Corruption may look much worse because it eats into the moral spine of the nation. It destroys our self image and ends up making us slaves of the rich and the powerful. But, if you look at it carefully, casteism does the same. In a different way of course. In trying to set right one historic wrong, Singh unleashed another and thought he had bought himself a permanent berth in history. The caste dynamics he unleashed were strong but not strong enough to keep him in power. Today, a sick man, he is fighting another big C and watching the caste leaders he had imposed on us make a mess of India. It is left to the BJP now to try and resolve the mystery of Bofors, which he had made into a household word during Rajiv's time but never had the political spunk to actually see through during his term as prime minister. His era is luckily dying out and those of us who took up cudgels for him in the media are embarrassed in retrospect to see the many unprincipled twists and turns it took.

History gave Chandra Shekhar the opportunity to prove that he was more capable than Rajiv or Singh, the two men he disliked the most and whom he followed into office. But he allowed his giant-sized ego to get the better of him. He was also foolish enough not to realise that he was being trapped and, like all our prime ministers, he had around him a gaggle of worthless freeloaders and carpetbaggers who predicted that he would win hands down if he went to the electorate instead of suffering Rajiv's constant pinpricks. He was, of course, wiped out but that is not the sad thing. What is sad is that there is not a single achievement he will be remembered for. For he did nothing at all during his months in office apart from breast beating about the empty exchequer he had inherited. He still keeps coming back to parliament from Ballia and all parties show him respect by fielding a weak candidate against him but no one has any time for him. He remains the loneliest man in parliament and the most frustrated because he is clever enough to know he blew the one great chance history gave him.

Narasimha Rao, on the other hand, made the most of his five years. He came to power with a feeble Government but lasted his full tenure owing to expert manipulation and unabashed corruption. He even bribed MPs to ensure that his Government never fell. His tragedy is that his economic reforms achieved more for India than the entire Nehru-Gandhi clan did and yet he was forgotten within days of demiting office. He was humiliated by his partymen, ignored by the Opposition, harrassed by the investigating agencies and forgotten by the people of India quicker than he thought he would ever be. He will be remembered only as as the first Indian prime minister to defend himself in court against bribery and corruption charges.

His best friend and bagman, the lugubrious godman and fixer Chandra Swami has already spent much time in Tihar and no one will be surprised if our legal system, upright as it is, succeeds in sending this prime minister behind bars to write the next volume of his autobiography.

Deve Gowda became prime minister by accident but he had the perfect opportunity to prove that an unknown village politician could change the future of India. Unfortunately, he had no time for anything serious. He played his Karnataka politics out of 7 Race Course Road and, in that sense, demeaned his position by doing virtually nothing of consequence except brushing up on his Hindi. He became a tragic hero for a day when Sitaram Kesri dropped his government for no ostensible reason. That apart he will only be remembered as the prime minister who fell asleep at public functions. A large, lumbering joke. No more; no less. What people find even more comical is his attempts to make a comeback and that is why, I guess, they made sure that he lost his Lok Sabha seat this time. Hopefully this will keep him back in Karnataka to do what he loves doing most. Fighting Hegde.

Gujral's problem was that he had no grass root support of any kind and only became prime minister because Kesri wanted Gowda out. Since all the leaders of the third front were so busy fighting amongst themselves for the top job, Gujral (who had no power base, no support, no hope in hell) quietly slipped past them to the winning post. The sad part is that instead of doing anything of value for India, he spent all his time trying to consolidate his power base and before he could realise what happened, the Congress again yanked away the rug from under his feet. Gujral was a good man, if somewhat effete, and if he had made a serious effort he could have shown India that a small man, a weak man could have made a difference. But having seen Gowda's fate, he was too frightened to be seen as strong and decisive. So he stuck to taking small, irrelevent decisions and ultimately wrote himself off as India's fastest forgotten prime minister. No one even gave him a ticket to fight the elections this time.

After these sad cases and of course the eminently forgettable Rajiv regime, known mainly for its corruption and vile politics, we are lucky to have a re-elected prime minister. The way things were going, I thought India would never see the same man back in office for a second term. Atal Bihari Vajpayee is actually back a third time if you count his first 13 days as well. True, he is back because the electorate felt that his earlier terms were rudely and unjustly interrupted. But more than that, they saw him as a leader, a do-er, a man with a dream for India.

It would be nice to see him stay and do real things for this country. We are tired of prime ministers whose names and regimes we can barely remember.

Pritish Nandy

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