BJP converting elections into a political beauty contest
Mani Shankar Aiyar Posted online: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 at 1134 hours IST Updated: Wednesday, February 04, 2004 at 0742 hours IST 1 2Next » New Delhi, February 3: This column is dedicated to that arbiter of good taste and exemplar of political etiquette, the Hon’ble Shri Pramod Mahajan, Minister of Manners.
I am amused by the BJP’s desperate attempt to convert the forthcoming Lok Sabha election into a political beauty contest between an octogenarian Dritharashtra, as Ram Jethmalani has so aptly described Vajpayee, and a reluctant debutante who has conclusively established her political appeal by winning far more states in her first six years at the helm than Vajpayee has in his last six as the NDA’s Numero Uno (which, for Pramod Mahajan’s benefit, I take the liberty of translating from the Italian as “Ek Numbari”). That they seek to do so only shows how dimly does their India shine. Else, why put all their eggs in one crumbling basket?
But battle having been joined, what alternative does one have to descending to their level? So, here goes. Sonia Gandhi, of course, is no freedom fighter. She could hardly have been one, given that she was born on December 9, 1946, the day the Constituent Assembly first met, to go by a plaque prominently displayed in Central Hall. She is only as old as our sovereignty. Not so Vajpayee. He is the first prime minister India has ever had who could have fought for the country’s freedom but refrained from doing so. Indeed, arrested in a Quit India demonstration in August 1942, he pleaded before a colonial court that he had done the Imperial Power no harm (“maine kuch nuksan nahi kiya”). Of course, he was then but a callow youth of some seventeen summers, so one can hardly take that statement as a confession of treachery.
But when one considers that his mentor, Shyama Prasad Mookherjee, was in that historic year of 1942 in cross-communal co-habitation in the Bengal Government with Fazlul Haq of Jinnah’s party, both pledging fealty to the Crown at the precise moment Gandhiji was proclaiming “Karenge ya Marenge”, one needs to ask whether Vajpayee’s court performance was an innocent youthful prank or the first expression of his political preferences? For let none forget that it is the same young Atal Bihari Vajpayee who became secretary to the first president of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the self-same Shyama Prasad Mookherjee.
So, did Vajpayee accuse himself of having done the Brits no harm because: a) he dearly wished them no harm? Or b) he did not sympathise with the aims or methods of the freedom movement for the reasons set out by his mentor? Or c) because in the unequal struggle between the satyagrahis and His Majesty, the Brits in 1942 looked as if they might be the winning side?
