The measure of a man

How will history judge Atal Behari Vajpayee? Before attempting to answer that question, raised so often in the past 24 hours, ever since the Bharatiya Janata Party’s founding father was named for the Bharat Ratna, it is important to place that interrogation of legacy in its proper context. How indeed does history judge any Prime Minister, President or head of government?

These assessments are not static; they are continuous and evolve with time. Take one example. In 1990, with the Indian economy collapsing, with the secularism project in tatters, and with India having in effect finished on the losing side in the Cold War, the tripod on which the Nehruvian legacy stood was under serious challenge.

Twelve or 15 years later, following India’s economic resurgence on the back of its IT prowess and after the crumbling of Pakistan and many other post-colonial states into undemocratic (semi-democratic at best) hubs of religious hate and chaos, Nehru began to be seen much more generously. His commitment to democracy and early investments in science and technology and higher education were that much more appreciated.

The opposite course was followed with his daughter. When she died in 1984, Indira Gandhi was regarded as a determined patriot who fought day and night for India. By the late 1990s and in the new millennium, she was being recognised as a victim — collateral damage even — of her own mistakes and a leader who throttled two generations of Indians by making a series of wrong economic choices in the 1970s, and building a paranoiac polity that only reflected her personal insecurities.

It would follow therefore that an honest examination of a legacy is in how successor generations, those with little or even no personal experience or engagement with the leader and his or her actions and decisions, come to measure such a legacy. Immediacy can be too emotional, one way or the other. If P.V. Narasimha Rao’s legacy were to have been chronicled in the summer of 1996, when he was voted out of office and the Congress slipped to 140 Lok Sabha seats, its lowest tally till then, he may well have been dismissed as a shyster, too clever by half, head of a very corrupt government, a failure in anticipating December 6, 1992, and dishonest in framing political colleagues in the Jain Hawala scam.

Today, impressions of Rao are very, very different. In contrast to the quality of party leadership that has taken the Congress down to 44 Lok Sabha seats, he would appear to be a wise, and far-seeing giant. The dramatic change in the course of the Indian economy and foreign policy, the reformist budgets and deregulation of 1991 and 1992, the reaching out to Israel, Singapore and East Asia, as a means to finding common ground with America (Looking East to Look West, to borrow writer Sunanda K. Datta-Ray’s phrase), these were tectonic shifts, gamechangers in India’s destiny.

How does Mr Vajpayee face up to these benchmarks? In his case too, context and the passage of years have helped. When he left office in 2004, he was perceived as a well-meaning and good Prime Minister; after 10 years of the United Progressive Alliance, he has become a great Prime Minister. Many who exulted and celebrated when the Vajpayee government was defeated in May 2004 have rewritten their report cards of the man and his prime ministry in subsequent years. Some have had the courtesy to acknowledge his Bharat Ratna as much deserved and long delayed.

It took the mess of the Manmohan Singh period, the repeated disappointments thrown up by an educated, erudite but ultimately overpromoted Prime Minister, to accept that what Mr Vajpayee had achieved was a near miracle. He kept a fractious coalition going for a full term, did his degree of deal making and compromises — with National Democratic Alliance allies or within the Sangh Parivar — but never lost sight of his government’s strategic goals.

His focus on infrastructure, on power and telecom and highways, on repositioning India in the global comity of nations, and on rescuing the India-United States relationship from decades of shibboleths to a workable partnership, the product of a modernist diplomacy, was unwavering. It could be argued Dr Singh had similar ideas — but in Mr Vajpayee’s period not only were the promises made, they were kept. Those roads actually got built. Even today, one can travel to several Indian states, including somewhere the Bharatiya Janata Party has never been within smelling distance of power, and hear people in a far-off rural locale point to an impressive highway and call it “Vajpayee’s sadak”.

Where does one place Mr Vajpayee in the prime ministerial pantheon? A test of a Prime Minister’s legacy is a comparison between conditions at the beginning and end of his or her tenure. Such mapping is only useful in case of someone who has been Prime Minister for a full term or thereabouts. It would not be fair in the case of say Chandra Shekhar, who was in 7, Race Course Road for just a few months.

Unfortunately, this would also leave out stalwarts like Lal Bahadur Shastri. Shastri’s short, 18-month term saw exemplary wartime leadership in 1965 — with very different conclusions from the Chinese conflict of three years earlier. It also had him encourage agriculture minister C. Subramaniam to take early steps in the Green Revolution.

Of the Prime Ministers who have served a full term, three stand out as India’s finest: Nehru, Rao and Mr Vajpayee. They left India better off than they found it. In contrast, Indira was one of history’s great disasters. She did win the war in East Pakistan but in her 20 years — 1966-1984 — she trampled and destroyed the impressive array of independent public institutions that the British raj, and then Nehru, had left behind. Her legacy was a divided and internally driven country, with no economy to speak of.

On his part, Mr Vajpayee took charge of a confused India in 1998, one that had lost its way and was in the midst of a maddening era of coalitions and regional politics, with no sight of the big picture. When he demitted office, India’s mood was confident and perhaps even cocky; it was poised for great things. If we are to be true to Mr Vajpayee, we cannot stop at giving him the Bharat Ratna. We must achieve those great things.

The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com