A promising start

the electoral verdict was not exactly in favour of its own agenda. The victory is as much the BJP’s as it is of its regional allies. In conceding this point, the party has behaved in a highly responsible manner even at the risk of antagonising the hardliners in the party who would find it extremely difficult to countenance any watering down of its Hindutva plank. Even on many other issues likeeconomic liberalisation, national security and foreign policy, the party has shown remarkable resilience. For instance, it is prepared to carry on the economic liberalisation programme initiated by the Congress and pursued vigorously by the United Front although it had laid considerable stress on swadeshi in its own manifesto. In the fast-changing world the BJP does not want India to remain an outcast as is reflected in its willingness to welcome foreign capital to subserve national economic interests. Needless to say, all this bodes well for the 13-party coalition. In retrospect, it would have been better if the BJP and its allies had contested the elections on this kind of a common agenda.

In the give and take that facilitated the drafting of the agenda, the BJP’s allies have shown a measure of maturity, except perhaps the AIADMK whose insistence on making Tamil an official language of the nation necessitated a safety clause. In the end, if the agenda appears to stand for a continuation of many of thepolicies of the outgoing government, it redounds only to the credit of the coalition. It may be pertinent to recall that even in the 11th Lok Sabha, there was a consensus on many national issues. After all, as the agenda itself mentions, the coalition is keen to pursue the consensual, rather than the confrontationist, method of solving national problems.

The tone and tenor of the agenda are such that it should not be much of a problem for even the Opposition to extend support for its implementation. It is true that the agenda is full of platitudes but that could hardly be helped in a document of this nature. The point is how sincere the BJP and its allies are to its implementation. The failure of the Common Minimum Programme of the United Front was not so much on account of its intrinsic drawbacks as the lack of sincerity in its implementation. The nation can rest assured that so long as the coalition government sticks to the agenda, there will be no threat to political stability. This is possible only ifthe constituents of the coalition forget for a while their own petty programmes and work for the implementation of the national agenda.