In Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, there is a powerful sequence at the very end. A Hindu communalist has a change of heart when he discovers an innocent Muslim child whom he has orphaned after killing his father. Full of guilt, he takes the child to the Mahatma, who is fasting to end communal tension, and asks him what should he do? Gandhiji, who is often criticised by the Left for spiritualising politics, replies: ``Take back the child and rear him as your own, but as a Muslim, not as a Hindu.'' It is instructive to remember that Atal Bihari Vajpayee swore by Gandhian socialism when he founded the Bharatiya Janata Party (the modern incarnation of the Jan Sangh) in 1980, as a centrist successor to the dying Janata Party. Although Gandhiji considered Ram Rajya as the utopia towards which India should strive, what would have been the Mahatma's advice to Vajpayee today? Perhaps, as penance, atone for the sin of destroying a place of worship by fasting, and then along with Hindu kar sevaks rebuild a masjid for the Muslims. Of course, Vajpayee is no Mahatma. We do not expect such magnanimity from him. Yet, for an avowed Gandhian, what can be the reason for raking up independent India's most divisive controversy eight years after it was given a decent burial by shifting the issue to the judiciary? No political compulsion can be a good enough reason to make such an incendiary remark, which simply falls short of claiming ``mandir wahin banayenge'', and that too during the holy month of Ramzan. If public reactions are any indication, by his Ayodhya gamble Vajpayee seems to have lost the goodwill of most minorities which he so carefully cultivated during Dussehra, when he asked his loyalist, the newly chosen Dalit president of the BJP, Bangaru Laxman, to openly woo all minorities in the party. Barely a few days ago, on the eve of Ramzan, he had declared a unilateral ceasefire against the militants in Jammu & Kashmir for which he had been showered with accolades universally. In short, between Dussehra and Ramzan, the prime minister thrice redefined his party's programme and thereby the national agenda. Curiously, the last time he took an 180 degree turn from his positions on the two previous occasions. Why did the PM step beyond the Lakshman rekha drawn by the NDA government's common minimum programme and risk the stability of his government? What was the immediate provocation for defending his `tainted' cabinet colleagues facing CBI inquiries? Each of these questions have indeed become sawal dus crore ka. Most answers delve into a needless controversy over whether Vajpayee is a moderate who has unmasked himself, or whether he has always been part of the Sangh tradition. Others end up heaping praise on him for his Machiavellian qualities: By reinventing Ayodhya as a national agenda, they argue, Vajpayee has once again won the hearts of the RSS cadres, long alienated because of hard selling globalisation and secularism. Perhaps true. But bonding with the RSS might not end in bringing popularity in the rest of the country. Like President Bill Clinton, who was a Democrat but ran virtually a Republican administration for the last eight years, Vajpayee was considered a Nehru in the saffron camp, the ``right man in the wrong party''. By giving a clarion call on the unfinished agenda in Ayodhya he might have already lost that hegemony which comes with occupying the centre space in democratic politics. And this when he has barely finished one year of his second-term. Politics is a game of strategic interactions. Political actors make strategic choices under various constraints. What were the constraints that the prime minister faced other than the pressures from the hardliners inside the party? Democratic politics, by its very nature, faces a central dilemma - that between the imperatives of mobilisation and governance. Incumbent governments usually prove to be unpopular since in India they fail by the most elementary criterion of governance. BJP state governments in the past have been forced to bite the dust simply because of the steep rise in the price of onions. Given the disastrous handling of the farmers' issue this time all across the country, or that of law and order in several BJP-run states, the party will most likely fare disastrously if governance turns out to be the agenda in the forthcoming Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. UP is the crucible of BJP's politics, in pollsters' language, it is a bell-wether state. It would be no exaggeration to claim that UP is for the BJP what West Bengal is for the CPI(M). It is in this crucial state that the party's fortunes have of late shown a sharp decline. Between the Lok Sabha elections of 1998 and 1999, its share of the popular vote dropped by an unprecedented 9 per cent, from 37 to 28 per cent. Of this the major share was in Uttarakhand, which is now a separate state. The party could not even manage a quarter of the votes in both the strategically located Ruhelkhand and Oudh. As local elections have shown, there has not been much gain in these areas since then. The change of leadership at the last moment from Ram Prakash Gupta, an upper caste bania, to Rajnath Singh, another upper caste Rajput, is hardly going to make much difference. The expelled Lodh leader Kalyan Singh has already attracted a significant portion of the ``most backward castes'' that had gravitated towards the BJP during the 1996 assembly elections. The Ayodhya card, it is hoped, will once more galvanise the Sangh Parivar vote base, draw them out in much higher numbers to the polling booth and thereby bring victory to the BJP in its bastion. Unfortunately, if history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, the slogan `Mandir wahin banayenge' for the second time is likely to prove a farce as well. Other than alienating the Muslims, it will prevent all future alliances, pre-poll or post-poll, between the BJP and the Bahujan Samaj Party. Ram Vilas Paswan and Bangaru Laxman are unlikely to fetch many Dalit votes for the party at least in UP. Arguably, even if the BJP is able to emerge as the single largest party thanks to Ayodhya, its `untouchability' status will prevent it from forming a government. Vajpayee once sacrificed his party to form the government. He now seems to have buckled under pressure from the hardliners and opted for the opposite approach and UP is most likely to become the test case for this new suicidal tendency because of pressure from the enemy within. Mahatma Gandhi had once asked the Congress party to be transformed into a Lok Sevak Sangh. Vajpayee must take a cue from that, otherwise he may gradually end up sacrificing his government for the party.BLURB:Vajpayee once sacrificed his party to form the government. Now, under pressure from the hardliners, he may end up sacrificing the government for the party
