How BJP will interpret and disseminate Vajpayee's political legacy

If it’s a question of excavating, interpreting, assessing, distilling and disseminating a legacy spread over two phases from 1951 to 1977 and 1980 to now, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its progenitor, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), have not been particularly adept at handling the complex processes that shaped their history although the BJP has gamely appropriated other parties’ inheritance by enshrining certain icons, notably Sardar Vallabhai Patel,  in its pantheon of greats. 

The BJS-BJP sanctuary has a fixed place for three individuals who marked defining moments in the parties’ chronicles: Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of the BJS; Deendayal Upadhyay, the BJS’ architect and ideologue; and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the first Prime Minister from the BJP.

Anirban Ganguly, director of the BJP’s Mookerjee Research Foundation, says bringing Vajpayee and his legacy “alive” will be easier than amplifying Mookerjee (who died in 1953) and Upadhyay (killed in 1968) to the present and succeeding generations because Mookerjee and Upadhyay have become symbols who epitomised ideas.  “Vajpayeeji’s graph was not a plain graph... he went on to become PM. He epitomised that struggle in a party he founded with 10 others. The generation before mine that includes Dharmendra Pradhan, Piyush Goyal and Nirmala Sitharaman knows the impact of him being PM. But Vajpayeeji is not going to be a mere symbol for the coming generations. We will connect his governance with (Narendra) Modiji’s,” said Ganguly.

Ganguly is trying to contemporise Mookerjee by dredging up “factoids” of his “active association” with the Indian Institute of Science, his help in drafting Assam’s first National Register of Citizens for the then CM Gopinath Bordoloi and his role in setting up the Damodar Valley Corporation. 

While PM Modi has embedded Upadhyay’s concept of “antodaya” (leg up to the weak) in the BJP’s everyday lexicon through his welfare programmes, Prafulla Ketkar, editor of Organiser, a pro-Rashtriya Swayam-sevak Sangh (RSS) weekly, believes Vajpayee ably captured the letter and spirit of Upadhyay’s pro-federalism advocacy. “He implemented Upadhyay’s idea by having a pre-poll alliance with more than 20 parties and cementing the alliance with a common minimum programme.” 

In an era in which political communication is characterised by grand gestures and mega-events, the BJP did not allow people to forget Vajpayee for a minute after his death through Modi’s persona. Whether it was the five-km walk from BJP headquarters to the crematorium or being with Vajpayee’s adopted family for hours or at a prayer meeting or flagging off the Asthi Kalash Yatra to immerse the ashes into several rivers, Modi and BJP President Amit Shah never left the scene. 

Was Modi’s omnipresence in the final journey of Vajpayee meant to obliterate memories of his bitter-sweet relations with the BJP icon? A senior BJP leader said, “It showed the deep love Modi had for him. Everybody associates the 2002 events with Vajpayeeji’s ‘raj dharma’ comment. You forget Vajpayeeji was responsible for Modi continuing as Gujarat CM. Vajpayeeji had absolute authority. If he didn’t want Modi, nobody could have stopped him. But after that remark, he decided Modi will stay.” 

      

And the RSS, which never allowed Vajpayee to forget it had the power of veto when he was PM? Ketkar, who had met Vajpayee once in 1995, said the RSS was “highly emotional” about the late PM. “The first time he became PM in 1996, Balasaheb Deoras (a former RSS chief) cried because he was overwhelmed by the fact that a swayamsevak holding the top post,” he recalled. When Vajpayee met Dattopant Thengadi, the powerful swadeshi exponent who had virtually paralysed some of the government’s key reforms initiatives, “they turned emotional and cried”, Ketkar said. Notwithstanding the tears, Vajpayee ignored Thengadi’s objections and went ahead with the reforms.     

Although RSS Sarsanghachalak Mohanrao Bhagwat attended every memorial service held for Vajpayee, it is early days to ascertain the Sangh’s thought-through assessment of him. An RSS source said: “Vajpayeeji was not seen or heard for 11 years. A generation of swayamsevaks can’t relate to him.” Indeed, the uneven turnout for his funeral in Delhi — in contrast to the surging crowds that waited in Haridwar for the final rites to be performed — was ascribed to “poor” mobilisation by the local BJP unit.

A local leader said, “Those who came did so spontaneously. Our Delhi leaders did nothing.”  Ajay Bhatt, the head of the BJP in Uttarakhand, attributed the “record” congregation at Haridwar to the fact that Vajpayee had helped create the state in 2000, granted it special status and gifted it an industrial package. 

How would the BJP wish posterity to memorialise Vajpayee?  A top functionary summed it up as “someone who practised political consensus without sacrificing our ideology. He had pulled out of the Janata Party government (in 1979) when the Socialists demanded that he should cease being an RSS member”.

In a bid to cement the legacy

• “Asthi Kalash Yatras”:  Urns containing Vajpayee’s ashes will be immersed in rivers across the country over. Maharashtra will take the urns to 11 rivers in 13 cities, Tamil Nadu will take the ashes to sea in Chennai, Rameswaram and Kanyakumari. Karnataka will immerse the ashes in eight rivers, including Cauvery
• Chhattisgarh’s administrative capital, Naya Raipur, will be named Atal Nagar and Bilaspur University will be rechristened after  Atal Bihari Vajpayee
• A chair in 13 Maharashtra universities after Vajpayee
• Rohtang tunnel, to be shortly commissioned, will be named after Vajpayee; Himachal Pradesh government’s Mukhya Mantri Adarsh Vidya Kendra scheme will be re-launched as Atal Adarsh Vidya Kendra scheme
• Auditorium on the AIIMS’ Rishikesh campus  will  be named after Vajpayee
• Jharkhand to include Vajpayee’s life and thoughts in the school curriculum