ELECTIONS '98
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The BJP has lost the battle, the war remains

Not only did the three-day long debate and vote on A B Vajpayee's confidence motion provide gripping televiewing, the likes of which cannot be enjoyed by many DD programmes, it also brought home the fact that the BJP lost its second government at the Centre not because of the combined stratagem of Jayalalitha and Subramanian Swamy, not because of the Congress's machinations, not even because of the BSP, Saifuddin Soz or anybody else

The BJP lost the numbers game because of the ineptitude of its managers, the confidence of its top brass that all was well, and a marked reluctance to follow up on its words and deeds. The result was that an outcome that seemed like a cinch on Thursday, when the motion was introduced by the prime minister, and concretised further into a cakewalk on Friday, had evaporated by Saturday morning, when the votes had to be counted.

And when the realisation dawned on the party leadership, the prime minister was well into his speech which, despite its overt concessions to the Lok Dal and the BSP, was not enough to reverse the damage. By then the leadership knew that the battle was slipping away from it, which explains the last-ditch stand against Giridhar Gamang.

Rookies in management schools are taught the importance of followup action, that it is not important only if you win a customer, the real tough battle is to retain those you have got on your side. And this, they din into you ad nauseam, is the basic lesson. Forget it, and you lose your constituency, your market, whatever.

Somebody must have forgotten to impart this primer to the BJP's managers, or if it was told to them they forgot the trick when it mattered the most. Flaunting cellphones and crowing on TV shows can never substitute spadework, and that's a lesson that those who run the BJP's affairs will do well to remember.

Those three days also brought home the fact, starkly and devoid of gloss imparted by deft editors, that the fight in Delhi is all about, and only about power. It never was, and never will be a fight for the moral high ground. In this, all parties, without exception, are tarred by the same brush. If the nation did not bat an eyelid when an MP declared that the treasury and opposition benches were both snakes and that her party will abstain the next day, when she did a neat somersault, despite it having amounted to lying on the floor of the House, it was because it had been primed for all this by our politicians, both from the right and the left. The nation knows that those who profess to speak on its behalf are only papering over their self-indulgence.

If a party which was born in the protest fires against its parent organisation's decision to forge an alliance with another party perceived as the "mother of corruption," and later without a squeak lines up on the same side as it because a magic wand has been waved in a Delhi address, the nation knows that the fight was not for its soul, but for its purse-strings.

In politics, there is only thus far that posturings of morality and principles take you, that is the harsh reality. It is what they tell you out in the sports arena, the nice guys finish last. The BJP learnt to its horror in 1996 that its moral high-ground would only leave it high and dry, and that to rule it needs to bend. Once that decision is taken, the rest is easy, as Vajpayee repeatedly genuflected at Poes Garden.

But why single out the BJP in all this? The ideological flip-flops Vishwanath Pratap Singh executed in the run-up to the 1989 elections should have taken him to the head of the world gymnastics table, but instead landed him the prime minister's chair, and he was after all the nation's real Mr Clean.

Given this, the turnaround by those last upholders of morality in public life, the left, should come as no surprise. That two years ago they may have been willing to sacrifice the United Front government for the sake of the DMK, but today they would rather see the back of the same DMK in order to embrace the AIADMK, which party they maligned not so long ago, should not shock, not when one looks at the general shifts and moves the leading players have been indulging in.

In all this, it is the DMK which comes through as a consistent entity, never mind if it finds itself on the losing side. Jayalalitha was and continues to be its enemy number one, from which it has not resiled, even at the risk of the ground being cut from under its feet.

The Congress has come off poorly, never mind what the spin doctors say. It has not been in control of the situation from the beginning, has been swept away by the flow of events rather than being in charge of it, and even the decision to form a government has been foisted on it, by a combination of factors. The manner in which it has helped in ousting a government, and is discussing with forces inimical with it only to see the back of the BJP, are not entirely unnoticed by the voting public.

The last time such a ganging up against the BJP was witnessed, the same electorate had no hesitation in bringing back the BJP, proving that whether in moviedom or politics, mass sympathy is always with the underdog. This time, the BJP cannot have asked for more: a regime growing in popularity * being seen * to be dismissed on the floor of Parliament by an unholy ganging-up, especially at a tremendous cost to the nation whose interests the perpetrators of this mess claim to uphold - this will have a fallout far beyond the expectations of the dramatis personae.

The BJP has little to worry, cast as it is in the mould of the underdog. It is those arrayed against it who need to watch out.