COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
ELECTIONS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

Kargil, not Sonia's origins, will dominate polls

Funny how things change in the mercurial world of Indian politics. Till even six months ago, it was evident that the 1999 general election, the last before India enters the new millennium, will be what one political scientist had dubbed the "finals", the final clash between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, both of which are competing for the same political space.

Thanks to the shocker that the assembly election in Delhi and two north Indian states had proved to be, the till then resurgent BJP was, at that time, getting set to unleash its brahmastra, by focusing on the foreign origins of the Congress president.

And the way the BJP went about it, was typical. The Ram Janambhoomi campaign, for instance, was taken up by its allied organisations, and then by the rabble-rousers from within its own ranks, before it was sanctified by the leadership in the form of the rath yatra.

And it was the same this time as well. Various frontal organisations of the BJP started harping on the inadvisability of having a foreign-born as the prime minister, and even as the incumbent prime minister himself said it will not become an issue during the election, it was clear that he was, as is his wont, espousing a minority viewpoint within his party.

After all, the BJP was the party that had gleefully broken the nation's nuclear celibacy, so why should it hesitate now to use the Brahmastra in its armour?

Six months ago, it would have been inconceivable that the disquiet within the Congress party over having a naturalised Indian as its prime ministerial candidate will spill over, since conventional wisdom had it that Congressmen are so blinded by their pursuit of power that everything else, including national honour, was secondary to them. But when Sharad Pawar took on the might of the Gandhi legacy with his revolt, it was clear that he had queered the BJP's pitch.

Thanks to him, the 'finals' now had three teams, and the result was once again up in the air. By himself Pawar is a non-entity beyond his fiefdom, but his nuisance value to both the sides is immeasurable. His efforts at forging an alternative front, prima facie aimed at keeping equidistance from the two poles of Indian polity, is also capable of putting him at the head of a bloc of MPs in the 13th Lok Sabha whose support could be crucial in the formation of the next government. And, if the events of 1996 were to be replayed, then we could once again see a Deve Gowda-Gujral type of situation all over again.

But then, even Pawar's best laid plans could go wrong. A veteran like him knows the importance of timing in politics, and he had waited just this much for coming out in the open with his reservations on having Sonia Gandhi as prime minister. And he had reckoned without the Mujahideen holding the Kargil region to ransom.

Now, the carefully cultivated agenda for the 1999 general election has been altered. Pawar's calculation was that the Sangh Parivar's campaign against Sonia Gandhi, while intrinsically valid, would not necessarily bear fruit only because a lot of Indians were not comfortable about the BJP's core ideology. What he attempted was a hijack of the BJP's programme, in the hope that with people like P A Sangma, a Christian, and Tariq Anwar, a Muslim, as part of his bandwagon, he could run with the baton better.

But it is Kargil that will dominate the 1999 election.

And as parties are realising, it is difficult as hell to milk political advantage out of war. By itself, the continued occupation of Indian territory by outsiders is a terrible blow to the image of the ruling party, which has always boasted of its nationalist machismo. But the BJP has realised that words are poor substitute for action. After all, what can you tomtom when daily, newspapers and television screens are full of reports of your men being killed on the front, by a nation with whose leader the prime minister had broken bread just a few months earlier!

Ideally, for the Congress, this ought to have been a heaven-sent opportunity to clobber the BJP before the people. But again, a war is not something that calls for pointing of fingers, at least not until the frontier is echoing with gunshots, for statements then have the potential to cause more damage to the troops than an unguided missile.

Even the government's biggest supporter can really absolve it of any blame in the Kargil crisis. The least of its mistakes was to allow itself to be lulled into a make-believe world by a mere bus ride which, given the history between the two nations, was an egregious one.

If the Opposition is muted right now, it is only because the nation is sensitive about doing anything that may damage the troops' morale. It is well known that our soldiers labour against the greatest odds, not for the love of money, but purely out of a sense of commitment to the uniform they wear and the flag they salute. The nation may not pay them the kind of wages one reads about in business publications, but it also knows that to rob such a selfless band of men of their morale will be to take away the last vestige of their honour.

Our politicians may not see it in exactly these words, but knowing the enormous regard the nation has for its men in khaki, they have decided to keep quiet for the time-being. And the minute the last of the jawan returns to his normal duty, and monotony sets in over the usual cross-border transgressions, this government will be hauled over the coals.

There is no way it is going to escape the denouement. There is no way it can avoid the accusations of dereliction of duty, there is no running away from facts about its insouciance towards human lives. The government may be full of good intentions, but it has failed miserably in its duty as the nation's sentinel, for which it will have to pay the price.

And that price will be a steep one, if the war ends before the election. Perhaps it suits the BJP just fine to allow thing to drift along till election is over, before taking decisive action.

Saisuresh Sivaswamy