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Vajpayee is losing the propaganda war

The Vajpayee government is doomed if it performs well. It is also doomed if it performs badly. For, in either case, the main Opposition party will try and pull the plug on it with the help of malcontents of whom there is no dearth in the present-day polity. Given the precarious numbers behind it, and the ever-present threat of that prima donna of Poes Garden, even if it were to win the hearts of most Indians with its sterling performance its life for as long as it lasts will still hang by a slender thread.

The fragility of this administration or, for that matter any other that might come to be formed in this Lok Sabha, is built into the fractured mandate. The trick then for the administration is to move away from its obsessive concern with survival and get on with the urgent task of governance.

The Vajpayee government seems to have learnt that vital lesson at long last. It now seems to have taken a grip on things. Thus, the increasing impatience in the Congress party is not hard to understand. Congressmen are worried that the prime minister might consolidate his position further. And thus scupper the chance they had begun to espy of their early return to the good old days when they raked in the moolah by the fistfuls selling patronage to all comers.

Quite aside from its decision to embarrass the government on Bihar, there are other signs of growing impatience in the Congress. The alacrity with which the discredited former central minister P Shiv Shankar latched on to the half-baked and untenable allegations of the sacked adviser to the finance minister underlines a certain desperation.

Mohan Guruswamy, who had come to the BJP via a circuitous route from the Congress to the Jan Morcha, Janata Dal, et al, might have come full circle. Given the charges of sleaze doing the rounds against him and the circumstances leading to his sack, only a mad man would lend credence to anything that he has to say. For as long as he was in the North Block, the government could have done no wrong. The moment they flung him out of his office, Guruswamy turned into a paragon of virtue.

Before Shiv Shankar, who decades ago had had to quit as a high court judge in suspicious circumstances, makes an utter fool of himself in trying to pass off Guruswamy's half-truths and plain lies as the gospel truth, he would do well to probe the circumstances leading to the sack of Yashwant Sinha's adviser. A very frustrated Guruswamy, who can now go back to being an active partner in the consultancy firm he had floated with a few friends on the eve of becoming adviser to the finance minister, has been briefing Shankar and another Opposition leader who would care to listen about the alleged hanky-panky in the government.

In the usually well-informed circles, the hush-hush talk revolves round a trade-off for a bail-out package for an industrial conglomerate. Guruswamy had no executive power as an adviser. Yet, his office room had become the first and last stop for all manner of touts and liaison men. He not only ran errands for the moneybags in the finance ministry, but often enough used his secretary-level rank to get things done for his business friends in other ministries as well.

Those ready to fling the Guruswamy charges at the Vajpayee government will stand to profit immensely from a little homework of their own about his antecedents.

Whether or not he did errands for a cloak-and-dagger agency, Indian or foreign, is not germane to his character. He might have done it in his lean phase. He might have also burnt his fingers badly in a private venture of his own, which he had set up after his return from the US several years ago. Since then it has always foxed me why a relatively minor industrialist undertook to pay his expenses even as he dabbled in politics, hopping with the felicity of a trapeze artiste from the Chandra Shekhar camp one day to V P Singh's the next.

Of course, those who embraced him as one of their own in the BJP are not blameless, either. L K Advani must be a very poor judge of character to have allowed this smooth-talking chameleon-like hanger-on admittance in his inner circle. Prior to joining the BJP, Guruswamy had found no takers for his claim to contest one of the two Lok Sabha seats in Hyderabad on a Janata Dal ticket.

For a man who did not tire of telling the world that he was the author of the BJP's economic manifesto, to betray the trust the party leadership had reposed in him speaks volumes about his character. But I have this gut feeling that Guruswamy would not have reacted in the manner he did had he not been caught in the act of wrong-doing himself. He is trying to cover up for his own stealth, his pandering to the moneybags, his obsessive mission to befriend the who's who of India's corporate world. Attack being the best form of defence, Guruswamy unleashed the barrage of charges only when he found himself bereft of his official position. And a dumb government, instead of telling the truth, chose to sit back and be hurt by his campaign of calumny and worse.

It is also curious that Guruswamy chose to be part of the VSNL road show in the US even after he was forced to tender his resignation on pain of outright dismissal. If he was so solicitous of propriety and norms, he ought to have opted out of the US tour. But so keen was he on a junket at the tax-payer's cost that he begged to be relieved of his duties only after he returned from the US.

But clever man that he is, prior to his departure for the US he left copies of his resignation letter with the PRO of a controversial industrial house and a correspondent of an economic paper. It was the PRO who sent copies of his resignation letter to various publications once the word leaked that he had been sacked as adviser to the government. Street-smart politicians try to make a virtue out of an unpleasant necessity. Forced to resign, Guruswamy latched on to the alleged attacks on Christians as one of the grounds for his resignation.

Given the above facts, why do you think the government is getting the stick in the media on l'affaire Guruswamy?

As I have said often in these columns, the government has no one to tell, nay, sell its side of the story. It inducted two former journalists into the prime minister's office to handle its image. Unfortunately, their own image can do with some urgent correction.

Leftist-turned-Ram bhakta Sudheendra Kulkarni is now engrossed in the Telecom Commission and can hardly spare a moment for anything else, what with the cellular operators engaging his attention full-time. My friend Ashok Tandon, a good man, a clean man, is out of his depth in his high-profile job in the PMO.

Knowing his limitations, Tandon plays second fiddle to a few courtiers in Pramod Mahajan's proliferating durbar in the hope of firming his grip on his job. As I said, Tandon is a gentleman, but one who has allowed himself to be exploited by devious operators, among them an evergreen wheeler-dealer who has parlayed his connections to wangle lucrative programmes on the Mahajan-run Doordarshan and Rathikant Basu-run STAR TV.

As for the Press Information Bureau, the less said the better. Nine out of ten scribes in the capital, I bet, wouldn't be able to name the principal information officer to the Government of India. And all ten wouldn't be able to spot her if she stood in a crowd of two in the PIB itself.

The fact that the I&B minister himself is constrained to hold weekly post-Cabinet-meeting media briefings underlines the rottenness of the information apparatus gathered by the Vajpayee government. The prime minister can still tap the vast reservoir of goodwill there is for him personally. Despite the mistakes of his government, Vajpayee continues to be the most popular leader around. But he has allowed himself to be surrounded by either too-clever-by-half operators like Mahajan and his courtiers or he is saddled with duds who can bring no cheer to his administration. For, it is not only important that the government he heads performs, but it is equally, if not more, important that it advertises the fact of its good performance to the people at large.