Atal Behari Vajpayee is the first Prime Minister since 1971 to have been re-elected to office ... Vajpayee has metamorphosed from last year's hesitant leader of a tentative coalition to confident commander of a 24-party alliance. And yet, a bird's eye-view of the Lok Sabha would show much the same picture: a slightly larger ruling side and mostly the same faces. The dazzle of the big picture could. also be hiding details common to 1998.
Through Vajpayee's spectacular journey to superstardom, the BJP has itself remained static. From 161 seatsin 1996 to 182,both in 1998 and 1999, the BJP's growth graph in th. Lok Sabha would hardly qualify as dramatic. The opposite, in fact, if its vote per cent was taken into account .- from 20 to 25 to 23 for the same period.
As a strategy, this cannot be faulted. Faced with forced isolation, the BJP chose to grow through a network of alliances. However, the downside of this meant that it had to necessarily restrict its own political space and, indeed, allow the balarice of power to shift in favour of the allies. The BJP's top leadership pleaded on bended knees as partners threw tantrums ...
Officially second-in-command, L.K. Advani remained unusually subdued. After two trips to Chennai, bouquet in hand, Jaswant Singh returned to ... the CTBT. Yashwant Sinha had no role beyond finance. Lesser leaders - and party workers - had even less to do in the NDA.
The Vajpayee bandwagon has since grown from 18 members to 24 and the BJP's share in the coalition – both in terms of seats and votes - stands further reduced. Of the NDA's 305 seats, the allies account for 123. And, even of the BJP's 182, only a hundred-odd have been won on its own strength, the rest coming via alliances ... The Janata Dal (U) could, indeed, be the UF reborn. It ... bristles with larger-than-life leaders: Sharad Yadav, Nitish Kumar, George Fernandes, R.K. Hegde, Ram Vilas Paswan, all have ambitions going far beyond ministership. During campaigning, Fernandes was, in fact, candid enough to admit ... that he didn't envisage a long-term relationship with the NDA.
For all this, the NDA is inherently more durable than its previous version ... It has a 30-plus majority which means more room for manoeuvre. The Telugu Desam Party has a squad large enough to threaten the alliance's stability and its decision to stay out of government could be a worry. But Chandrababu Naidu is a peace-maker by temperament ... Mamata Banerjee is volatile but not self-destructive. More than anything else, the NDA constituents have a common enemy in the Congress for which reason alone they must hang together. With two dozen constituents and an increasingly restless BJP cadre to take care of, life may not be ... more comfortable than before for Vajpayee. Yet, it is unlikely to be the nightmare it was. (Source: The Times of India, 10 October, 1999)
