“For the last few weeks, the crowd puller on the streets of New Delhi’s
official and diplomatic quarter has been Rajesh Khanna, a former film star in a
country wild about movies and a Congress candidate for Parliament in nationwide
elections that begin Monday,” Barbara Crossette wrote
in The New York Times in May of 1991.
Mr. Khanna was pulled in to counter the star power of the “sobersided,
meticulously articulate, scrupulously courtly” Lal Krishna Advani, leader of the
right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, she wrote, who was giving Rajiv Gandhi stiff
competition.
“Mr. Khanna is equally renowned for once having been married to an Indian
Marilyn Monroe called Dimple Kapadia. When she agreed to show up on the hustings
for old times’ sake, the crowds were ecstatic,” she wrote.
Not all of them, though.
Khushwant Singh, a columnist, author and former newspaper editor, says that
the appearance on the Congress Party ticket of Mr. Khanna, whom he describes as
“some kind of buffoon,” has made him decide to boycott the election, the first
time he has done so since he began voting.
Rajiv Desai, who runs a public affairs consultancy in New Delhi and
occasionally writes on politics and the evolution of political campaigning in
India, thinks the celebrity candidate is a sign of political maturity.
In an interview, he said that the attraction to politics of public figures of
any kind is a sign that the base of the candidate pool is widening and campaigns
are becoming more sophisticated. In South Asia — certainly in Pakistan, India
and Bangladesh — opposing parties have tended to regard each other as
ideological if not mortal enemies, and have found it hard to work together after
elections.
“These celebrity politicians don’t treat politics as deathly serious,” Mr.
Desai said. “They can look at the other parties as rivals, not enemies.”
“In this election, although Congress is likely to get the largest number of
seats, there is a chance that it may have to work in coalition with other
parties. It will have to tread warily.
This article appeared on The New York Times on July 18, 2012.
When Rajesh Khanna Dabbled in Politics
He drank heavily in his prime and still enjoys a nightly whiskey or two at
74. India's leader takes painkillers for his knees (which were replaced due to
arthritis) and has trouble with his bladder, liver and his one remaining kidney.
A taste for fried food and fatty sweets plays havoc with his cholesterol. He
takes a three-hour snooze every afternoon on doctor's orders and is given to
interminable silences, indecipherable ramblings and, not infrequently, falling
asleep in meetings.
Atal Behari Vajpayee, then, would be an unusual candidate to control a
nuclear arsenal. But for four years the Indian Prime Minister's grandfatherly
hands have held the subcontinent back from tumbling into war. Despite the fact
that he heads the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a constituency stuffed
with extremists, Vajpayee has ambitiously pursued peace with neighbor and rival
Pakistan, even traveling to the Pakistani cultural capital of Lahore in 1999,
vainly hoping to bury the bloody animus of the past and start an era of good
feelings.
With 1 million soldiers facing each other at high alert on the India-Pakistan
border, those days seem long ago. At the same dangerous time, Vajpayee's
stewardship is looking less and less comforting. The frail bachelor seems shaky
and lost, less an aging sage than an ordinary old man. He forgets names, even of
longtime colleague and current Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, and during
several recent meetings he appeared confused and inattentive. After a meeting
with a Western Foreign Minister, his appearance was described by one attending
diplomat as "half dead." At a rare press conference last month in Srinagar, the
Prime Minister tottered to the podium. Indian TV crews are asked to film him from
the waist up to avoid showing his shuffling gait to find he had trouble
understanding questions, repeatedly relying on whispered prompts from Home
Minister Lal Krishna Advani. Even then Vajpayee stumbled over his replies. "He
is very alert when he is functional," says one BJP worker. "But there are very
few hours like that." Adds one Western diplomat: "We have a lot of conversations
about his health. Some of his mannerisms come down to his personal style. But
some of it is definitely spacey stuff."
While no one questions that key decisions on national security and foreign
policy are still made by Vajpayee, the focus is now turning to the two men
behind the throne: Vajpayee's low-key National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra,
and Vajpayee's hard-line BJP colleague of 50 years, 72-year-old Advani. The
consensus among observers and diplomats is that the hawkish Advani is preparing
to succeed Vajpayee at the next national elections due by late 2004. "There is
no doubt he is the Prime Minister in waiting," remarks a diplomat.
In the meantime, Vajpayee has undergone a sudden conversion from peacemaker
to warmonger primarily in response to political pressures. This year's standoff
on the border shows the dovish Prime Minister has accepted the argument that
war or the threat of it works. In comments that set off alarm bells around the
world, Vajpayee last month spoke twice of an impending "decisive battle" against
India's "enemy." Although he has repeatedly said that he does not want war, the
Prime Minister has sound strategic reasons for ratcheting up the rhetoric. Since
Sept. 11, he has found the international community more sympathetic to the idea
of India waging its own war on terror against jihadis in the contended state of
Jammu and Kashmir, where many of them have been inserted by Pakistan. And it
plays well for India to keep the pot boiling: New Delhi can claim a victim's
solidarity with the U.S., avoid addressing the awkward issue of its heavy-handed
rule in Muslim-dominated Kashmir and just possibly get Pakistan President Pervez
Musharraf to actually shut down the jihadi industry on his territory, ending
what India calls a "proxy war."
Last week, Musharraf told visiting U.S Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage that he was going to put a permanent end to terrorist incursions into
India. Vajpayee's government promised in turn some de-escalation measures,
though a withdrawal of troops from the border has been ruled out. The big risk,
however, is that no matter what Musharraf does, there are enough jihadis already
in Kashmir to keep hammering India with suicide bombs and death squads. Four
people were killed by terrorists Friday night in Kashmir, even as heavy shelling
continued at the frontier and an unmanned Indian spy plane was shot down by the
Pakistani air force. Any small spark can still push Vajpayee to deploy his
soldiers in some punitive counterattack on Pakistan, which can lead to
full-scale war.
Meanwhile, Vajpayee's colleagues carp that he's still not being hawkish
enough. "Any Prime Minister that takes action against Pakistan will sweep the
elections, but Vajpayee is reluctant and that will definitely damage the BJP,"
complains BJP hard-liner B.P. Singhal. "As the Prime Minister, for him, national
interest is above party interest."
Tellingly, Vajpayee was forced to give up his moderate stance and attend to
his party in response to a domestic disaster, not an international crisis. On
Feb. 27, a group of Muslims firebombed a train in the western state of Gujarat
murdering 58 Hindus. The reprisals against Muslims in Gujarat were fierce,
unpoliced, and went on for weeks, killing some 2,000 according to human rights
groups. (The official death toll, widely disbelieved, is half this.) On April 4,
Vajpayee reacted with revulsion, urging Hindu rioters to rediscover "a sense of
unity and brotherhood." Asked the published poet: "Burning alive men, women and
children? Are we human or not? Or has a demon taken over us?" His office briefed
newspapers on the likely candidates to replace Gujarat state leader Narendra
Modi, a member of the BJP who was accused of complicity in the violence, or at
least, ineptness in containing it. But scarcely a week later, on April 12,
Vajpayee changed his tune. Nothing more was said about sacking Modi. And
speaking to an audience in Goa, Vajpayee shocked the country by declaring:
"These days militancy in the name of Islam leaves no room for tolerance.
Wherever such Muslims live, they tend not to live in coexistence ... they want
to spread their faith by resorting to terror and threats."
In the subcontinental context, that kind of statement is a license for the
killings to continue. According to diplomatic sources, the burden of the crisis
made Vajpayee unwell. Adds Vinod Mehta, editor-in-chief of the Indian weekly
Outlook magazine, Advani and his supporters used the illness to gather the
party's hard-line core and read him the riot act. "The party basically gave him
no room to maneuver," says Mehta. "He knew he could have lost his job and he had
neither the spirit nor the physical strength to fight back. So he just gave up
his moderate stance and fell in line. Now he's just a party mascot, a puppet of
the hard-liners."
With an enfeebled Vajpayee at the helm, the prospect of war with Pakistan
becomes more real. "Advani would really like to finish this proxy war, and
perhaps do a bit more," says one diplomat. India has none of the checks and
balances designed during the cold war to prevent a nuclear launch in anger.
(Although India's military is comfortingly professional, nonpolitical and
obedient to civilian control. The country's nukes are controlled by government
scientists, and deployment orders come from the Prime Minister's office alone.) For his part, Advani denies any undue influence, or even the tag of
"hawk" although, characteristically, he describes communal violence under the
BJP as "minimal," even after the shame of Gujarat. But asked about the
possibility of attacking across the Line of Control in Kashmir, Advani answers
that in his view India is already facing an "undeclared war" from the militants.
His list of conditions that Musharraf must meet before peace talks can begin is
lengthy. "As long as this undeclared war, this training, arming, financing of
jihadis, and this infiltration and terrorism and sabotage continues," he says,
"then any dialogue will be meaningless." And he hints that the international
community has given tacit approval for action. "One major change in the last 10
days has been that the U.S., Britain and other coalition members have said
publicly and forcefully that Pakistan should stop cross-border terrorism," he
says. "Our Prime Minister took really radical initiatives in the past. There's
no question of that now" in other words, of actively looking for peace. An
Indian army source adds that unless India detects that promised shift in
militant activity and capability in the next five weeks, the military expects an
order to attack.
The body on the other end of the seesaw is Mishra, a 70-year-old career civil
servant and diplomat, who functions as the equivalent of a White House chief of
staff. The fact that Mishra has survived countless calls for his removal he's
accused of wielding influence beyond his position is testament to his pivotal
role, diplomats say. Mishra is considered to be the brains behind the peace
overtures of the past. His influence with Vajpayee these days waxes when the two
men get away from the capital and the rest of the BJP. At a regional security
conference in the Kazakh capital of Almaty last week, the Prime Minister made a
rare and unexpected conciliatory gesture when he proposed joint Indian-Pakistani
patrols along the Line of Control to ensure an end to infiltration. All week
Mishra was briefing India's national newspapers that the government had decided
to tone down the rhetoric. And significantly, when Vajpayee returned to Delhi on
Wednesday night, Mishra stayed behind for further talks. But, warns Outlook
editor Mehta, Mishra is just an appointed government servant, however close he
is to the boss. "Mishra's influence is directly proportional to Vajpayee's
position. He has no party base. When Vajpayee goes down, Mishra goes with him."
Observers say that the BJP is hoping to use Vajpayee through the next general
elections, but no further. The party currently rules in a coalition, with
Vajpayee as the glue that holds it together. If it manages to win an absolute
majority, it won't need him any longer. The Prime Minister has largely accepted
this gradual decline. His great ambition on gaining office was to do for
India-Pakistan relations what Nixon did for China and the U.S.: only a
right-winger, went the argument, could take the country into a peace deal with
the archenemy. And this Vajpayee wanted to do, to secure a place in the history
books. Friends say this ambition is now dead. Much of the Prime Minister's
energy is now devoted to the business of weight rather than weighty affairs of
state. His staff coaxes the reluctant old man onto a treadmill for 10 minutes
every day and encourages him to take short walks. His "family" longtime
companion Rajkumari Kaul, who suffered a heart attack in March, and her daughter
Namita ensures he is served only boiled vegetables and rice. But Vajpayee still
insists on an evening drink or two. In the family cottage in the Himalayan
foothills, says an aide, nothing can keep him away from deep-fried trout. "He
promises to stick to his diet with doubled rigidity once he leaves," says an
aide, "but the trout he must have." On a long flight abroad, Vajpayee compared
his menu with other members of the government party. "He was terribly upset when
he discovered he had been singled out for special treatment," says the aide,
"and tried to browbeat the in-flight staff into serving him the general meal,
which was spicier." Meanwhile, tension seems set to continue between India and
Pakistan. But as Vajpayee's ability to steer a moderate course diminishes, he's
spending the twilight of his political life where he wants to be out to
lunch.
This article appeared at Time.com on June 10, 2002.
Asleep at The Wheel?
