These are excerpts from Abhishek Choudhary’s book ‘Believer’s Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu right’s path to power (1977-2018)’.

Namita and Ranjan shared the old elite’s contempt for Vajpayee’s ideological family. They did not get along with Advani’s family, and felt his daughter Pratibha ‘was trying to cut her father off’ from Baapji.

They took up the task of buttressing Vajpayee’s ratings. Soon, all of the PMO–PMF had started rounding on Advani and Sangh Parivar. The VHP–RSS loudmouths openly charged that Ranjan belonged to the ‘American lobby’ or that he had ‘direct links with Italy’.

The PMO–PMF’s retaliation, also by way of media plants, was aimed at creating an image of Vajpayee as a liberal-progressive statesman who was struggling to keep in check the raging lunatics of Sangh Parivar. This project involved an erasure of his past to showcase him as a statesman in the Nehruvian mould. The cultivation of liberals involved delicate footwork, with simultaneous appropriation – such as issuing the whip in Parliament to gather numbers on important bills – and othering of the Sangh Parivar. Among other things, it concretized the spurious moderate-Vajpayee versus hardliner-Advani binary.

The First Couple went out of the way to court top celebrities and editors who could be strategically made use of. If a familiar journalist wrote an unflattering story, Namita would call up – smiling and complaining – just like her father did earlier: ‘Tum ye kaise likh sakte ho ... kabhi aao, milo.’ Some like India Today got easy access to the PMO. In return, ‘we would be planting stories on them’. She often accompanied her father on foreign trips. In the prime minister’s chartered plane, she would schmooze with the carefully chosen delegation. A journalist penned down one such experience:

‘So, what does politics in Delhi look like from Mumbai?’ The question is lobbed at me, seemingly artlessly ... Her bluff, easy exterior camouflages a distinctly sharp mind. I respond truthfully, ‘From where I sit, politics in Delhi doesn’t seem all that consequential.’ Ms. Bhattacharya listens intently as I elaborate on my reply. Then she moves on, networking down the aisles of the wide-bodied Air-India 747-200, patting a shoulder here, sharing a guffaw there, pausing beside a columnist of right wing calling with an affectionately playful ‘Hi, Saffron’.

Consequential new appointees to the PMO would receive a call. ‘Welcome to the family,’ Namita told a retired R&AW chief hired to look after Kashmir. ‘Now that you’re here, we are reassured ... Please look after the two old men. They’re your responsibility.’ At least some of her warmth was heartfelt. If there was a busy evening at work, the concerned official would be fed dinner by the family. Every six months, Vajpayee would host a meal for his staff, where he would chat up the family of even the obscurest employee. Most people at the PMO felt cared for by 3 RCR.

Namita–Ranjan now frantically socialized: meeting an editor for lunch; attending the Gladrags North India final beauty pageant; or the Reliance-friendly politician Amar Singh’s private birthday party. Yet they more or less successfully managed to evade the gossip columns. Namita would refuse interviews with a bland excuse: ‘I don’t want to attract unnecessary attention.’

***

Tehelka in the words of a co-founder meant ‘sensation, impact, bloody hell, explosion!’ On the evening of 13 March, the cabinet rushed into an emergency meeting after TV channels flashed a series of blurred videos captured by an obscure web portal. Two of these videos were consequential: the newly appointed BJP President Bangaru Laxman was shown accepting a bribe from a defence middleman, stuffing bundles of cash into his desk drawer. The other one showed Jaya Jaitly – president of one of the BJP’s closest allies, Samata Party, and George Fernandes’s partner – similarly accepting a bribe. The toothless BJP president was immediately made to sign his resignation letter. Laxman, the first Dalit to rise to become the saffron party’s president, sobbed, alleging a conspiracy against the marginalized.

Since its inception nine months earlier, Tehelka.com had worked on what was then a novelty for Indian journalism: a sting camera operation. Two of its reporters had floated a fictitious company, West End International, apparently based in London. The company was ‘bigger than Tata’ and manufactured arms, night-vision goggles, and other hi-tech equipment. They worked on a shoestring budget: their main undercover face was a young reporter who spoke English with a thick Malayali accent and, wearing a black hat, pretended to be a Londoner.*

He bribed politicians, bureaucrats, army officers, and other middlemen on camera, in exchange for access in the near future, exposing the muck in defence purchases.

More worrisome for Vajpayee were the revelations on the PMO’s functioning. His son-in-law and his PPS–NSA were both alleged on the video as functioning in an extra-constitutional manner. The spy-camera footage had captured the BJP president talking about Brajesh arranging party funds through shady deals, and about Ranjan’s involvement in power and infrastructure deals and generally ‘this and that’. A long-time RSS financier claimed he had got deals passed by Vajpayee. He quickly added, ‘Not PM himself, Brajesh Mishra is PM.’ He bragged about having ‘killed’ Ranjan in some recent deals.

The sting operation was an ethical minefield. Tehelka had used sex workers to lure army officers into helping West End bag fictitious deals. The defence middlemen may have exaggerated their contacts, for Tehelka had failed to sting anyone from the Vajpayee PMO. As with Hawala earlier, accepting funds from dubious sources was a banal ritual all (non-communist) parties followed for their upkeep.

Nonetheless, the subtext was crucial. It exposed the bottomless cronyism in the way the government conducted business. It also offered a unique, unfiltered peek into the Sangh Parivar’s financial underbelly. However murky its means, what Tehelka revealed was infinitely murkier.*

Its tail up, the opposition erupted in Parliament calling Vajpayee a thief – ‘chor’. It demanded the scalp of George Fernandes. The scandal concerned his ministry, and it was his partner who had also been stung. All of it took place inside the defence minister’s residence, tasteful Buddhist wall hangings adorning the background. Once a firebrand trade unionist, Fernandes had since risen up to be Vajpayee’s most trusted NDA colleague outside of the BJP.

Fernandes had occasionally grumbled about the attacks on Christians or economic liberalization. But he compensated by out-RSSing the RSS on other matters: his congenital hatred of the Nehru–Gandhis; his support for Tibet and vocal opposition to Chinese encroachment in India’s northern territories. The Catholic socialist from Mangalore, who now fought polls from Bihar, had been chosen as the NDA convenor.

He made a great PR exhibit for the Hindu-nationalist government. Vajpayee loved and respected him, and on two previous occasions had saved Fernandes from losing his job.

Now he reluctantly asked Fernandes to resign temporarily. Mamata Banerjee, who had her eyes on the assembly polls in Bengal and spent more time in Kolkata than in Rail Bhavan, calculated that the NDA would crumble. She pulled the TMC out.

On at least two recent occasions, whistle-blowers had charged the PMO of favouring a few select corporate houses – Reliance, Essar, Hindujas. Two weeks ago, an ex-bureaucrat had leaked to Outlook that the Hindujas were powerful enough to convene cabinet meetings at their pleasure. The PMO had been bypassing the cabinet and ‘foisting controversial decisions on ministries without so much as consulting’ them. Rampant lobbying had led one young entrepreneur to conclude: ‘What we are seeing is not reforms. There is no level playing field, no fair play or an atmosphere which promotes healthy competition. In a sense, this is a licence raj in a different garb.’ 

Outlook had followed up with another exposé on Ranjan’s role as a ‘powerful yet invisible’ force driving the PMO. His footprints were visible everywhere – telecom, roadways, power: ‘Interested lobbies are very clever. They go through Ranjan.’

The age of visual excess was beckoning. Operation West End was more tragicomic and thrilling than the best of Bollywood. Out of sheer panic on the fourth day, a grim-looking Vajpayee made a televised address admitting the exposé to be a ‘wake-up call’. 

He also announced a judicial inquiry into the corruption charges. No one knew what this meant, since the deals caught by the spy-camera were all fictitious.

At a media seminar the next day, he took a U-turn, demanding that the fourth pillar should ‘restrain itself while reporting military matters’.

Soon enough, the PMO unleashed the Enforcement Directorate and IB to harass Outlook and Tehelka.* When no irregularity was found, Brajesh Mishra, on his boss’s behalf, began hounding their proprietors. It was a Kafkaesque playbook, morally deranged for a man who had begun his professional life as a journalist at the receiving end of the interim government’s ire.

The RSS chose to bury its head in the sand by dissociating itself from the volunteers stung on camera. Instead, they deflected the loss of reputation by attacking the government’s economic reforms, asking Vajpayee to rejig his team. Under pressure, Vajpayee shunted out some of the top PMO bureaucrats. But he drew a line at Brajesh Mishra and Ranjan Bhattacharya. They were both asked to lie low.

A long-running joke had been that Vajpayee had made the IB’s life easy by hardly ever soliciting political intelligence; that through his own wide contacts across the Sangh Parivar, he could muster more classified intelligence. This time he was ‘most rattled’, and he rebuked the IB Chief Shyamal Datta for failing to detect such an elaborate sting concoction: ‘Ye nahi hona chahiye tha!’ Coming from his laconic boss, this was ‘voluminous abuse’.

Hereafter, the PMO grew cautious about any files involving a financial transaction.* Vajpayee had earlier promised to authorize Himachal’s BJP chief minister P. K. Dhumal to allot hydroelectric projects up to 300 MW without issuing tenders. This presented ample scope for greasing some palms in the hilly state, to which the prime minister had been generous. But when Dhumal phoned the PMO to remind them of the promise, Ashok Saikia lost his temper. ‘Your file is with me and you can tell the PM that I am not putting [it] up,’ he barked, ‘Do you want this old man to go to jail?’

The writer had earlier authored ‘Vajpayee: The ascent of the Hindu right (1924-77)’, which was the first part of his book series on the former PM.

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