The Nation

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One day last month, the Software Technology Parks of India started a video-conferencing facility between Delhi and Lucknow, which happens to be Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's constituency. Home Minister L.K. Advani inaugurated a new instrument landing system at Indira Gandhi International Airport, while Urban Development Minister Anant Kumar laid a spate of foundation stones for the construction of flyovers. Various ministries and departments also chipped in with a host of seminars and conferences that were duly publicised through full-page advertisements in national dailies. All these on December 25. India was officially celebrating not Christmas, but the prime minister's 77th birthday.

LARGER THAN LIFE: A birthday card from Goel (above); the tiny counter at the BJP office is crammed with books by or on Vajpayee (below)

Earlier, paeans to prime ministers were limited to ads brought out by the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity and streetside cutouts. No longer. Vajpayee is everywhere-smiling out of book jackets, gleaming from audio and video cassette covers, looking down from banners, posters and cutouts. And lest we forget, he is also the subject of a photo exhibition that opened in Delhi last week. Its fawning organiser Vijay Jolly says this will enable people to "see photographs of Atalji from his childhood till now, in which he will be viewed as a statesman, visionary, poet, popular orator and a successful prime minister".

Is it 1975-77 revisited, when Emergency India saw photographs of Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay adorn offices, billboards on highways, airports, railway stations and bus panels? Though the Vajpayee fever is yet to soar to such heights, there is a parallel in the level of sycophancy.

Consider this: the Union Rural Development Ministry placed full-page ads attributing the ministry's "achievements" to the "able leadership of our beloved prime minister". The Uttaranchal Government credited him with the decision to close a few tunnels of the Tehri dam, while kudos for providing subsidised foodgrains to the poor came from the Food and Civil Supplies Ministry. Not to be left behind, BJP-ruled state governments in Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Goa and Gujarat too sent their "heartiest greetings" via full-page newspaper ads.

The trend was started by Vijay Goel, minister of state in the Prime Minister's Office who has made public panegyrics a habit on Vajpayee's birthday every year. He wasn't a minister when he took to singing praises as his hobby, but considering where it has got him, others are motivated enough to give it a try. At least half-a-dozen junior ministers at the Centre are known to have sent out New Year cards that carried the prime minister's mugshots and couplets, perhaps in the hope that at least they would be made full-fledged members of the Union Cabinet.

THE NATION PM PROMOS > 21 Poems (Penguin) > Meri Ekyavan Kavitayen (Kitaabghar), also self-rendered in an audio cassette > Unki yaad karen by Naushad and Geet naya gaata hoon by Padmaja Fenani Joglekar > Music video by Priyadarshan (under production)

The birthday has also brought the poet in Vajpayee to the fore. And though his poetry is yet to set the cash registers ringing in book shops, the tiny counter at the BJP's headquarters on Ashoka Road in the capital is stacked with books and cassettes on and by Vajpayee. It's not just fawning politicians. Even Indipoppers are joining the fray. Music band Aryans has composed Main Hindustan hoon, an ode to Vajpayee. Says lead singer D.J. Narain: "In the present war-like scenario, India needs a strong leader and Vajpayeeji seems to have all the qualities a strong leader should possess."

As a third-term prime minister, there is no doubt that Vajpayee's popularity has surpassed that of his contemporaries, especially within his party, but with toadyism reaching new heights, is the party finally jettisoning the principle of collective leadership which it has proudly flaunted all along? Says Sunil Shastri, BJP general secretary: "Once in power, the party has to make certain compromises as the prime minister's position automatically elevates him." He is also quick to add that all party decisions are still being taken collectively.

If anything, next month's assembly polls to four states should provide further impetus to the Vajpayee choristers. Already publicity materials are being sent to the states. The BJP campaign, it is clear, will centre not on the NDA Government's achievements but on the prime minister's magnanimity. But if the erosion of over 1 lakh votes in Vajpayee's winning margin in Lucknow in 1999 over 1998 is anything to go by, the sterling qualities that the sycophants see in Vajpayee may not be enough to see the BJP through.