Is this really Vajpayee's Election?

Politicians are fortunate that voters have short memories. Today nobody remembers how the BJP regarded Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the aftermath of the assembly election defeats in such states as Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in late 1998. But anybody who saw the mood of the BJP after the assembly election defeats of 1998 would have concluded that Atal Bihari Vajpayee was on his last legs. An HT correspondent asked Navjyot Singh Sidhu if he thought the BJP was communal and he said, “Atal Bihari Vajpayee is totally secular.” On Friday, I interviewed the Shiv Sena’s Sanjay Nirupam, the man whose absurd outburst in Parliament over UTI led to the crisis when Vajpayee threatened to resign. Even the largely unreadable BJP Vision Document was, in Sonia Gandhi’s phrase, “Vajpayee’s photo album with a few captions.” Vajpayee did complain about the Vision Document and it was duly reprinted.