Was 'Agnipath' a signature Rajnath Singh scheme in the first place?

The space for Rajnath in UP politics has shrunk after Yogi Adityanath appeared on the scene

Barring a minor “one-time” tweak in the upper-age limit for armed forces recruitment under the Agnipath scheme, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has stuck to his guns that the scheme will change the profile of the armed forces, making them younger-looking. As swathes of India, from rural areas to urban, from north to south, burn, Rajnath stands unmoved: Ironically over a scheme in which he has had little to contribute, despite being defence minister.

Yielding is not part of Rajnath’s working style. In much of his political life, he has stood on the side of discipline even when he’s had to pay personal costs. Take his tenure as UP education minister. Rajnath got this job in 1991 in the Kalyan Singh government. He decided early on in his tenure that he would not just reign as education minister but also rule. One of his first moves was to bring, through an Ordinance, the anti-copying law.

Those were years when vice-chancellors of universities in UP as reno­wned as Allahabad University would not countenance police on the campus. In 1989, the reduction of the voting age from 21 to 18 accelerated unionisation and campus politics and eventually the collapse of the examination system, which was taken over by student mafia. Students used to take examinations with a knife thrust into the desk.

Rajnath had none of this. He announced that copying would henceforth be a non-bailable offence: Which meant the onus of proving oneself innocent was on the accused. Young people aged 14 and 15 were sent to jail on charges of copying in examinations. The immediate fallout was that the pass percentage in the UP High School Board examination for Class X in 1991 was 58.03. In 1992, after the anti-copying law was put in place, it was 14.7. Similarly, the Intermediate (Class 12) results showed 80.54 per cent passing in 1991. In 1992, the pass percentage dipped to 30.38.

Both sides had their arguments. Rajnath was implacable that only draconian measures could prevent copying in examinations. Indeed, he told reporters that some people in his family were involved in this exercise “as a business” and “when I came to know of this, I stopped talking to them, I found the practice so reprehensible”.

But children being hauled to jail? His other moves as education minister — removing “distortions” in history books and introducing Vedic mathematics into the syllabus — went largely unrecorded.

But both the BJP and Rajnath personally paid a price for this implacability. The Kalyan Singh government was dismissed in December 1992 on charges of breakdown in law and order after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. And when after a year’s President’s Rule, Rajnath contested the Assembly election from Mohana, a student-dominated constituency near Lucknow, in 1993, he got a bad drubbing with just 38 per cent of the vote against the Samajwadi Party’s 44 per cent. The Samajwadi Party won the seat.

Rajnath has never ack­nowledged as correct the charge of academics that he behaved as a fascist in imposing the anti-copying law. He has always believed it was his achiev­ement that he was able to bring order into troubled campuses, although the Kothari Commission on higher education says that some amount of politics and disorder on campuses was inevitable, even desirable. To Rajnath must go the dubious distinction of intermediate and high school-level policing of examinations.

The limited point is that once Rajnath makes up his mind, there are few who can change it. On the other hand, was the Agnipath scheme a signature Rajnath Singh scheme in the first place?

The space for Rajnath in Uttar Pradesh politics has shrunk after Yogi Adityanath appeared on the scene. Although Rajnath has always reacted angrily at being described as a “Thakur” leader and strongly contests such a characterisation (he memorably even lost his temper with L K Advani on the issue), the reality has to be acknowledged: There is no room at the top in the UP BJP any more for another Rajput. So Rajnath has no option but to be gracious about the whole thing.

As BJP chief, Rajnath had to take some unpleasant decisions and propel some others. After the BJP’s 2009 defeat, when then vice-president Yashwant Sinha resigned from all party posts, Singh had to take the unprecedented step of issuing orders that those going public with complaints about the leadership would be dealt with sternly. As a BJP leader put it, it was a clash between “the coterie advising L K Advani and the rest of the party, with Rajnath Singh trying his best to retain some measure of authority”. When the Goa meeting of the party saw Narendra Modi publicly throw his hat into the ring for the top job, it fell to Rajnath to make the decision palatable to the party, especially Advani, who attacked him in a public letter. As before, on the Agnipath issue, he’s standing up to be counted as a lieutenant of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, implacable in his loyalty.