Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who has died aged 93, was the most important politician in 20th-century India not to be either a current or former member of the Congress party. His political life spanned almost the entire period of Indian independence.
Vajpayee had a gift for ambiguity. Nobody could be completely sure whether he was a lone liberal among Hindu fundamentalists or simply a plausible salesman for religious nationalism. It was perhaps his command of Hindi, the most widely spoken language of India, that allowed him to conceal his true beliefs from so many for so long. He became prime minister first in 1996 for less than a fortnight. Then, in March 1998, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), long considered a pariah in Indian politics, welded provincial parties into a workable coalition. Vajpayee again became prime minister.
In power, he burnished his rightwing credentials. His popularity soared when the government detonated a nuclear bomb under the sands of the Rajasthani deserts in the teeth of international disapproval. A month later Indian forces won a decisive victory over Pakistani soldiers in the Kargil war.
These two events led to Vajpayee being re-elected in 1999 and he went on to lead the first government not dominated by the Congress party to complete a full five-year term. In doing so, Vajpayee became the first Indian who did not hail from the Nehru-Gandhi clan to be sworn in three times as prime minister. He also proved an able diplomat, working discreetly to woo President Bill Clinton, who had denounced India’s nuclear tests in 1998 but went to India two years later – the first visit by a US president to the country in more than two decades.
Yet, domestically, Vajpayee often appeared not to be in charge. His attempts in 2001 to forge better relations with Pakistan’s military ruler General Pervez Musharraf were undermined by Hindu hardliners. While Vajpayee tried to build bridges, the religious right simply burned them down.
His lowest point came in 2002 when Vajpayee told a party rally that “wherever Muslims are living they don’t want to live in harmony. They don’t mix with the society. They are not interested in living in peace.” This was just six weeks after about 1,200 Muslims met their deaths during pogroms in Gujarat at the hands of mobs organised by the state government – run by the BJP’s Narendra Modi. Fingers were pointed at Modi, since the constitution vested in him power over the police and the administration. Vajpayee could either have dismissed Modi or suspended the state government. He did neither. A swaggering Modi now runs India.
Vajpayee was born into a high-caste Brahmin family in Gwalior, in central India’s cowbelt; his father, Shri Krishna Behari Vajpayee, was a teacher. A Marxist in his youth, he abandoned that creed for rightwing Hindu politics as a student. It was a visit to a camp run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS – National Volunteer Service), an organisation inspired by European fascism, that converted him. The RSS is the moral compass for Hindu nationalism, a political ideology the young Vajpayee openly endorsed. Yet outwardly, he appeared an instinctive moderate who professed admiration for Gandhi and condemned the Mahatma’s assassination by a member of the RSS. Vajpayee cited Richard Attenborough’s film about the independence leader as one of his favourites. He was, in private, a liberal, likable man who enjoyed a scotch and had to deny eating beef, a serious charge against a Hindu politician. Despite his protestations of being a bachelor, it was widely rumoured he had a long-term lover.
Vajpayee was an aspiring author, and wrote vivid, dreamy poetry. He had a sharp pen, honed in his early years as a trenchant journalist on an RSS magazine. When the 33-year-old Vajpayee was elected to parliament for the RSS’s political wing, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, in 1957, he discovered his true gift: public speaking. Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the world’s greatest orators, noticed the rising star on the opposition benches and predicted that one day he would hold high office. As early as 1960, Vajpayee warned of alienating Muslims and other minorities in a country as diverse as India. He wrote that restricting his party’s base to just one creed did not make electoral sense. He practised what he preached. In his own parliamentary constituency of Lucknow, Shia Muslim households in the city displayed pictures of Vajpayee alongside one of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the Iranian revolution in 1979.
It was not until Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi misread the public mood by suspending democracy and throwing the opposition into jail that Vajpayee emerged on to the national stage. When the emergency was lifted, Gandhi lost power and Vajpayee became foreign minister, in 1977. His stint was distinguished by peace missions to India’s neighbours. Vajpayee met Pakistan’s military dictator Zia-ul-Haq in 1978 and a year later visited Deng Xiaoping in China. Both trips were seen as diplomatic breakthroughs but Vajpayee’s spell in power was over in months when the government collapsed after bitter infighting.
As a response, in 1980 Vajpayee and his longtime political partner Lal Krishna Advani founded the BJP. It was a long march back to power. The turning point was the destruction in 1992 by a mob of religious bigots of the Babri Masjid, a mosque supposedly built by the Moghul emperor Babur in the 16th century over the birthplace of a Hindu deity, Ram. This sparked riots that left more than 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, dead. It also thrust the BJP into the limelight.
Vajpayee’s achievement as prime minister was to present a fresh vision of India in the world. This new self-image was at odds with the Nehruvian idealism of the past, and emphasised economic and nuclear strength. The BJP’s ascent also symbolised the passing of India’s secular identity. By the late 90s Vajpayee promised the BJP was a “party with a difference”. However Vajpayee’s BJP proved as corrupt and opportunistic as any other. In 2004, the BJP campaigned on his economic accomplishments, coining the slogan “India Shining”. However voters did not feel as rich as the BJP thought they were.
It was Indira Gandhi’s daughter-in-law, Sonia, who triumphed over the octogenarian Vajpayee in 2004. By then his health was fading, and doctors dissuaded him from campaigning in the 2009 election. It is unlikely that it would have made much of a difference: Sonia Gandhi’s Congress won an emphatic victory.
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