Atal Bihari Vajpayee

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Atal Bihari Vajpayee joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1939, at the age of 12, as a volunteer in Gwalior. Decades later, that same boy would be sworn in three times as the prime minister of India, and become the first non-Congress leader to serve a full term in the office. He was born on the 25th of December 1924 and died on the 16th of August 2018, at the age of 93. In between, he was elected ten times to the Lok Sabha and twice to the Rajya Sabha, making him the longest-serving member of the Indian Parliament. He was also a Hindi poet who once wrote that his verse was "a declaration of war, not an exordium to defeat." How does a full-time RSS worker who never married become a figure that two warring sides could respect? Why did a man who ordered nuclear tests also ride a bus to Lahore in search of peace? And how did a government riding 7% growth lose an election it called six months early? The answers run through poetry, war, a torn-down mosque, and a single vote.

• 2. Brahmin Boy In Gwalior

  ›

  Krishna Bihari Vajpayee taught school in Gwalior, in Madhya Pradesh, and his son Atal was born there into a Kanyakubja Brahmin family. The boy's mother was Krishna Devi. His grandfather, Shyam Lal Vajpayee, had moved to Gwalior from Morena in search of better opportunities. Vajpayee did his primary schooling at the Saraswati Shishu Mandir in Gwalior and his high school at the Gorkhi School. At Gwalior's Victoria College, now the Maharani Laxmi Bai Govt. College of Excellence, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Hindi, English and Sanskrit. The Scindia dynasty of the erstwhile Gwalior state sanctioned him a monthly scholarship of seventy-five rupees. With that support he completed a Master of Arts in political science from DAV College, Kanpur, affiliated to Agra University. Unlike purist Brahmins who shun meat and alcohol, Vajpayee was known to be fond of whisky and meat, a private contradiction that ran alongside a public life of RSS discipline.

• 3. The Activist And The Press

  ›

  In 1944, Vajpayee became general secretary of the Arya Kumar Sabha, the youth wing of the Arya Samaj movement in Gwalior. Influenced by Babasaheb Apte, he attended the Officers Training Camp of the RSS between 1940 and 1944, and became a pracharak, a full-time worker, in 1947. He gave up studying law because of the partition riots. Sent to Uttar Pradesh as a vistarak, a probationary pracharak, he began working for the newspapers of Deendayal Upadhyaya: the Hindi monthly Rashtradharma, the Hindi weekly Panchjanya, and the dailies Swadesh and Veer Arjun. In August 1942, Vajpayee and his elder brother Prem were arrested for 24 days during the Quit India Movement, even though the RSS had chosen not to take part. He was released after giving a written statement that he had been part of the crowd but did not join the militant events at Bateshwar on the 27th of August 1942. For the rest of his life, including after he became prime minister, he called the allegation of participation a false rumour and insisted he never visited Bateshwar during that period.

• 4. Oratory And Nehru's Prophecy

  ›

  In 1951, the RSS seconded Vajpayee, along with Deendayal Upadhyaya, to the newly formed Bharatiya Jana Sangh, where he became national secretary in charge of the Northern region, based in Delhi. He soon became an aide of party leader Syama Prasad Mukherjee. In the 1957 general election he lost to Raja Mahendra Pratap in Mathura but won from Balrampur. His oratory in the Lok Sabha so impressed Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that Nehru predicted he would one day become prime minister of India. Vajpayee mirrored Nehru's style, diction and tone, and Nehru's influence showed in his leadership. When Nehru died on the 27th of May 1964, Vajpayee called him "the orchestrator of the impossible and inconceivable" and likened him to the god Rama. After the death of Upadhyaya, leadership of the Jana Sangh passed to Vajpayee, who became its national president in 1968 and ran the party alongside Nanaji Deshmukh, Balraj Madhok and L. K. Advani.

• 5. Emergency, Janata, And A Lost Hometown

  ›

  In 1975, Vajpayee was arrested with other opposition leaders during the Internal Emergency imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Interned first in Bangalore, he appealed on grounds of bad health and was moved to a hospital in Delhi. After Gandhi ended the emergency in 1977, a coalition including the Jana Sangh formed the Janata Party and won the general election, with Morarji Desai as prime minister. Vajpayee served as minister of external affairs, and in 1977 became the first person to deliver a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in Hindi. In 1979, Desai and Vajpayee resigned, and the Janata alliance collapsed. Former Jana Sangh members formed the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1980, with Vajpayee as its first president. Under him the BJP softened the Jana Sangh's Hindu-nationalist line and even expressed support for Gandhian Socialism. The shift did not work. After Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh bodyguards, sympathy carried the Congress to a massive victory in the 1984 elections, and the BJP won only two seats. Vajpayee, who had won earlier from New Delhi, shifted to his hometown Gwalior, where Madhavrao Scindia of the Gwalior royal family was brought in on the last day of nominations and beat him; Vajpayee took just 29% of the vote.

• 6. The Babri Years

  ›

  In 1986, L. K. Advani took office as BJP president and steered the party back to hardline Hindu nationalism. The BJP became the political voice of the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir Movement, which sought to build a temple to Rama in Ayodhya at a site believed to be his birthplace, after demolishing the 16th-century Babri Masjid. The strategy worked, and the BJP won 86 seats in the 1989 general election, making its support crucial to the government of V. P. Singh. In December 1992, a group of religious volunteers led by members of the BJP, the RSS and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad tore down the mosque. Vajpayee himself came under public scrutiny over a controversial speech he gave one day before the demolition. Religious polarisation following the demolition helped the BJP become the single largest party in the 1996 general election. President Shankar Dayal Sharma invited Vajpayee to form a government, and he was sworn in as the 10th prime minister of India. Without a majority in the Lok Sabha, he resigned after 16 days.

• 7. Bombs And A Bus To Lahore

  ›

  In May 1998, India conducted five underground nuclear tests in the Pokhran desert in Rajasthan, 24 years after its first test, Operation Smiling Buddha in 1974. Two weeks later Pakistan responded with its own tests. France endorsed India's right to defensive nuclear power, while the United States, Canada, Japan, Britain and the European Union imposed sanctions, which were lifted after just six months. The tests were popular at home, and within weeks of taking office Vajpayee had publicly affirmed India's nuclear-weapons status. He then pushed for peace. With the inauguration of the Delhi-Lahore bus service in February 1999, Vajpayee travelled to Lahore to meet Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, producing the Lahore Declaration, which committed both sides to dialogue and envisaged a denuclearised South Asia. That spring his second government fell. The AIADMK under J. Jayalalithaa withdrew support after a tea with Sonia Gandhi, and on the 17th of April 1999 the government lost a confidence vote in the Lok Sabha by a single vote.

• 8. Kargil, Parliament, And Gujarat

  ›

  In May 1999, Kashmiri shepherds discovered militants and non-uniformed Pakistani soldiers holding border hilltops near the town of Kargil, with fighting also in the Batalik and Akhnoor sectors. The Indian army launched Operation Vijay on the 26th of May 1999. Over 500 Indian soldiers were killed in the three-month war, and an estimated 600 to 4,000 Pakistani militants and soldiers died; India recaptured almost 70% of the territory. Vajpayee sent a "secret letter" to US President Bill Clinton warning that if infiltrators did not withdraw, "we will get them out, one way or the other." The BJP-led NDA won 303 of 543 seats in the 1999 elections, and Vajpayee took oath for a third time on the 13th of October 1999. In December 1999, Indian Airlines flight IC 814 was hijacked to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, and the government released prisoners including Masood Azhar in exchange for the passengers. On the 13th of December 2001, masked men with fake IDs stormed Parliament House in Delhi; the attackers, later proven to be Pakistan nationals, were killed, and Vajpayee mobilised an estimated 500,000 to 750,000 soldiers along the border under Operation Parakram. In February 2002, after coach S-6 of the Sabarmita Express was set on fire at Godhra, killing 59, Hindu mobs killed thousands of Muslims in Gujarat, where Narendra Modi was chief minister. Vajpayee said Modi must follow raj dharma, ethical governance, and later admitted that not removing him had been a mistake.

  From 2003 to 2007 India's GDP growth exceeded 7% every year, after three years below 5%. In July 2003, Vajpayee visited China, recognised Tibet as part of China, and the following year China recognised Sikkim as part of India. Confident of economic momentum and a peace initiative with Pakistan, the NDA called elections six months early under the "India Shining" campaign. The gamble failed. The BJP won only 138 seats in the 543-seat parliament, while the Congress under Sonia Gandhi emerged as the single largest party with 145, and Vajpayee resigned. Scholars link his defeat more to rural distress and the miscalculated India Shining campaign than to the Gujarat riots. In December 2005 he announced his retirement at the BJP's silver jubilee rally in Mumbai's Shivaji Park. Manmohan Singh later called him the Bhishma Pitamah of Indian politics, after the Mahabharata figure respected by two warring sides. He was given the Padma Vibhushan in 1992 and the Bharat Ratna in 2015. His name now marks the Atal Tunnel at Rohtang, the longest tunnel above 10,000 feet, a reminder that the bachelor poet from Gwalior left his signature on the country's mountains.