The many faces of Vajpayee

A biography of India's first non-Congress PM to serve a full term offers an insightful and engrossing narrative

Atal Bihari Vajpayee

Author: Sagarika Ghose

Publisher: Juggernaut

Pages: 432 

Price: Rs 799

In recent years, we have been seeing a number of high-profile releases of biographies of politicians associated with the Sangh Parivar. These books seem to stake their subject’s claim to uncle-of-the-nationhood, as if to offer Sanghi alternatives to the Gandhi-Nehrus. In so doing, it’s not that facts are always massaged; more usually, calamitous actions are made palatable through generous and glowing interpretations of motives or contexts. The idea, I suppose, is to write an Indian historical narrative that is, if not entirely Congress-mukt, at least one in which Congress figures are diminished and Sanghi characters inflated.

It is in this climate that journalist and novelist Sagarika Ghose has written Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a biography. Straight off, she tells us she is a liberal. The idea of a liberal assessing the life of right-winger Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the first non-Congressman to serve a full term as prime minister of India, raises our expectations of getting a book that inclines not towards PR but critique. In this, the book succeeds, and has many crucial insights delivered in an engrossing narrative — but with one flaw too massive to overlook.

The book shows Vajpayee’s rise as a charismatic youth politician of the Sangh to Parliamentarian and finally India’s prime minister, a trajectory that also brought Hindu right-wing politics to mainstream respectability, and turned the party he co-founded, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), into a serious contender on Raisina Hill. His most high-profile achievements and failures one expects to read are present in vivid colour — his soaring career taking the BJP to success, his dogged and determined tenure as an opposition politician, his ascent to the premiership, his unprecedented attempts at peace with Pakistan; also, his opportunistically riding the Ram Mandir movement and directly abetting the rath yatra (and, therefore, indirectly the Babri demolition that devastated communal relations). Also, his fiasco of a 13-day government, his inept handling of national security issues right from the hijack of Indian Airlines’ IC814 to the damp squib called Operation Parakram, to his swaying readily with the breeze that boosted Narendra Modi after the Gujarat riots. There is plenty here to chew on and relish for avid fans of political nonfiction.

The writing is beautifully wrought, displaying a novelist’s aptitude for making a phrase ring and an image lambent. For instance, the passage describing the demolition of the Babri Masjid is among the most visual and well-voiced I’ve read in years, and there are many such feats of writing.

Along with the big picture, the author zooms in on the individual, points out his missteps and deviousness, doublespeak and opportunism, in detail and in refreshingly frank terms. The author’s aim, we realise, is to see through the persona of the poet-politician down to the chameleonic person. Vajpayee the politician, we are told, was “(o)ne day a moderate, the next day sounding like a hardliner, one day arguing for pluralism, the next day harking to Hindu sentiments”. At another place, we see this: “All through his life, Vajpayee... showed he lacked the strength of character to act against wrong, but still had the sensitivity to be ashamed about his own failings”.

Vajpayee’s motivations are incisively delineated: his quest for power, the moral cost be damned; his obsession with Jawaharlal Nehru and his descendants, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi; his contradictions and paradoxes, namely his allegiance to his parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and also his stoking “Hindu nationalism trying to operate within the constraints of democracy”.

We are shown how Vajpayee contributed to his image as a “good man in bad company”, the bad company being the Sangh Parivar in the few decades following the murder of Gandhiji; and how Vajpayee was the “friend to all, enemy to none”, a bridge builder indispensable in BJP’s coalition era. We are presented a psychological and social map of his conflicts, internal and external, at being described as a mukhauta or mask of a “moderate” for the Sangh. It’s an insightful account of his internal struggles, which evidently were monumental.

As a person, Vajpayee comes across as unconventional to say the least. Vajpayee said, “I am a bachelor, not a brahmachari.” What’s more, if you think you’ve consumed all the writing and movies there are about love triangles, wait till you learn here about Vajpayee’s domestic arrangement. No spoilers, but imagine the torments that afflicted Vajpayee’s parent organisation, the RSS, as it came to terms with him. We are also told of his love of good food in general and specifically meat and alcohol, convivial company, and the public stage. The author explains all this as the traits of a bon vivant and a bohemian. Along the way, we get insights into Vajpayee’s relationships with mentors and colleagues in the RSS, and colleagues in the BJP, including L K Advani, Modi and others. We are provided brief portraits of these leaders as well.

The book tells us so much, but misses a crucial detail. I am reminded of Amit Shah’s announcement in 2019 that the National Register of Citizens would be compiled. The NRC was enabled in 2003 by an Act of a BJP government under Vajpayee with the consent of the opposition, chiefly the Congress party.

The Vajpayee administration added Section 14A to the Citizenship Act that empowered the government to issue a “national identity card” registering “every citizen of India”, and to “maintain a National Register of Indian Citizens”. Surely Vajpayee had fathomed the implications? And the Vajpayee-Advani-led government apparently framed rules for drawing up local registers of citizens that, among other things, allowed people to complain that their neighbours were illegal migrants, at which point the accused would be presumed guilty of the alleged offence and have to prove their citizenship. This vision of a society in which people suspect each other has RSS or other Sangh outfits written all over it; Vajpayee probably accommodated them. Yet the 2003 amendment does not find a mention in the book. In an otherwise splendidly wrought book, this is a major flaw; this episode might have forced a radical and more scathing reappraisal of Vajpayee, which might have led the author to a different book.