Vajpayee's biggest error as PM

I have never been able to get my head around Pokhran II and the events that occurred organically after that

My personal acquaintance with Atal Bihari Vajpayee was nil. The closest we ever came to a one-on-one contact was approximately 40 years ago, when he was the chief guest at a semi-formal dinner at the Administrative Staff College, Hyderabad. I was refilling the ice-buckets.

That was in the late 1970s when I was a callow teenager. I was happy to see him tucking into the excellent biryani with gusto after he had swallowed a couple of stiff ones. I knew little of politics but I dimly felt that anybody who enjoyed his meat and drink as much as Vajpayee did, couldn’t