Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the three-time Prime Minister, fiery orator and poet, was a man of many parts. He was successful in transcending the ideological divide to emerge as a popular Prime Minister. Vajpayee was a master in treading the middle path—while remaining true to his Hindutva roots—making him acceptable to a lot of people.
Born in Gwalior in 1924, a 14-year-old young Vajpayee joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1939. In 1942, he was arrested with his brother during the Quit India movement but released after furnishing a confessional statement.
Political Career
Vajpayee was a founder-member of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951 and was closely associated with Shyama Prasad Mukherjee till the latter’s death. Vajpayee began his Parliamentary innings with the second Lok Sabha in 1957 and went on to represent the Jana Sangh, Janata Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from four different states—Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat—as a ten-time Lok Sabha MP. He was also a member of the Rajya Sabha twice.
It was his oratorical skills that got a young Vajpayee noticed as a first-time MP in a house full of stalwarts and freedom fighters. His hour-long speech in the Rajya Sabha on November 9, 1962 (which covers almost forty columns of the Rajya Sabha records for the day) greatly raised his stature as he tore into the Nehru government’s inability to anticipate the Chinese aggression and ill-preparedness for the war. Vajpayee served a four-year term as the President of the Jan Sangh after the death of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya.
In 1977, Vajpayee was named the Cabinet Minister of External affairs in the Janata Party government headed by Morarji Desai. During this term, he made history by becoming the first to deliver a Hindi speech in the United Nations General Assembly. As Foreign Minister in 1979, he took the call to cut short his China visit midway when the Chinese attacked Vietnam. Post the fall of the Janata government, Vajpayee was elected the Founder-President of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1980. While serving as the leader of the opposition in 1994, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao chose Vajpayee to lead the Indian delegation at the United Nations Human Rights Commission—when India successfully countered Pakistan’s pitch of human rights violations in Kashmir.
Prime Minister Vajpayee
Vajpayee’s first term as Prime Minister lasted merely 13 months—as he could not muster support to form a government despite the BJP emerging as the single largest party with 161 seats. In the following general election in 1998, he was back as Prime Minister heading a rickety coalition. Just a couple of months into the tenure in May, India conducted nuclear tests in Pokhran and successfully managed to negotiate its way out of international sanctions by the end of the year. He also pushed for normalising ties with Pakistan and undertook a historical Bus journey to Lahore in February 1999. Despite losing the no-trust vote in the Parliament by a solitary vote in April, he remained the caretaker Prime Minister and steered the government during the Kargil war in that summer.
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Later that year, he was re-elected as the Prime Minister following the general elections in October. Vajpayee became the first non-Congress Prime Minister to complete his term but his third term (1999-2004) was rather eventful. A couple of months into that term in December, an Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to New Delhi was hijacked by terrorists and flown to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Vajpayee government was caught leaden-footed and eventually caved in to release dreaded terrorists like Masood Azhar to secure the passengers’ exchange.
Vajpayee was an eternal optimist when it came to Pakistan. He invited General Pervez Musharraf—who conceived the Kargil incursions and later deposed Nawaz Sharif in a coup d’état—for talks in 2001. But that ended in a stalemate after the nations failed to come to an agreement on a joint statement even after three days of back-and-forth negotiations. Later that year, in December, the Indian Parliament came under attack from terrorists hailing from Pakistan and that, in turn, led to Operation ‘Parakram’. The deployment of half-a-billion soldiers at the border on Vajpayee’s order—reciprocated in kind by Pakistan—eventually ended in huge loss of lives and resources for the nation. Vajpayee’s legacy as Prime Minister got seriously diminished in the aftermath of the Gujarat riots of 2002. Despite calling for early elections in 2004 and widely expected to win another term, his National Democratic Alliance (NDA) lost the elections to the Congress-led opposition.
A Paradox
Atal Bihari Vajpayee makes for a fascinating character study. He was often described as a “Mukhota” (mask) for the Sangh Parivar. Vajpayee had also mastered the art of doublespeak to wriggle out of tough situations. Despite his moderation and affability, Vajpayee was prone to making hate speeches on rare occasions. In 1970, while speaking on communalism in the Parliament, he said, “Our Muslim brethren are getting more and more communal, and as a reaction, Hindus are getting more and more aggressive. Hindus will no longer take a beating in this country”.
On the eve of the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 5, 1992, Vajpayee made an impassioned speech that almost predicted what was to follow the next day: “If there are boulders, no one can sit there, the ground has to be levelled; it has to be made fit for sitting. Arrangements for a yagya will be done, so there will be some construction. At least a platform will be made. The Supreme Court has stopped construction. But if we do bhajan, pooja and yagya, a shamiana could be erected. Eye-witness accounts later corroborated that the kar sevaks who brought down the structure on the next day did indulge in some construction and even put up a shamiana after placing the idols. That speech also raises questions about the conspiracy angle especially as Vajpayee is heard telling in the end that “despite my wishes to the contrary, I have been asked to go to Delhi”.
The one-member Liberhan Commission constituted to inquire into the matter did not indict Vajpayee nor summoned him unlike LK Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi—but on page 942 of the report, the commission said: “It cannot be assumed even for a moment that L K Advani, A B Vajpayee or MM Joshi did not know the designs of Sangh Parivar. These people, who may be called pseudo-moderates, could not have defied the mandate of the Sangh Parivar, and more specifically the diktat of the RSS, without having bowed out of public life as leaders of BJP.” The report added, “These leaders have violated the trust of the people and have allowed their actions to be dictated not by the voters but by a small group of individuals who have used them to implement agendas unsanctioned by the will of the common people. There can be no greater betrayal or crime in a democracy and this commission has no hesitation in condemning these pseudo-moderates for their sins of omission.”
As the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was above board, till the Gujarat riots blotted his resume. Although he condemned the violence in no uncertain terms and censured the then Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi publicly for failing to uphold “Raj Dharma” at a press conference, he later made a speech at Panaji that rationalized the riots.
Addressing a public rally in the Goan capital, Vajpayee said Islam has two faces;one that teaches tolerance and respects human sentiments; another that fans militancy where there is no place for tolerance. “In Indonesia, Malaysia, wherever Muslims live, they don’t want to live in harmony.They don’t mix with the society (ghul milkar nahi rehte) and are not interested in peace”. Speaking on the Gujarat riots, he asked “Aag lagayi kisne?” (Who lit the fire?), even though he condemned what followed. Sir Mark Tully then wrote in CNN that “Vajpayee displayed his true colours and the mask had slipped”.
Even though these instances might be exceptions to the rule, it only brings home the fact that he was not exactly the “right man in the wrong party” as many people considered him. Vajpayee was an RSS product and remained an adherent—despite managing to keep the fringe in control during his tenure as Prime Minister. That Vajpayee still comes off as a moderate is a sad commentary on the sign of the times we live in and reflective of his hardliner successors in the BJP.
The author is an independent journalist.