'Believer’s Dilemma': Poet’s pitch in a chorus

In April 2002, after the aftermath of the Gujarat riots, which left over 2,000 people dead, a disproportionate number of them Muslims, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited the embattled state. At a press conference held during this visit, with the then Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, seated beside him, Vajpayee was asked what advice he might offer Modi. The prime minister responded with “He should follow Raj Dharma,” the ancient Indian concept denoting the righteous duty of a ruler. This remark has since become a touchstone in assessments of the contrast between Vajpayee and Modi.

Where many commentators retrospectively cast Vajpayee as a moderating, occasionally reluctant figure within the Hindutva project, Modi has been portrayed as the embodiment of its unapologetic consolidation. While accounts suggest he was disturbed by Modi’s administrative handling of the riots, he ultimately demurred. A man often described as the ‘moderate face’ of an otherwise majoritarian formation chose accommodation over confrontation, a choice that would define the years of his political career. It is within this web of contradictions between reformist temperaments, structural conservatism, and ideological complicity that Choudhary situates the second volume of his penetrating biography of Vajpayee.

Vajpayee offered the Sangh or the Hindu Nationalists a face it needed. As Choudhary observes, Vajpayee became the crucial intermediary, a man who opened the doors of democratic liberty wide enough for an ideological family that, once inside, began methodically to dismantle its foundations.The author carefully reconstructs the power dynamics between Vajpayee and Morarji Desai, revealing deep cleavages over foreign policy vision and national self-conception. The sections on Vajpayee’s tenure as PM are among the most analytically rich.

As foreign minister, Vajpayee flirted with the notion of a South Asian supranational consortium not unlike a nascent European Union. This was not mirrored in the domestic sphere, where the Janata coalition’s centrifugal tendencies meant it never quite delivered the Sampoorn Kranti (Total Revolution) that Jayaprakash Narayan had envisioned.

The late 1970s were a moment of global tumult. Vajpayee sought to recalibrate India’s posture. He advocated for a tempered, even conciliatory, approach toward China. This tightrope became even more perilous following China’s invasion of Vietnam in early 1979. His statement did little to silence critics on either side.

Meanwhile, at home, the Janata coalition, derided by Indira Gandhi as a khichdi sarkar (a mishmash government), was imploding. Ideological incoherence, personal animosities, and mutual suspicion had reduced the promise of post-Emergency renewal to a tragic farce, Choudhary notes. Vajpayee’s occasional adoption of “Gandhian socialism” began to grate against his formative intellectual inheritance from Upadhyaya’s “Integral Humanism.” It was not a wholesale rejection, but a rhetorical deviation. His rhetorical flourishes and pragmatism notwithstanding, he repeatedly came to the RSS’s defence during moments of public scrutiny, offering both political cover and ideological affirmation. By the early 1990s, the BJP had transitioned from a peripheral force to the principal opposition party, and it did so on the back of precisely the kind of mobilisation that Vajpayee had once seemed wary of. When the Babri Masjid was demolished in December 1992, Vajpayee, characteristically, responded with ambivalence cloaked in oratory. Vajpayee’s insistence on court verdicts, his mild distancing from the kar seva optics, and his appeals for constitutionalism are contrasted with his incendiary speeches in the movement’s later phases. The “accidental liberal” proved, in the end, to be a loyal institutional actor. The poet had found his pitch within the chorus. Among the most absorbing sections are the chapters dealing with economic policymaking and foreign affairs.

Choudhary charts in great detail how the Vajpayee government, having attained nuclear status, quickly moved to stabilise relations not only with Pakistan, via the Lahore bus initiative, but also with the United States and other powers.

What emerges is not a tragic liberal trapped in a party of firebrands, but a skilled and highly adaptive political actor whose career illustrates the tactical and ideological flexibility of the Hindu nationalist movement.  It is at once meticulously researched, lucidly narrated, and intellectually rigorous.