By Kavitha Iyer
Mumbai: In the preface to Believer’s Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right’s Path to Power, 1977–2018, the concluding volume of his two-part study of the former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, Abhishek Choudhary describes how prime minister Narendra Modi walked on crowded streets, barefoot, behind Vajpayee’s cortege following his death in August 2018.
“It was impossible in this gesture to set apart careful PR from genuine affection,” writes Choudhary, whose first volume Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right 1924–1977 won the 2023 Tata Literature First Book award, and was a notable book of the year in the Hindu, the Telegraph, Frontline, and the Quint.
Vajpayee’s daughter, “though most Indians were unaware of her identity as the biological daughter” of the poet-politician who had never married, kindled her father’s pyre.
Choudhary, who has spent the better part of a decade studying the former prime minister and India’s Hindu right, looks past the soft-focus nostalgia on Vajpayee as the leader who charmed allies and soothed coalition partners, presenting instead a layered portrait of a man at the centre of the Sangh Parivar’s project to Hinduise India.
Picking through decisions—some deliberate, others reluctant—taken during Vajpayee’s six years in office; dissecting Vajpayee’s evolution through major historical milestones from 1977 onwards, including the fall of the Janata government, the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the Pokharan nuclear tests, the historical bus from Amritsar to Lahore, the Kargil war, the hijacking of Air India flight IC-814, the terror attack on Parliament; the Gujarat riots, the rise of Modi and more; Choudhary presents a nuanced, sometimes unsettling portrait of a prime minister who brought the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s affiliates unprecedented proximity to the levers of state power, and who married Hindutva’s cultural nationalism with the confidence of a liberalising economy.
The book “doubles as a history of Hindu supremacism,” novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra says in his advance praise for the book.
A grantee of the Robert B Silvers Foundation and a fellow of the New India Foundation, the Delhi-based Choudhary told Article 14 that the most obvious way in which Vajpayee enabled and empowered the Hindu right was his handling of the 2002 Gujarat riots, and the making of Modi’s superstardom, but he also played a slow and determined role, decades on the making, in the legitimisation of the Bharatiya Janata Party as a governing party.
Vajpayee believed he could temper the Sangh from within, Choudhary said. “Gujarat shattered that illusion. His failure became symbolic of the limits of one leader against the momentum of an ideological project.”
In this interview in which he discusses everything from the shadow of Gujarat to the India Shining campaign and from Vajpayee’s overtures to Pakistan to the age of Modi, Choudhary reflects on the pivotal events of those years, the long arc of Hindutva politics, and the ironies of Vajpayee’s legacy in an India shaped, in part, by forces he helped unleash. Excerpts:
If you had to list the three most significant ways or events in which the Sangh Parivar and Hindutva politics were enriched, emboldened and energised during Atal Behari Vajpayee’s prime ministership, what comes to mind? Why?
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.
