The familiar Vajpayee

The Untold Vajpayee

Politician and Paradox

Ullekh N P 

Penguin Viking

272 pages; Rs 599

Is any biography of Atal Bihari Vajpayee possible without talking to some of his surviving contemporaries, particularly his one-time deputy and closest comrade-in-arms L K Advani, or even a Karan Singh of the Congress or Communist leader Somnath Chatterjee?

Ullekh N P’s The Untold Vajpayee: Politician and Paradox suffers because the author was either unable to get access to people who have known Mr Vajpayee closely, including his immediate family, or perhaps they chose not to share.

Sorely missing is fresh material or insights on Mr Vajpayee’s three stints as prime minister — the 13-day government in 1996, the 13-month government of 1998-99 and the eventual near full-term government from 1999 to 2004. 

These years witnessed events like the Pokhran nuclear test, hijacking of IC-814, the Kargil war, the terror attack on Parliament and Gujarat riots of 2002, but much of what the author has detailed is largely in the public domain.

One of the more interesting episodes that the author writes about is Mr Vajpayee having told a minister in his government that “he knew of a plan to unseat him as PM and replace him with Advani”. According to the author, the minister learnt months later that there had indeed been such a manoeuvre. But the author doesn’t tell us who the plotters were, or about the two Cabinet ministers who had agreed to be deputy prime ministers to Mr Advani.

To reconstruct events of those years, the author has relied too heavily on the people he has interviewed and whose names are mentioned in the acknowledgement section, or on journalistic accounts. Most of these men and women, it would seem, were not privy to the internal mechanics of the Vajpayee PMO (Prime Minister’s Office).

The book has copious details on Mr Vajpayee’s personal life — his love for whisky, his not-so-secret domestic arrangement, the controversy over his involvement in the Quit India Movement of 1942 as a student and his dalliance with communism. For example, as a schoolboy, Mr Vajpayee composed a short ballad that is now sung in many Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh shakhas, “Hindu tan man, Hindu jeevan, rag, rag mera Hindu parichay” (I am Hindu heart and body, my life is Hindu, Hindu is my only identity).” Again, much of this has been frequently written about. 

The author offers a glimpse into Mr Vajpayee’s current medical condition. Barring those he had met in his younger years, an ageing Mr Vajpayee had a poor recall of people’s names. He would address Ranjan Bhattacharya, the husband of his adopted daughter Namita, as “Bengali babu” or “Mukherjee bhai” even 13 years after their marriage.

The book also explores some of Mr Vajpayee’s more vitriolic speeches, including his “incendiary” speech during the 1983 Assembly polls in Assam. A big issue during that election was of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. According to the author, the Bharatiya Janata Party had later disowned the speech. He says the speech possibly inspired the massacre of 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, in Nellie, Assam, some months later. Few have forgotten Mr Vajpayee’s speech in Lucknow on the eve of the demolition of the Babri Mosque on December 6, 1992, where he implored kar sevaks to level the ground in Ayodhya. But the speech became public years later, by which time Mr Vajpayee had established himself as the most acceptable face of the BJP and successfully distanced himself from the events that led to the razing of the mosque and the subsequent communal riots.

How will Mr Vajpayee, currently ailing at his 6A Krishna Menon Marg bungalow in New Delhi, be remembered? For all his paradoxes, shrewdness and ruthlessness at cutting to size political rivals, his charisma and even duplicity, Mr Vajpayee is most of all remembered by people who got to know him for his warmth.

His deep friendships with leaders in the Congress and in Opposition ranks, with the likes of P V Narasimha Rao, Chandra Shekhar and even an A B Bardhan, are recounted to this day in Parliament’s Central Hall. At BJP offices across the country, those several decades his junior, current ministers in the BJP governments at the Centre or in states, fondly recall the encouragement and warmth they received from the former prime minister. There are anecdotes about him in his hometown in Madhya Pradesh, and places where he lived or visited often, that are told to this day.

The author has dug deep but come up with material largely well known in political and media circles. The book, however, is well written, provides a context to the past century of Indian politics and could be of some interest to a younger audience.