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?

The most obvious (and the most visible) one was his handling of the 2002 riots and the making of Modi’s superstardom. But since you ask separately about it, let me point out other examples.

Vajpayee helped the Hindutva organisations transition from the margins of democracy to its centre. He helped turn them mainstream, brought them a  respectability they had dreamt of since 1947. During his prime ministership, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliates operated more like a “deep nation,” to borrow Dinesh Narayanan’s phrase, than ever before. Its network of educational, cultural, and paramilitary outfits gained administrative proximity, even as he often grumbled about their extremism.

To give you an example: Whereas the Intelligence Bureau had been earlier groomed to think of them as internal security threats, as organisations that had once inspired Gandhi’s murder and more recently razed the Babri, they were now forced to turn deferential. A former IB chief likened the Sangh Parivar’s position to that of a prompt box in a play, always reminding Advani and Vajpayee of forgotten lines. Elsewhere, the joke went that Vajpayee knew about most things through his wide Sangh Parivar network before he met the IB chief for briefings on alternate days.

He even appointed a parallel envoy to the United States, bypassing the formal diplomatic channel. Bhisham Agnihotri, a US-based law professor, was tasked with liaising specifically with the Indian diaspora. Agnihotri set up an office in New York at the taxpayer’s expense. This move unsettled some of the MEA officials in Delhi and Washington DC. They complained, but were asked by the prime minister to adjust and cooperate.

A related point is the legitimisation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a governing formation in the eyes of parties and ideologies whom they had fought for much of their lives. And here Vajpayee’s personal charisma—something that formal political science doesn’t pay attention to—played a massive role.

The Dravidian movement had by the late 1990s served its purpose of soothing the Tamil sub-national anxieties, and of keeping the Hindu right at bay, and then somewhat faded away. And so both the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) extended support one after the other. Asked in October 1999 how long the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) would last, Karunanidhi shot back: “It is like asking on the marriage day when are you going to divorce.” 

The divorce did come in early 2004, when the DMK exited over the Gujarat riots and the BJP’s refusal to do away with POTA (the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002, which declared the LTTE in Sri Lanka a terrorist organisation.) But even then the Tamil patriarch spoke fondly of the prime minister.

Similarly, in 1998 Farooq Abdullah tried arguing to his party folks that they were not propping up the BJP, rather a hopefully stable coalition that already included their former socialist friends and Akalis. Of course, the National Conference had a core demand diametrically opposed to the BJP–RSS demand for the abolition of Article 370. Vajpayee had taken an immense liking to Farooq’s son. He was moved by the gesture of the UK-born Omar supporting him during the 1999 confidence motion, and promoted Omar Abdullah—then the youngest MP in the Lok Sabha—to junior commerce minister.

They too broke away and supported the Congress coalition in 2004, as did the Dalit-based Lok Janshakti Party of Ram Vilas Paswan. Sonia Gandhi’s party was nimble-footed in courting them. The BJP had internal crises after the 2004 debacle, but all through 1998–2004 there was no talk of ‘dual membership’ as in the 1970s and 1980s. The six-year stint was enough to legitimise the BJP as a party that could be trusted to run a government. Indeed, it was the first non-Congress government to finish its term.

Third, the redefinition of the ideal citizen: from swayamsevak to investor. Vajpayee’s term marked the moment when Hindu nationalism fused with aspirational capitalism. 

In a way he replaced the ascetic RSS pracharak with the globalised, tech-savvy Hindu nationalist entrepreneur. If the model citizen of Vajpayee’s youth was the soldier-citizen, the model citizen of prime minister Vajpayee’s India was the investor-citizen. (Do check out Ravinder Kaur’s Brand New Nation for more on this theme.) 

Of course, the Sangh Parivar of his generation had loud swadeshi voices—like Dattopant Thengadi of the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) and Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM), backed by RSS chief K S Sudarshan—who hit the streets to oppose liberalisation and privatisation. That story is still unravelling. Trump’s recent 50% tariffs on Indian goods—and his demand that India reduce Russian oil imports—ironically vindicate Thengadi’s scepticism. “Free trade” turns coercive the moment it threatens American interests.

Broadly speaking, though, the new generation of the Sangh Parivar learnt from the Vajpayee-era bickering. The current breed doesn’t feign an aversion to capital. That’s part of the reason Modi’s terms are marked by fewer public spats or media leaks from within the Sangh Parivar.

The ‘India Shining’ campaign of 2003–04 very much appears to be the predecessor of present-day tech-bros’ myth-making on an ‘India story’ that sees no flaw in development without democracy, GDP without justice. Because history might have clues to the future, I want to ask you, did the BJP’s India Shining campaign really contribute to the alienation of rural and working-class India?

Yes, and no.

The India Shining campaign was less a cause and more a symptom—of a growing disconnect between technocratic ambition and social reality. 

The dream of global power, propelled by GDP statistics and investor optimism, masked the persistent fact that most Indians still struggled for basic needs, many of them to meet basic caloric needs. This new bullishness came not only from macroeconomic success but also from an old civilisational inferiority complex—hence the constant comparison with Pakistan (but—and that is revealing—rarely with the more prosperous, more bullish, northern neighbour); the obsession with scale over substance; the faith in frictionless, top-down reforms. The visions of retired babus-turned-technocrats like Amitabh Kant epitomise this affliction now—dreamers of a rocket-ship trajectory to a $30 trillion GDP.

Painting with broad strokes, however, hides lots of specific details. Vajpayee was never thrilled with the ‘India Shining’ campaign. (It sounded less crude in Hindi, ‘Bharat Uday’. His PMO even made an unsuccessful attempt midway to  replace ‘India Shining’ with a more sober ‘Iraada Naye Bharat Ka’, meaning dreams for a new India.) Paradoxically, this overreach came after he had done some painful work of macroeconomic consolidation. Roads were built, forex reserves improved, the telecom sector boomed, but they didn’t touch the lives of the working poor, at least not fast enough. At the same time, fiscal tightening (which led to the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, 2003) made it easier for the next government, the UPA, to roll out a scheme like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which worked rather very well for a decade or so.  

Modi, by contrast, prefers the populist clarity of direct cash transfers. Now and then I spend some time in my village in Madhubani, near the Bihar-Nepal border, and a common reply I get is: if earlier only 10 % or 15% of funds reached the ground, now perhaps 30% or 40% does. That still leaves a mindboggling terrain of corruption and inefficiency. But for the bottom half, tired of existing on the edges of visibility, some watching Insta reels while sowing rice or tending livestock, such marginal improvements matter a great deal more than most of us in the metros care to understand. So far that strategy has worked for Modi.

Your account of Vajpayee’s comment on the Gujarat chief minister’s ‘rajdharma’ in 2002 describes a conflicted man, his own personal convictions perhaps falling short of the influence an Indian prime minister required at that moment. Do you see 2002 as a crack in Vajpayee’s moral edifice, or were there just other dynamics in a party he no longer controlled?

The Gujarat debacle was not a failure of conviction so much as of courage—the executive head’s lack of courage to act decisively and forcefully. 

This had partly to do with the BJP’s mounting electoral losses and growing pressure from the Sangh Parivar to move ahead on its pet demands. The alternative would have been to resign. And more than once, in fact, he did think of doing so. But maybe that was not a feasible option. Because the coalition partners could not think of anyone else who could run the government. In any case Vajpayee didn’t want to lose the job himself.

There were other macro factors at work. Gujarat became the VHP’s way of asserting its significance within the Parivar. Seen one way, the riots were a manifestation of the Sangh Parivar’s pent-up anxieties—invented and real—against Islamic extremism, economic globalisation, and Vajpayee’s apparently feeble response to both. The riots exposed the limits of Vajpayee’s authority and the contradictions of his dual identity as a constitutional democrat and a lifelong swayamsevak. His personal instincts recoiled from the carnage; he wanted Modi gone. But by then, the party apparatus,  backed by the RSS, was beyond his command. Vajpayee believed he could temper the Sangh from within. Gujarat shattered that illusion. His failure became symbolic of the limits of one leader against the momentum of an ideological project.

His famous invocation of rajdharma (a ruler’s duty) at a press conference was not entirely insincere, but ineffectual. He had been outmanoeuvred by a more ruthless party machine. Modi survived—and soon flourished—as the new template of the Hindu Right: unapologetic, majoritarian, and electorally viable. After Pramod Mahajan’s scandalous and sad murder in 2006, Modi’s ascent was entirely a matter of when, not if.

We’ve seen several near-hagiographies of Vajpayee published. Is there a nostalgia around Vajpayee in contrast with the current regime, or was the Hindu right’s ability to craft and recraft the personas of its leaders responsible, or must we simply blame irresponsible historiography?

All three, and more.

After 2014, there was suddenly an enormous demand to understand the right-wing ecosystem. Some responses, particularly from liberal journalists, have taken the form of hasty quickie-peddling. The liberal nostalgia for Vajpayee stems from both the perception and reality of a more moderate, consensus-seeking politics—especially when contrasted with today’s vindictive regime. But it is also a selective memory: the same liberals who once reviled him for the nuclear tests or the rewriting of history books now eulogise him as a Nehruvian moderate. That reversal says a lot more about the crisis of our liberal intellectual class—its muddled understanding of history and politics—than it does about the strategies of the Hindu Right.

Some of it has to do with publishers and agents desperate for fast manuscripts. From personal experience I can tell you that, early on, every time I told an agent or publisher that my book might take two years, they would let out an audible gasp. That would scare and depress me because, deep down, I knew even that was optimistic. It ended up taking far longer than I had imagined.

Then again, as with any new regime, there are journalists and academics on the centre-right hoping to trim their sails to suit the wind, to benefit from the state’s largesse. A few others have been ideologically aligned with Hindutva their entire lives. The bitter disdain that earlier RSS hawks once reserved for Vajpayee has gradually given way to a grudging respect, even loathing, tinged with reverence. A few recent books attempt to document that shift: underplaying the differences, foregrounding Vajpayee’s moderation and sagacity in the hope that, in the eyes of posterity, some of it might rub off on the present dispensation.

They have largely succeeded. The Sangh Parivar, once wary of Vajpayee’s moderation, has posthumously appropriated him as a foundational figure. It understands the value of a benign mascot—someone who can appeal to the undecided middle while the real work of ideological hardening proceeds elsewhere.

While on the subject of historiography, I must add: the historiography of the Congress era was not wholly unpartisan. It often skirted around the deeper, more uncomfortable complexities of caste and religion instead of confronting them head-on. Nehru, in his youth, had an amazingly sharp historical sensibility. He sensed a Hindu-nationalist surge as far back as Shivaji’s lifetime; he admired Akbar deeply and regarded Aurangzeb as a colourless bigot who undid his ancestor’s legacy. But once in office, overwhelmed and depressed by the immediacy of governance, Nehru froze those fissures. The generation that followed simply inherited that evasion. My perverse hope is that the opening of this particular Pandora’s box, unsettling though it is, might prompt a more honest and open conversation about those unresolved tensions of the past.

Mercifully, some of that is beginning to happen. More layered histories—of caste, religion, gender, space, region—are being written now than ever before. We have never had a golden age of anything, including history-writing. I’m not entirely pessimistic.

From the Lahore Bus Yatra and Agra Summit to the many peace overtures, then Kargil and the actions after the Parliament attack, how do you view Vajpayee’s Pakistan policy, and are there any echoes of Operation Parakram in Operation Sindoor?

Vajpayee’s Pakistan policy was perhaps the most adventurous and emotionally sincere undertaken by any Indian prime minister after Nehru. He was willing to risk political capital on mending that relationship. Not out of benevolence, but from the shrewd conviction of a conservative who had tracked geopolitics for five decades: unless the region stabilises, New Delhi will keep wasting precious energy and resources that could be diverted elsewhere.

The 1998 nuclear tests were, contrary to what most progressives then concluded, more strategic inevitability than political stunt. With the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) deadline approaching, the political class had shed all moral hesitations on the nuclear question. The trigger came from the coercive ‘Entry Into Force’ clause in the CTBT, which made it compulsory for all nuclear-capable states to sign the treaty. This made it seem as if India alone were blocking the arrival of a nuke-free world. A hostile global dispensation forced political parties back home to harden their stand: nearly all parties, including the Communist Party of India (Marxist), viewed the CTBT as crass hypocrisy by the P5—the permanent members of the UN Security Council—who sought to freeze nuclear apartheid. Any stable government would have tested. 

The post-facto opposition from the Congress and the Left was largely tactical. This worked well for Vajpayee, as nuclear testing was the only major political decision his 13-party coalition had approved under the tackily acronymed NAG, or National Agenda for Governance.

Kargil was not of Vajpayee’s making. But the BJP successfully appropriated the valour of the armed forces and presented the victory as a validation of its muscular foreign policy—a narrative that proved a significant electoral asset in 1999 and a powerful rallying point for the Hindutva base.

Operation Parakram, India’s largest military mobilisation since 1971, came straight out of the Cold War playbook: the threat of war as a means to coerce the enemy to deter itself. It drained resources, killed thousands of soldiers via accidents and heatstroke, and achieved no immediate strategic gain. (I remember this also because my father was an obscure cog in this giant army wheel of Operation Parakram in Pathankot.)

Though separated by two decades and differing in style—mass mobilisation in Parakram Vs precision airstrikes in Sindoor—both episodes reveal a shared reliance on spectacle over strategy. Sindoor’s design was calibrated for image management in the age of WhatsApp and primetime nationalism. The enduring echo is perhaps not so much in tactics but in the theatricality of state power.

This may be an unfair question, but surely you must have given this some thought. If Vajpayee were alive today, how would he view the current political climate in the country and the dominance of the forces he is said to have spent years balancing?

It’s a perfectly fair question, and one to which I don’t have a definite answer. 

Transposing leaders across generations belongs to the realm of speculation and makes the biographer-historian look silly. But since you ask, I suspect someone like him—if he were, say, 60 or 70—would have taken a couple of fat ministries, say MEA and Finance, grumbled in private, and stayed on. 

Every age picks leaders tailored to its moment, so Vajpayee would not get the top job for sure. Someone like Advani would step in.

If he were 80 or 90, and retired with decent health, he would be very uncomfortable. He may have frowned at the intensity of communal rhetoric today, the marginalisation of Muslims, the disdain for institutions. But he would not have raised a banner of revolt. He was a bridge, and he believed in the bridge: that the RSS and parliamentary democracy could coexist; that a slightly benevolent Hindutva was India’s only sustainable model of secularism. 

One of my most significant findings while mapping the evolution of the Sangh Parivar was a pattern in Vajpayee’s character: his reflexive loyalty to his ideological family in moments of crisis—whether it was the 1983 Assam riots; the 1992 Babri aftermath, when he singlehandedly defended the BJP in Parliament while its top leaders were locked up in jail; the 2002 Gujarat pogrom; or his tragic last public appearance in 2008, when the stroke-battered patriarch voted against the Indo–US nuclear deal he had initiated right before the 2004 general elections.

Ultimately, therefore, he would have done what the party line demanded. Vajpayee had a near-fatal stroke, after which he never again spoke in public. But (as we have seen in recent years with L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi) he would have had very little to say. He would have recognised its roots in movements he helped mainstream. In his final years, Vajpayee grew increasingly introspective. I suspect that had he lived into the heart of the Modi era, he might have privately recognised the irony: that Hindutva is an expression of our contradictory modernity—fed by the widening reach of democracy, even as it gnaws away at the very institutions that make democracy possible.

(Kavitha Iyer is a senior editor with Article 14 and the author of ‘Landscapes of Loss’, a book on India’s farm crisis.)  

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