Vajpayee’s coming of age

Radhika Ramaseshan

Lytton Strachey, the English writer and critic of early 20th century, broke new ground in biographical writing by adopting an irreverent attitude to the past. It resulted in memorable takedowns of Victorian idols such as Florence Nightingale and Cardinal Manning through a clinical recounting of facts and telling anecdotes that shone a light on the protagonists. Strachey was a tad saucy but never slanderous.

The first volume of Abhishek Choudhary’s biography of Atal Behari Vajpayee, the BJP’s first Prime Minister, has shades of Strachey’s approach without the crisp writing style. That’s probably because it is a large work circumnavigating Vajpayee’s life from birth to (presumably) death, unlike Strachey’s shorter pen portraits of eminent Victorians. However, Choudhary’s biography marks a departure from the customary reverential tone used by Indians to chronicle deceased greats, especially politicians, because death holds a certain sanctity that will not countenance objectivity.

Vajpayee’s persona, his politics, his dilemmas, the compromises he struck and the ambition he harboured under the guise of self-assurance are delineated through meticulously researched events that enmesh the subject with the storied times he lived in and give the perspective one seeks in such a work.

There was a serendipitous quality to Vajpayee’s birth at Bateshwar, to Agra’s southwest. His grandfather, Shyamlal Vajpayee, a priest and astrologer, divined from Vajpayee’s horoscope charted at birth that his son Krishn Behari’s fifth child was blessed with a perfect alignment of the planets and stars. Therefore, he was christened Atal, meaning firm, unafraid although subsequent episodes showed that he didn’t always live up to the given name.

Not a particularly good student or a sportsman, Vajpayee discovered his oratorical talent by chance when he flubbed reciting a prepared speech. He pledged never to rote-learn a speech and give his silver tongue full play. He loved sweets and good food, which explained that he volunteered to supervise the cooking in the mess as a prisoner at the Bangalore Central Jail during Emergency.

A running theme is the burden Vajpayee carried, like his RSS and Jana Sangh/BJP compatriots, of what Choudhary terms the “Hindu past”, manifest in a subliminal awareness of centuries of colonisation, defeat and acquiescence but outwardly refusing to acknowledge the past as it was and instead “interpreting” history as one of “constant struggle and occasional victory”. Vajpayee loved historical fiction based on the “valour” of Maharana Pratap and Rani Lakshmibai. He recognised that the “real task of Hindutva was anti-Islamic sangathan (mobilisation), and that would require decades of brute, unglamorous labour”. While the “Hindu past” underpinned Vajpayee’s political preoccupations as it would for any “pracharak” and “swayamsevak”, it was a baggage that wasn’t easy to carry as his tenures as a PM showed. On the one hand, Vajpayee was attracted to the virtues of “secularism” as a counterpoint to Hindutva and was honest about realising that realpolitik would not brook religious fanaticism under the hydra-headed coalition he helmed. On the other, he was dogged by the demands of his Sangh peers and juniors.

Vajpayee’s political confusion was evident in Kanpur when he went to pursue Masters in political science away from the feudal Gwalior that lived under the shadow and patronage of the erstwhile Scindia royalty. Kanpur was a major hub of trade union activity, notes the author. The RSS ecosystem was weaker and Vajpayee hung out with trade unionists and Communists, causing his old friends to wonder if he was leaning leftwards. That was not to be and soon Vajpayee decided to become a Sangh full-timer or “pracharak”. For six years, he alternated between journalism, editing Sangh-affiliated publications, and politics, but remained steadfastly loyal to the RSS.

By 29, he was a full-time politician.

An interesting aspect of the work is the contradiction within the Congress regarding the RSS that surfaced each time Jawaharlal Nehru mooted a ban and Vallabhbhai Patel was ambivalent. While the first ban on the Sangh is described as the “first major expression of Independent India’s secular vision”, Choudhary verily notes that the “confused implementation” and “legal loopholes” generated sympathy for the Sangh among conservative Congressmen, indicating that the actual practice of secularism was not going to be smooth.

While conservative biographers avoid writing about their subjects’ personal lives unless they were straitlaced, Choudhary upfront devotes an entire chapter to Vajpayee’s love life after living with RSS men who took vows of life-long celibacy. Vajpayee never concealed his relationship with Rajkumari Kaul, who was already married with a daughter to a Delhi college professor, Brijmohan Nath Kaul. Rajkumari was head over heels in love with Vajpayee but never divorced her husband. She had a second daughter with Vajpayee who looked strikingly similar to him.

This volume ends with the end of Emergency and the arrival of the Janata Party dispensation. The Jana Sangh was dissolved. It merged itself with the Janata Party and Vajpayee became the foreign minister. The last para is prophetic. When an IB official asked an RSS “pracharak” how power could be shared with ideologically disparate parties, the answer was that power was not a “Hindu wife” and could be shared with the “oddest bedmate” if only for a while.