Terms of Trade | Atal Behari Vajpayee: a poet, a pragmatist, and a politician

A new biography throws light on former PM and Jan Sangh (and later, BJP) stalwart who embodied the seasoned politician's ability to straddle contradictions

“Had Bruce Graham not taken so long to complete this book, it would never have enjoyed the immediacy and importance that it now does by hitting the street at this point in India’s political history,” anthropologist Harold Alton Gould wrote in 1994 in the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change while reviewing Graham’s 1990 book, Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics: The Origins and Development of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh.

Has the BJP gained more by adopting a Hindutva hardline approach – the Ram temple movement under the leadership of Lal Krishna Advani – or putting forward its moderate face in the form of Atal Bihari Vajpayee? (HT PHOTO)

Although it was published three years after Walter Andersen and Sridhar Damle’s The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism, it is among the first academic works and, till date, one of the most comprehensive accounts of the RSS trying its hand at politics.

Graham’s concluding chapter begins with a question: “Why did the Jana Sangh fail to become a major force in the politics of post-independence India, despite its claim to be the true representative of the national aspirations of the Hindus?”

He answers this question towards the end of the chapter: “The intellectuals of each of India's minor parties look back to the 1950s and 1960s as a time of missed opportunities and though in most cases this is simply wishful thinking, those who were associated with the early Jana Sangh are justified in their regret. It is well within the bounds of possibility that a moderate, more open and more democratic Jana Sangh could have established itself as the governing party in one or two of the large states of northern India and become a significant force in national politics in the 1970s and 1980s.”

Gould’s claim makes it clear that there is a significant lag between the publication of Graham’s book and the historical period where its analysis ends. The book clearly did not foresee the rise of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) on the back of the Ram Temple movement.

To be sure, even the post-Ram temple movement phase of the BJP has always been clouded by a basic question. Has the BJP gained more by adopting a Hindutva hardline approach – the Ram temple movement under the leadership of Lal Krishna Advani – or putting forward its moderate face in the form of Atal Bihari Vajpayee? The latter, after all, was indispensable to the project of bringing other parties to garner the much-needed parliamentary majority which would ensure that the BJP became the first non-Congress party to run a full-term government in the Centre.

This question gets an additional twist because Vajpayee’s moderate persona has often been described as a façade. The most famous of these articulations, ironically, came from one of his own comrades Govindacharya, a senior leader of the RSS and BJP.

Such accusations, however, run into a basic logical problem. If Vajpayee’s moderation was a farce, how did other political parties fall for it and why could the Jan Sangh not succeed in becoming a moderate and more democratic Jana Sangh, which Graham cites as its political failure? And, if Vajpayee really was a non-believer in the politics of the RSS, why did he stay in its fold at a time when the RSS, and its electoral front Jan Sangh, were anything but favourites in Indian politics?

It is with an eye on this larger question that this author read the first volume of Vajpayee’s biography which has been written by Abhishek Choudhary. The first volume ends with Vajpayee taking over as the foreign minister in the Janata Party government in 1977, which means that the details of Vajpayee the politician, as people of my generation know him will only be available in the second volume which will be released later this year. Three things stand out in the first volume of the biography.

If there is one thing that Choudhary’s account of Vajpayee’s early life tells us, it is that he willingly took a plunge into the politics of the RSS at a time when he could have settled for a non-ambitious but an economically secure career. From working as an unpaid editorial hand in RSS’s early publications and not having enough money to ensure life-saving medical care for his parents to overcoming the shame of appearing in a torn kurta at a Jan Sangh rally or braving physical pain and illness to campaign for his party with very little resources, Vajpayee signifies how the RSS and its political affiliate Jan Sangh had a committed cadre-base which laid the foundation of its democratic engagement in India’s politics. That this experiment suffered two major setbacks in the untimely demise of first Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and then Deendayal Upadhyaya — both of them were very fond of Vajpayee — makes the RSS’s electoral project, an extremely resilient one. While there is a lot of merit in the ideological criticism of the RSS and the BJP, Vajpayee’s own political history begs the question of how many present-day politicians from the so-called secular parties put so much at stake to popularise secularism as an ideology as was done by the likes of Vajpayee to propagate the RSS's ideological worldview of Hindutva.

The second point merits a reproduction from the book. “Baad muddat ke mile hain deewane. Kahne sun-ne ko bahut hain afsane. Khuli hawa mein saans to le lein, kab tak rahegi azaadi kaun jaane" (It has been an aeon since we have met. There are stories to tell and stories to hear. But first, let us relish our freedom, for who knows how long it will last)”, is how Vajpayee opened his speech at Janata Party’s first rally after the withdrawal of the Emergency on January 30, 1977, at Delhi’s Ramlila Grounds. “The applause began after the first line and by the last line the huge crowd seemed to go completely mad,” the book says.

While one gets goosebumps (as is the case with many of Vajpayee’s speeches) imaging the electrifying atmosphere which must have prevailed at the venue, the larger political point is Vajpayee’s ability to strike a chord with the political mood even if it required articulating a larger cause rather than repeat inane rhetoric about his own ideology, which is a very common sectarian trait among politicians, especially in united front tactics. It is this ability to appropriate and articulate contradictions that made Vajpayee the most successful practitioner of coalition politics in India till date. More than anything else, it showcases Vajpayee as a leader who had a democratic instinct.

The book also offers a detailed account of Vajpayee’s crucial role in building early coalitions of the Jan Sangh with other non-Communist opposition parties. Of course, Vajpayee’s persuasive abilities were only successful with the ideological strength that the RSS lent to the Jan Sangh and to be sure, he did have moments of self-doubt. In other words, the point is not whether Vajpayee was a believer or a non-believer in the larger ideological framework. Rather, it is that ideology did not make him into a dogmatist (without value judgement about the politics), but a pragmatic politician who took his party beyond its ideological frontiers. This is yet another example of where India’s “secular” parties have suffered failures.

Lastly, the book confirms once again that politics, even for the finest of politicians, is never bound by limits of rationality or truth-telling. Whether it is Vajpayee demanding that the Indian government give full freedom to the Dalai Lama to organise a freedom struggle for Tibet from the Indian soil or his equivocation on the large-scale violence that broke out after police opened fire at a cow-protection agitation outside the Parliament in which Jan Sangh leaders, including himself, participated, one of India’s finest parliamentarians and politicians had more than his share of compromising with the truth and democratic values.

These contradictions or hypocrisies, depending on how one sees it, as we all know, continued in his latter phase as well, and hopefully, the second volume of the biography will document many more of them. Of course, Vajpayee the prime minister was more powerful vis-à-vis the RSS to enjoy a bigger ideological leash than Vajpayee the Jan Sangh president.

Chaudhary’s book has already received a lot of well-deserved praise. It will suffice for this column to end with an observation that Vajpayee is best understood as a pragmatic but deeply ideological figure trying to make the most of the political contradictions of his times. One must put on record that Vajpayee’s pursuit of this objective was greatly aided by the Congress losing its moral compass during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency.

Every Friday, HT’s data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India.

The views expressed are personal