Secrets of the nuclear statesman: New book reveals things you didn't know about Atal Bihari Vajpayee

Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was hailed as an imaginative moderate. PIC/GETTY IMAGES

WHY is Atal Bihari Vajpayee important? The answer seems to lie in the introduction to The Believer's Dilemma, the recently-released second volume in Abhishek Choudhary's two-part biography of the sage elder. "Vajpayee, for all his grumbling, helped the RSS and its affiliates function as India's deep nation," it says. A vivid - albeit poignant - picture emerges from these words: "In his last public appearance, in 2008, the stroke-battered patriarch allowed himself to be stretchered off to the Parliament House to vote against the Indo-US nuclear deal, whose seeds he had himself sown while in office."

Amid the maelstrom of Indian politics, Choudhary says, "I locate him in the larger pantheon of Hindu nationalism, and narrate the story by reflecting him in the mirror of other crucial characters." We asked the author to tell us five things we did not know about the "nuclear statesman", that the book reveals.

Abhishek Choudhary

1 Vajpayee founded the BJP reluctantly, more out of compulsion than ambition. This was after the Jan Sangh faction was formally expelled from the Janata Party in April 1980. Though determined not to disown his ideological roots, he wanted the new party to be seen as the true heir to Jayaprakash Narayan's legacy. Its flag echoed Janata's colours - one-third green, two-thirds saffron - with a lotus replacing Jan Sangh's old oil lamp. He did away with the Jan Sangh credo of Integral Humanism to adopt Janata's Gandhian Socialism. It was at once a tactical manoeuvre to position the party as progressive and centrist, as also a result of his intellectual awakening over the past few years.

2 His cynical doublespeak during the Ayodhya movement - especially his defence of the BJP in Parliament - helped spread the impression that the razing of the Babri Masjid was a freak accident, despite much evidence to the contrary. He instead shifted the blame onto the Congress's earlier handling of the Ayodhya dispute; he maintained that the real issue was not the demolition itself but the historical and political context that had led to it. His responses were carefully crafted to avoid condemning the RSS or alienating the party base - even as he privately harboured unease about the event's consequences.

3 The 1998 nuke tests were more strategic inevitability than a political stunt by the first Hindu-right government. By this time, with the CTBT deadline approaching, the Indian political class had largely shed all moral hesitations on the nuclear question. The Treaty was widely seen as crass hypocrisy of the P5 - the permanent members of the UN Security Council - which sought to freeze the nuclear apartheid status quo. In such a context, any stable government would have tested.

4 He secretly suffered a stroke in 2007 which effectively ended his political life, though it was not publicly disclosed then. He voted against the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2008 - his last political act - mostly to ensure that his successor in BJP, LK Advani, had a shot at the top job.

5 Vajpayee never married, but he had an out-of-wedlock daughter, Namita Kaul Bhattacharya, whose identity was long kept private. That one detail puts his life in perspective - including how his Prime Minister's Office-Prime Minister's Family axis came to wield such colossal clout during his years in office. When he passed away in 2018, it was Namita who lit his funeral pyre.