“All human beings have three lives: public, private and secret”. Abhishek Choudhary invokes this memorable line by the fabled Gabriel Garcia Marquez before inviting us to partake of his second volume on Vajpayee, titled Believer’s Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right’s Path to Power 1977-2018. It is in the realm of the personal that Choudhary’s two volumes on Vajpayee expose us to realities buried in the whisper corridors of Delhi. As Choudhary shows, an “affable statesman” like Vajpayee had umpteen layers to his political and private personality.
Choudhary’s work is perhaps most incisive in dissecting the life of a young Vajpayee. In the first volume, Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right 1924-1977, Choudhary documents his protagonist’s formative years in Bateshwar, later Gwalior and Delhi. From the overall narrative, one gets an impression of a restless adolescent stirring with intensity. At one point, we learn of an innocuous incident where Atal crams a speech for his school competition, only to go blank at crunch time. With sad determination, he vows never to rote-learn a speech again. While abundantly revealing, these chapters on young Atal’s experiences also have something uneven and preconceived about them. Generalised assertions and vacuous may-have-beens are few but present. Yet, the sheer range of archival sources—newspaper and magazine clippings, translations of writings and poems, and interviews with insiders—demonstrates the biographer’s skill and tenacity in scouting for clues both directly and tangentially relevant to his protagonist. Choudhary laces his ink with blood and honey in varying measures.
As the young Vajpayee hurtles towards adulthood, brushes with ideologies of various shades ensure that he is not a prisoner of raw orthodoxies. While firm in his convictions, perverse to some and potent to others, Choudhary shows Vajpayee as a politician dabbling in doublespeak. Choudhary believes that this is a fig leaf for acceptance and the search for power. While not wholly untrue, it might also be a sign of a thinking mind enlivened by curiosity. Vajpayee’s exposure to foreign cultures and political climes—courtesy of his responsibilities as a parliamentarian—also fine-tuned some rough edges over time. In later years, Choudhary delicately documents how Prime Minister Vajpayee, along with Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra, legitimised a new direction in Indian foreign policy. Shibboleths are shunned, and outreach to the United States came to be tinged with respectability rather than criminality.
Choudhary contends that Vajpayee’s life also mirrors the rise of a force in Indian politics from the margins to the centre. The journey from Bateshwar to Delhi is a tale of a gradual rise—a tree with deep roots in the soil, blighted to some and organic to others. Choudhary’s Vajpayee is a bundle of virtues and human imperfections. Reading these two delightful volumes on Vajpayee alongside Vinay Sitapati’s Jugalbandi might seem like an onerous task. Still, take a seat: connoisseurs of politics are in for a feast.