Book Extract | Believer's Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right's Path to Power by Abhishek Choudhary

Book Extract

Excerpted with permission from the publishers Believer's Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right's Path to Power, 1977–2018 Abhishek Choudhary, published by Picador India/ the New India Foundation, Pan Macmillan Publishing India
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The Sweet Intoxication of Power

The Janata government faced a peculiar predicament. For the first three decades of independent India, prime ministers had either looked after the foreign affairs portfolio themselves or entrusted it to handpicked minions. Now, for the first time, a foreign minister not only rivalled the prime minister in personal popularity but also represented the faction with the heaviest presence in the party.

Vajpayee had often thought of Prime Minister Morarji Desai as rigid, prickly, self-righteous. Foreign policy had never been among Morarjibhai’s chief interests. Two facets of his cut-and-dried personality began to affect India’s foreign policy. One was his Gandhian view of India’s position in the world – as a moral and civilizational entity, rather than in strategic or geopolitical terms. The other was his Gujarati instinct for business, shaped during his years in Bombay, the commercial capital. Both these traits bred a deep suspicion of the USSR, India’s closest ally; the second one meant a slight gravitation towards the other pole, the USA, with whom relations had been frosty since the 1971 war. It became crucial for Vajpayee and Desai to evolve a working relationship.

Unlike Morarji Desai, Vajpayee had evinced a keen interest in foreign relations. But his approach so far had been mostly instrumentalist, ultranationalistic, xenophobic even. The Jan Sangh had always been decidedly anti-USSR and anti-Pakistan, and they had turned anti-USA after 1971. Predictably, the CIA profiled the incoming foreign minister as someone who had ‘consistently favoured a hardline in foreign policy, and has not been particularly friendly to the great powers’.

Fortunately, both Desai and Vajpayee chose to be flexible enough to accommodate reality in their new jobs. On his first day in office, Vajpayee arrived punctually at the Ministry of External Affairs – housed in the South Block. The foreign secretary Jagat Mehta showed him around. Noticing that a portrait of Nehru he had seen hanging in the corridor on previous visits to the MEA had been removed, Vajpayee ordered it reinstated: ‘Where has it gone? I want it back.’ Mehta had earlier driven to the foreign minister’s house, ‘somewhat nervous’ of whether he was going to be fired. He was relieved to find Vajpayee ‘gratifyingly reassuring’, asking him to continue. The new boss ‘perked up his ears and show[ed] some non-verbal form of displeasure’ only when Mehta suggested the new foreign minister seek his recommendation before important decisions were finalized.

In a meeting with senior MEA officers, Vajpayee emphasized professionalism. Civil servants were expected to serve the government of the day, always keeping long-term interests in mind; they ought not hesitate or inhibit themselves in expressing honest opinions. The officers were relieved that ‘we were not going to lurch to a Jan Sangh foreign policy!’

That said, some of his early choices rankled with the MEA staff. He chose Ashok Mubayi from the Administrative Service as his private secretary, rather than a Foreign Service officer who would have better fielded liaison. A young foreign service recruit assisting Mehta recalled: ‘Normally private secretaries are agile, always running around, but he was fat, laid-back, more like a Foreign Minister himself … quite an operator!’

A more contentious matter was Vajpayee’s desire to promote the use of Hindi at the MEA, where most officials were ‘habituated to working and even thinking in English’. While the many South Indian staff at the MEA were assured they would never be discriminated against for their lack of Hindi proficiency, all agreements with foreign countries began to be typed out in both Hindi and English. Indian missions abroad were issued directives to progressively increase the use of Hindi. To flatter the foreign minister, the ambassador in Afghanistan started sending cipher messages in Roman Hindi.

Vajpayee, for his part, spoke in Hindi to all foreign visitors whose mother tongue was not English (since English too would have to be translated). Before long, he informed the Lok Sabha of his dream to deliver his maiden speech at the UN in Hindi. He would often point out that Hindi was, after all, the language of ‘one-tenth of the humanity’.

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The last week of April 1977 brought Vajpayee’s first significant international visitor, the Russian foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. Prior to his visit, Moscow had tactfully withdrawn several KGB agents from its embassy and consulates in India. They also tried to convince New Delhi that the Indo-Soviet relationship was basically bilateral and, as such, ‘not an impediment to the establishment of equally good relations with the West’. Gestures by the Vajpayee–Desai duo, such as retaining the Indian ambassador in Moscow, I. K. Gujral – a leftist Congressman with whom Vajpayee had crossed swords in Rajya Sabha in the mid-1960s – also signalled that India did not want a radical break.

Even so, on his way to Delhi, Gromyko appeared ‘visibly worried’ about the kind of reception he might receive. Receiving him at the airport, brass bands playing in the background, Vajpayee shook his hand warmly and put him at ease. They signed four new economic agreements, and a joint communique issued at the end reiterated the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty. Gromyko claimed that he had never felt more at home with Indian leaders. Vajpayee was complimented for conducting the negotiations ‘with consummate skill’.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan sent his special envoy too. Agha Shahi arrived with the apparent aim of exploring the possibilities of a Third World Summit (to which India responded coldly), but in reality to get a feel of whether the new government was serious about improving relations. He too went back relieved about a basic continuity in India’s foreign policy. On 29 April, at a reception held for Hafeez Jalandhari – famed for penning the national anthem of Pakistan – Vajpayee moved the audience to tears: ‘Main nahin kehta deewaar gira di jaa sakti hain par kyon na ek-do eentein khiska di jaayen … taank-jhaank toh ho’. The Jan Sanghi remarked on the government’s desire to ‘do its best to encourage promotion’ of Urdu; after all it was ‘purely an Indian language and the Government would like the people to read and write it’. In June, when a Pakistani aircraft strayed into Indian airspace due to bad weather, it was allowed to land at Amritsar; the pilot was given fuel and food and cordially sent back.

After the coup in Pakistan on the morning of 5 July, in which the military chief, General Zia-ul-Haq, deposed Prime Minister Bhutto, Vajpayee refused to comment on the ‘internal affairs of Pakistan’. Whether or not Pakistan wanted a democracy was ‘for the people of Pakistan to decide’. A grateful General Zia assured India that Pakistan would continue to abide by the Simla Agreement.

Friends and foes alike were startled by Vajpayee’s U-turn on Tibet, whose sovereignty he had once passionately advocated. Fifteen years after the Indo-China war, both countries seemed keen on rapprochement. In 1976, the two sides had restored ambassadorial relations. China interpreted the Indian election results as a setback for the Soviets and hoped for a shift in India’s foreign policy. Vajpayee saw improved relations with the northern neighbour as a way to gain more leverage with both the US and the USSR. It would also reassure India’s smaller neighbours – each of whom had with time grown friendly with China – of its commitment to a stable South Asia. At the same time, this had to be pursued slowly and discreetly to avoid causing undue alarm to the Soviets.

To begin with, the new foreign minister emphasized that ‘India considers Tibet a part of China and that Tibetan refugees in India would not be allowed to indulge in any political activity’, shattering the hopes of over 100,000 Tibetan refugees. He telephoned a foreign affairs expert, a friend, to rebuke him for writing an op-ed in a Hindi newspaper calling out this incongruency. But some of Janata’s cabinet ministers – such as the industries minister, George Fernandes, as well as the organization’s men – continued to publicly sympathize with the Tibetans, embarrassing the Vajpayee–Desai duo.

Contradictions notwithstanding, idealism shone through the Janata government’s early months. Desai’s cabinet was on the whole a vast improvement over Indira Gandhi’s. Cabinet meetings were ‘the secretaries’ delight, with the agenda, however comprehensive, within the time limit which was often one hour. The ministers were never denied their say, even when the clownish and irrepressible Raj Narain held forth philosophically on topics that did not concern him’. Files moved faster: a businessman was ‘able to push through his papers to a happy end in a month – almost a miracle if one knows one’s Delhi’.

Frustrated by the firsthand taste of red tapism, Vajpayee initiated basic reforms in his ministry. He paid incognito visits to the regional passport offices to acquaint himself with the knotty procedure for obtaining a passport, and the corruption and delays involved. He assured the Haj Committee of Bombay and Gulf migrants of Kerala that they would not be harassed. He even unsuccessfully flirted with the idea of doing away with police verification from the passport process.

Gradually, there emerged a pattern of how the first-time minister operated. While Vajpayee dealt with broad contours of foreign policy, he left his MEA officials to do ‘much of the talking on more specific issues’. As per one assessment, Vajpayee contributed ‘no little political courage and ability, and also had the virtue of recognising his limitations in terms of knowledge and experience of foreign affairs. Jagat Mehta contributed the latter and also formulated policy, which was on the whole successful’.

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Almost immediately after the RSS was unbanned on 22 March, the shakhas reappeared – for the first time in twenty-one months. When Balasaheb Deoras came to Delhi a few weeks later, he was given a heroic welcome at the railway station, with the new foreign minister himself turning up to garland the RSS chief. Vajpayee was gently rebuked by Morarjibhai. But the prime minister surreptitiously met Deoras himself, and from then on they occasionally exchanged notes on major developments.

In the last week of April 1977, the Jan Sangh working committee met to formally dissolve the party and merge it with Janata. Vajpayee and Advani were roasted for the faction’s under-representation in the portfolio distribution and the organization, despite faring the best in the elections. They were mollified only after being assured of more opportunities in the near future.

Soon the Janata government, in its first major display of opportunism, dissolved ten state assemblies and called for fresh polls. Jayaprakash Narayan blessed the decision, reasoning that the state governments should align with the new central government. The centre wanted to change the complexion of these assemblies so Janata could instal its own nominee as president in the Rashtrapati Bhavan. This was also intended to quell resentment over ministerial posts; some of the crowd would get accommodated, provided Janata won, in the state ministries. The hurly-burly of ticket distribution and campaigning would promote unity, welding the warring factions into a united whole.

The Emergency excesses of Mrs Gandhi remained the principal issue, and Vajpayee deemed the elections the ‘second step towards JP’s peaceful revolution’. The campaign could be summarized by an incident in Bihar. Driving along a dusty road in the scorching June heat, Vajpayee stopped near a roadside well to drink water from the bucket of a farm labourer. He asked the man which party he would vote for. ‘Janata,’ came the reply. Why? ‘If we have given kurta should we not give dhoti along with it?’

In seven out of ten states, Janata returned with a majority. The former Bharatiya Lok Dal and Jan Sangh groups now came to an understanding that excluded other constituents: Jan Sangh grabbed chief ministerships in three states (Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan) and the Metropolitan Council of Delhi; the BLD took the remaining four (Haryana, UP, Bihar, Orissa), where Jan Sangh members were included in the cabinets.

Planned and speedily executed by Charan Singh and Nanaji Deshmukh, this operation presented exactly the kind of moment for which the RSS had asked the latter to decline a plum cabinet portfolio. One profile hailed Nanaji as the ‘kingmaker much as Kamaraj Nadar was in the Congress party of the 1960s’. On his part Charan Singh, with the help of the Jan Sangh faction, successfully outmanoeuvred the Party President Chandra Shekhar, who was keen to project his own protégé in Uttar Pradesh for the top job; the socialists too were denied the spoils of power.

Instead of fostering coherence and unity in the new party, group loyalties hardened as the state governments formed. For a while, though, Jan Sangh’s strategy of backing Morarji Desai at the centre and Charan Singh in the states lent Janata an equilibrium of sorts.

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With some stability at home, Vajpayee and Morarji Desai proceeded down one of the important planks of their foreign policy: cultivating the neighbours. During July to September 1977, the foreign minister made largely successful trips to Afghanistan, Bhutan and Nepal. While in Afghanistan he visited the Bamiyan Valley, 230 kilometres north-west of Kabul, home to two gigantic, sandstone-hewn statues of the Buddha – one of them the tallest in the world. An Indian conservation team had been working on the site for a few years, and Vajpayee’s task was to formally hand it back to the Afghans.

In Kathmandu Vajpayee embarrassed the young king by touching his feet. ‘Your Excellency, it is perhaps against the norms of diplomacy,’ the thirty-two-year-old maharaja said. The palace later instructed journalists to not publish the photo. Nepal’s principal concern was its national sovereignty: after India annexed another Himalayan kingdom, Sikkim, in February 1975, Nepal feared Indian designs over itself. This was further complicated by the demand from some Janata leaders for the release from prison of the pro-democracy campaigner (and the former prime minister) B. P. Koirala. Vajpayee assured Nepal of an ‘equal and sovereign’ treatment, though the new Indo-Nepalese treaty on trade and transit could not be finalized during his visit.

Mrs Gandhi had turned her back on Bangladesh after Mujibur Rahman’s assassination in 1975. But the Janata government decided to extend their good-neighbour policy through negotiations on the Ganga water-sharing agreement. In November 1977, the two sides inked the treaty for five years, giving Bangladesh what the Indian prime minister described as ‘its legitimate share plus five per cent’. Vajpayee was not required to visit Dhaka immediately, as the negotiations fell mainly under the domain of the agriculture ministry.

Between these well-publicized trips to the neighbourhood, Vajpayee was also part of a covert diplomatic initiative undertaken by his boss. On the day he was sworn in, Morarji Desai had announced at a press conference that he would consider establishing full diplomatic relations with Israel. Two hours later at the Janata victory rally, Vajpayee – who was yet to be assigned the MEA portfolio – repudiated him. In all likelihood, the two had had a chat between the two events. For though both Desai and Vajpayee had a soft corner for Israel, they decided to prolong the status quo: India was heavily dependent on Arab oil, and Janata did not want to squander the goodwill it had recently garnered from Muslim voters.

On the afternoon of 14 August, Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, alighted in New Delhi. He was travelling under a fake name and had disguised himself with dark glasses and a large straw hat. He was put up at a private residence in south Delhi’s Safdarjung Enclave. Dayan’s chief aim was to advance talks on establishing diplomatic relations between India and Israel. As a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, India had some clout among the non-aligned nations. At the very least, Dayan was hoping to receive India’s backing for the Israel–Egypt peace plans in the NAM, neutralizing India’s longstanding support to the Arabs.

The meeting had been arranged with the help of two friends – an Indian and an Israeli – who had earlier met fortuitously in London ‘while undergoing therapy at a weight management centre’. That evening Desai met Dayan at a poorly furnished government house, joined by Vajpayee who was informed by the prime minister after Dayan landed up. At India’s request, the meeting was kept top secret. No other cabinet minister, not even Foreign Secretary Mehta, got a whiff of it. Morarji Desai thought that if the news of Dayan’s visit became public, the Janata government would collapse. ‘Atal was terrified,’ the boss updated Gujral, the ambassador to the USSR, a few months later. ‘I told him not to worry.

Vajpayee – who had for two decades advocated for diplomatic relations with Israel – spoke only when required. The Indian prime minister did most of the talking, with occasional protestations from the one-eyed Israeli foreign minister (a former military man who had lost his left eye in the Second World War). Desai, trying to sound like a statesman, brought up his meeting with the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and proposed that while everyone accepted the founding of Israel, the only solution was to ‘establish a Palestinian state in the Arab territories which you will evacuate’. Dayan took issue with the two-state formula: the ‘solution to Arab refugees was to settle them in the lands where they dwelt at present’.

Desai declined the idea of establishing diplomatic relations with Israel – or even a consulate in Delhi. Only Bombay had an Israeli consulate; India had no diplomatic presence in Israel whatsoever. Both Vajpayee and Desai argued that such a step would be misinterpreted, leading to ‘unnecessary complications in diplomatic relations with West Asia’. Ideally Nehru should have done this in 1950 (soon after the Zionist state was founded), Desai said, but now India could establish full-fledged relations only after peace came to the region. He suggested Dayan meet Vajpayee during the conferences in the US and Europe but refused to risk sending his foreign minister, formally or secretly, to his country. He was relieved that Vajpayee ‘did not say anything to give a different impression to Dayan’.

Dayan wrote in his memoir: ‘Now, when his help was needed on behalf of peace, he could do nothing, since he had no diplomatic relationship with Israel, and once peace was attained, and India were to establish such relations, its help would no longer be necessary.’ This awkward meeting was a sign that for all its ambitions, Janata did not have the mandate or confidence to revamp India’s foreign policy. Having failed in his mission, an annoyed Moshe Dayan refused the memento – an antique piece of silver tableware – gifted by his hosts. He flew out mocking India’s poverty, cursing its rulers’ moral cowardice.

*****Abhishek Choudhary Believer's Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right's Path to Power, 1977–2018 Picador India/ the New India Foundation, Pan Macmillan Publishing India, 2025. Hb. Pp. 452

Believer’s Dilemma concludes Abhishek Choudhary’s landmark two-part study of Atal Behari Vajpayee (1924–2018), the RSS propagandist who established himself as an imaginative moderate, drawing the Hindu Right from the fringes to displace Congress as the natural party of power.

This magisterial second volume combines new archival documents with revealing interviews to present an unsentimental history of India’s ongoing political moment, beginning with the short-lived Janata coalition and the Vajpayee–Morarji Desai tussle to steer foreign policy; Mrs Gandhi’s ad-hocism in Assam, Punjab and Kashmir; Rajiv’s cynical turn toward the Hindu vote; Vajpayee’s failure to secularize the newborn BJP; the Sangh Parivar’s meticulous plan to raze the Babri, and much more. Choudhary traces these machinations of the previous half-century to cast fresh light on major events from Vajpayee’s term in office (1998–2004), including his desperation to conduct nuclear tests; his cold pragmatism and heartbreak in negotiating with Pakistan and China; his wide range of emotional strengths, which allowed him to manage an unwieldy thirteen-party coalition and turn India into a multi-party democracy; his role in propping India up as a potential superpower and embedding capitalist aspiration into its socio-political imagination.

According to historian, Ramachandra Guha, this is “the finest biography of an Indian prime minister that I have read”.

Mapping the evolution of the Sangh Parivar, this book reveals a deeper pattern in Vajpayee’s character: his reflexive loyalty to his ideological family in moments of crisis – be it the 1983 Assam riots, the 1992 Babri aftermath, 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 earlier helped seed.

A decade in the making, Believer’s Dilemma is an original and psychologically insightful take on the Hindu Right and its first prime minister.

Abhishek Choudhary studied economics in Delhi and Chennai, followed by brief stints in nonprofits and journalism. He was awarded the NIF Fellowship in 2017 to research former prime minister Vajpayee's life. During the winter of 2021–22, he was a scholar-in-residence at the International Centre Goa. He lives in Delhi.