Book extract - Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right 1924-1977

A man of unusual gifts and dangerously consequential flaws, Atal Behari Lal Vajpayee was the Hindu Right’s most glamorized and enigmatic face until now. Drawing on a natural talent to pull in the crowds with his eloquence, he elevated his physically frail and academically mediocre self to become a powerful spokesperson of historical victimhood.

Abhishek Choudhary sets out to prove that Vajpayee was far more critical to the project of Hinduizing India than is commonly understood. He uncovers how Vajpayee’s early life, of which we know shockingly little, lies at the heart of his political character: essentially conservative yet curious and conciliatory, detached yet quietly ambitious. Weaving previously unseen documents with revealing interviews, Choudhary layers this definitive biography with details of Vajpayee’s underground activities in the wake of Gandhi’s assassination; his early obsession with foreign policy; the shock from the premature deaths of his parents; his tortuous private life and maudlin poetry; his key role in the SVD coalition experiment; his defence of the Sangh Parivar inside the parliament and his averments and deferments outside. In so doing, this extraordinary debut revises several lazy myths and false binaries that have come to dominate Indian political discourse. The sympathy of Congress conservatives and Hindi intelligentsia for the RSS, Patel’s own extended ambiguity, Nehru’s innate conviction that East Pakistan would merge back with India, Indira Gandhi’s fleet-footed attack on the Jan Sangh’s finances and electoral chances, the foolish fantasies of JP’s Total Revolution and the Sangh Parivar’s dubious heroism in the Emergency are also revisited to reveal the complexity of India’s democracy.

The first of a two-volume study, Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right is a well-lauded original portrait of Hindutva’s first prime minister. It was the Winner of the 2023 Tata Literature Live! First Book Award and Shortlisted for the 2023 Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize

Abhishek Choudhary studied economics in Delhi and Chennai, and has worked since 2010 in development (Pratham, IGC-Bihar) and journalism (Governance Now, Hoot, Newslaundry). His writing has appeared in a range of publications, including Anandabazar Patrika, Caravan, Deccan Herald, EPW, Himal Southasian, HuffPost India and Indian Express. He was awarded the New India Foundation fellowship in 2017 to research Vajpayee's life. During the winter of 2021-22, he was a scholar-in-residence at the International Centre Goa

‘The finest biography of an Indian prime minister that I have read’ – Ramachandra Guha, author of India After Gandhi: A History

‘A real achievement, an instant classic and a total triumph’ – Shruti Kapila, Professor of History and Politics, University of Cambridge and author of Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age

‘Doubles as a history of Hindu supremacism; it won’t be bettered for a long time’ – Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present

‘Extraordinary and unputdownable. This is biography done right’ – Sonia Faleiro, author of The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing

‘A book to read for understanding the trajectory of Hindutva – and therefore of India’ --Christophe Jaffrelot, author of Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy

‘A compelling portrait of India’s first major national leader from the Right’ -- Niraja Gopal Jayal, Avantha Chair and Professor of Politics, King’s College London and co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Politics in India

‘Attractively written ... Choudhary skilfully deciphers the enigma of Vajpayee and the deep roots of his ideological commitments’ -- Sugata Bose, Gardiner Professor of History, Harvard University and author of His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire

‘A thoroughly researched study of Vajpayee, who, far more than other Hindu nationalist figures, legitimized their participation in India’s political life’ --- Walter K. Andersen, co-author of The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism

The following extract has been taken with permission from the publishers.

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In the last week of August 1975, Sheikh Abdullah made an undisclosed trip to Delhi to meet Mrs Gandhi. She had brought him in to mediate with JP. While JP did not mind endorsing the government’s economic programme, he was ‘not prepared to tolerate Mrs. Gandhi’s continued leadership of the country’. 

Unfortunately, JP’s core team also included Vajpayee, whose relationship with Abdullah had often been frosty. There is no record of whether Abdullah personally visited AIIMS, but Vajpayee’s tepid response to the J&K chief minister was that he ‘would have to consult his party’. To capitulate would have deprived them of their martyrdom, which could fetch political dividends in the future. Mrs Gandhi shelved the reconciliation. 

The government was irked by two of Vajpayee’s other acts of confrontation. In mid-September, he had communicated to the Karnataka High Court his inability to be present in Bangalore due to ill health. No less an aggravation for Mrs Gandhi was that M. C. Chagla – the celebrated Bombay lawyer and her ex-cabinet colleague – had agreed to represent him. The case was at the heart of the Emergency, and its verdict would have repercussions across the country.

Aware that his letters were being intercepted, Vajpayee did away with envelopes altogether. He began to use postcards ‘because it costs less, [faces] less trouble passing the censor’. He wrote letters in a tone stiffer than usual, for instance, addressing Appa as ‘Dear Dr. Ghatate’, with nothing more than essential facts for his ongoing hearing in Bangalore. Occasionally, though, Vajpayee managed to smuggle out messages and letters to underground journals. The most popular of these was Janvaani – People’s Voice. One of his visitors recalled pretending to use the toilet in his AIIMS ward to collect Vajpayee’s letter tucked into a corner there. 

The external intelligence wing R&AW was closely monitoring all underground journals and, in all probability, word about his bylines had reached the PMO. Struggling to crush the underground movement, the government ordered that Vajpayee be ‘speedily moved’ from AIIMS to Tihar jail. This was averted, as his operation was still due. Some of Mrs Gandhi’s advisors also discouraged her from sending an ailing VIP political prisoner to jail at a time when smugglers and criminals lodged at Tihar were out on bail citing health excuses. 

The day before he was to be operated upon, Vajpayee was granted a fifteen-day parole inside the hospital – meaning he would ‘at least nominally not be in GoI custody’. At the same time, while he was being kept on traction, there was no staff ‘to even ask for a glass of water’.29 On 16 November, he had a complicated surgery to remove a disc from his spine. It began at 7:30 in the morning and continued until 2 in the afternoon. The operation was successful. JP was also admitted at AIIMS, but Vajpayee’s post-operative condition was not good enough to allow a meeting between them. None of this ever made it to the press. 

            The parole was extended, but Vajpayee was placed under house arrest. When he returned home after four months, he was welcomed back at 1 Ferozeshah Road by Delhi Police constables. They maintained a register, and the kaidi-kavirai was amused to see his dog’s name included in the list too. The terms of parole imposed restrictions he did not like: he could not take part in any political activity, overt or underground; he could not use a phone. Few old friends dared to visit; the vegetable vendors stayed away from the house; even the neighbourhood taxi drivers were reluctant to ferry the Kauls for fear of being interrogated by the police. Vajpayee’s schoolgoing daughter Gunnu never forgot the humiliation of being ‘treated as untouchables’. 

Nourished by warmth and care at home, by mid-December 1975 he was able to ‘move about a bit’. But for Vajpayee the political beast, life was otherwise depressing. Taking stock in a birthday poem, he wrote that ‘the sun in the evening of my life has decided to set ... Words are devoid of meaning ... What was music once is now scattered noise.’ Birjan Kaul, who had to bear the ignominy of living under restriction for no fault of his own, understood the dilemmas of his wife’s lover rather well. On the afternoon of 25 December, when a mutual friend came with a box of sweets to wish Vajpayee on his birthday, Kaul saheb took the visitor aside to treat him to a classic story: 

Once there lived a lion in a jungle. He had three servants – a cow, a jackal, and a monkey. One day, in a fit of temper, the lion killed and devoured the cow. Thereafter, the lion asked the jackal to tell him if his breath smelled fine. The jackal said his breath had the foul smell of meat. This irritated the lion so much that he then killed the jackal, and ate him too. He then he asked the monkey whether his breath still smelled foul. A shrewd judge of situations, the monkey excused himself: ‘Sir, I just caught a cold, the zukaam has hampered my sense of smell.’ 

That’s Atalji’s dilemma: he cannot speak, and he cannot remain silent. If he speaks, he will be put in jail – which in his present health he can’t afford. But if he stays quiet for too long, he will lose whatever worth he has left as a politician. 

Vajpayee’s birthday was a significant date for another reason. The Sarvodaya leader (and JP’s colleague), Vinoba Bhave, who Mrs Gandhi occasionally sought out, was to break his maun vrat – vow of silence – that day. Opposition leaders who had approached him, hoping the Gandhian would rebuke the prime minister to end the Emergency, were told: ‘Wait till the 25th of December.’ This long list included the RSS chief Deoras. Between August and December 1975, Deoras had written two letters each to the prime minister and the home minister K. B. Reddy from his lodge in Pune’s Yerawada jail. In his childlike handwriting, a chastised Deoras had beseeched them to unban the RSS, offering his organization’s services to the government. 

Indira Gandhi had ignored Golwalkar’s advances in the past, and she did not deem the present RSS chief worthy of a response.36 Disappointed, Deoras shot off a letter in the second week of January 1976 to Vinoba Bhave, with whom he had a slight acquaintance. He complained that the arrests of his innocent volunteers and full-timers were ‘still continuing’. Once again no reply came forth. On hearing that the prime minister was to meet Bhave at his ashram in Wardha on 24 February, the RSS chief sent the acharya a second letter, begging him ‘to do your best to remove the wrong impressions the PM is carrying about the Sangh’. No response.

Why were the RSS chief’s multiple letters to Mrs Gandhi, Reddy, Bhave (also apparently to some of Sanjay Gandhi’s lackeys) all ignored? It had to do with the embedded ambiguity in the RSS’s character, further amplified during the Emergency. Each of them knew that many of  Deoras’s claims in his letters – for example that the Sangh Parivar had not participated in the JP movement – were lies. It was common knowledge that the RSS– Jan Sangh provided shock troops for the Lok Sangharsh Samiti. 

Formed the day before Emergency was imposed, the LSS was now coordinating its activities underground. With Morarji Desai under arrest, for the first few weeks Nanaji was the chief coordinator of the underground. He travelled across the country, with the party’s Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy acting as his driver. Nanaji had given up his dhoti-kurta for a grey safari suit and dyed his greying hair black, taking on the appearance of an upstart businessman. Swamy pretended to be a Sikh (the most common disguise among RSS–Jan Sangh folk) from Tamil Nadu who could awkwardly mumble a few lines in his Tamil-tinged Punjabi. After Nanaji was surprised by a raid at his South Delhi hideout in late July 1975 and jailed, his place was immediately occupied by Congress (O) leader Ravindra Verma. After Verma was caught at a Bombay bus stop in December, the charge was taken by Dattopant Thengadi until he too was caught. 

The underground thrived in the early months because the RSS pracharaks, full-timers, were trained for exactly such an event. There being no proper documentation of their identities, they were mostly obscure faces who could hide in a crowd or in a fellow volunteer’s home as a relative. The more popular among them were reshuffled. Most of them remained at large. In some cases, they were also helped by sympathizing police and intelligence officers. 

Few things about the Emergency depressed Vajpayee as much as the deaths of partymen in jail or hiding underground, some of whom were close friends. He had received news of the death of Baban Kulkarni, the Maharashtra Jan Sangh secretary, while he was awaiting surgery at AIIMS. He sent a condolence letter to Kulkarni’s wife, which – possibly withheld by the censors – never reached her. He cried his heart out to Advani: ‘Sometimes it seems unbelievable that I would not get to see Babanrao on my next Bombay trip; that he would never again be around with his cheerful face or quick-witted suggestions.’ ‘Deeply shocked’ by the premature death of another old colleague, he wrote to a mutual friend: ‘How fragile our bodies are, how fleeting this life.’

Abhishek Choudhary Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right 1924-1977 Picador India and New India Foundation, 2023, rpt. 2024. Pb. Pp. 472 Rs. 650