Barmer had suffered devastating floods in 2006, and as the MP representing the constituency, I was involved in relief operations. Pranab Mukherjee, as Defence Minister in the United Progressive Alliance government, had accompanied Sonia Gandhi, then Congress president, for a survey to take stock of the operations. A district administration briefing was planned in Barmer for them, and as soon as they arrived Ms. Gandhi told me, in earshot of mediapersons, “Your MLA has behaved very badly with me.” Unaware of what had happened, I nevertheless apologised with folded hands “on behalf of everyone”, including the MLA, who like me belonged to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). That little apology made it to a tiny news story, which in turn reached Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then already in retirement from politics. He sent me a thank you message, the first and only one I received from him, “for maintaining Indian traditions, culture and our dignity”.
A dignified man
It was this civility and dignity that marked Vajpayee’s life and politics, and which seems completely at odds with the prevailing political culture of today. His endearing manner, display of affection and quality of giving earned him respect all around, including from the Opposition. His easy manner was reflected in his ready smile and a wink, and it kept debates from escalating into confrontation. His mannerisms, including his long pauses, were easy to interpret as earnest. Yet, he would not shirk from the toughest decisions — in calls he took for India, he revealed the steel in him that his amiable persona often cloaked. There were two decisions that he took during his prime ministership (1998-2004) that helped change India completely; they still define India today. In taking them he demonstrated the willingness to take the bull by the horns.
On May 11, 1998, India began a two-stage series of nuclear tests that changed the way the world perceived decision-making in New Delhi. To top it off, de facto nuclearisation was claimed as a policy, giving nightmares to economists and policymakers. Vajpayee had factored it all in, including the likely course of Pakistan’s reactive tests and the effect of sanctions on both countries, before giving the green signal. From that moment, the global attitude towards India began to change, and it defined India’s rise.
The second decision has changed India internally — it was the launch of the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY). Unlike the much celebrated ‘Golden Quadrilateral’ and the expansion of other highways undertaken on his watch as Prime Minister, it is the PMGSY that has completely altered the lives of farmers in India’s far-flung villages and hamlets. For the first time they came to be connected to markets through a motorable road, thus bypassing middlemen who had always controlled access. Till date, it remains India’s only pure data-driven scheme, unalterable by political pressure. Both decisions were game-changers for India.
Early recognition
Vajpayee’s birth in Gwalior on December 25, 1924 to Krishna Devi and Krishna Bihari Vajpayee, and his subsequent upbringing and education are well documented. His early influences from Arya Samaj and then the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) are just as well known. His full-time commitment to the RSS, and subsequent secondment to the Jana Sangh, brought him in contact with Syama Prasad Mookerjee. The political graph was only upwards from there, bringing him appreciation from India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who prophesied that one day Vajpayee would lead the country. But before he became Prime Minister, Vajpayee cut his teeth as India’s first non-Congress External Affairs Minister (1977-79) in the Janata Party government, and provided a glimpse of his future direction.
By the time he became Foreign Minister, Pakistan had been defeated in war, divided into two, and was headed for another round of military rule. Despite all that, he launched persistent efforts with Pakistan, beginning with a visit to the neighbouring country. This was to remain the foreign policy theme through his tenure as Prime Minister. It drew from a realisation that India would never be able to earn its place under the sun unless it made peace with Pakistan.
But doing business with Pakistan was never easy. After the bitter rhetoric of the 1998 nuclear tests, there was the euphoria of the bus journey to Lahore in 1999. A little-known fact about the bus trip is that as it crossed the Radcliffe Line at Wagah, the Border Security Force was playing Daler Mehndi’s Punjabi pop hit ‘ Sade naal rahoge to aish karoge’ (If you stay with us, you’ll do well). Obviously it was a message lost on Pakistan, which thereafter responded with the intrusions in Kargil that led to a brief but bitter war that summer. Vajpayee held his nerve and didn’t waver despite adverse military conditions in the early days. Eventually India won a military victory as well global goodwill, a rare double achievement. Years later, I was the first Indian journalist to meet Nawaz Sharif, who had been Prime Minister of Pakistan during the Kargil war, when he was in exile in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He said: “Mr. Vajpayee is justified in feeling let down, we did let him down.”
Quietly purposeful
The humiliation at the end of the year in 1999, with the hijack of an Indian Airlines plane to Kandahar, was followed by another attempt to forge peace with Pakistan at the Agra Summit in July 2001. In between, in 2000, Vajpayee didn’t hesitate to let Pakistan know what he was about. Unknown to most, though it is murmured about occasionally and was even hinted at in the Pakistani media at that time, there was a devastating strike across the Line of Control (LoC) that lasted the longest, and till now accounts for the most casualties ever on the other side. All that the Indian raiding party left behind as evidence was an HMT watch, showing India time. Troops manning India’s posts said at the time that they had lost count of the number of ambulance sirens wailing across the LoC. Behind Vajpayee’s cherubic, charming exterior, there was indeed a spine, and he could take, and handle, ruthless policy decisions.
Vajpayee will ultimately be remembered for his oratory, the skill with which he summoned the apt word out of nowhere, his longish silences that would be suddenly broken by a beautifully worded sentence. His resignation speech of 1996 in the Lok Sabha stands out, as does his Srinagar address of April 2003 in which he held out the hand of friendship to Pakistan and which led to a sustained peace process. The 1996 speech had drama, anguish, integrity, hope, and sincerity that seeped through every word, every phrase. It remains a benchmark in speech-making, all of this before the era of PR speech-writers and social media platforms to take things viral. His speech went viral by the oldest known medium, word of mouth.
His command of words will always set him apart from other leaders. And nothing more so than his poetry. A couplet of his found pride of place in the BJP central office for the longest time. In translation: “With a small mind you cannot become great/ with a small heart you cannot stand tall.” It was a dictum he heeded by living and governing with a broad mind and a big heart.
Manvendra Singh is an MLA representing the Shiv constituency in Rajasthan’s Barmer district
