A new biography of Atal Bihari Vajpayee tries to correct misconceptions and raise eyebrows

Publishers cannot seem to get enough of India’s former Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924-2018), who was a co-founder of the Bharatiya Janata Party and stalwart of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). After Penguin published Shakti Sinha’s book Vajpayee: The Man, The Method, The Legacy: The Years That Changed India (2020), and Juggernaut came out with Sagarika Ghose’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee (2021), Picador has released Abhishek Choudhary’s book Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right (1924-1977).

Choudhary, who has worked in development and journalism, wrote this book with funding from the New India Foundation that awards fellowships to writers working on the history of independent India. In the preface, he writes, “My book is an assessment of Vajpayee’s life, not a tribute. As such, one should read it as a detached, unsentimental (not to say insensitive) take on his career and moral character.” Does he deliver what he promises? Read and decide.

You must know, however, that this book is only the first part of a two-volume study undertaken by Choudhary.The book is divided into three sections: “A Hindu Soul Ripens (1924-1953)”, “Between the Alleged Assassinations (1953-68)”, and “In the Shadow of Shrimati Gandhi (1968-77).” Vajpayee’s life after this will be covered in the second part.

This book would be of interest to those who want to know about Vajpayee’s childhood and adolescence, and the experiences that shaped his worldview as a newspaper editor, political worker, orator, leader, and poet. It would also speak to those who are curious about how Vajpayee – a boy from Bateshwar – landed up in Delhi, and his equation with politicians like Deendayal Upadhyaya, Syama Prasad Mukherjee, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

Without learning about Vajpayee’s training with the RSS, his role in the Jan Sangh, his interventions in parliament as a member of the opposition, and his response to the Emergency, it is difficult to appreciate how he came to be “the Hindu Right’s most glamorized and enigmatic face until now”. Choudhary tries earnestly to fill in that gap.

Choudhary sets himself up as a fact-checker though he also wants to be an opinion maker. He starts off by throwing shade at Ghose, saying that her book contains factual errors. He notes, “Like many others before her, a celebrity journalist who recently published a biography, based largely on secondary sources, insists that Vajpayee ‘hero-worshipped’ Nehru.”

Soon after this, Choudhary goes on to call out Vinay Sitapati, author of the book Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi (2020) that is published by Penguin. Choudhary states, “In a clumsy attempt to unveil new information on his private life, another recent book by an academic (Sitapati) makes the stunningly misleading claim that Vajpayee’s relationship with Rajkumari Kaul – his partner and the mother of their love child – was primarily ‘intellectual’.”

Every smirk and side-eye, characteristic of Choudhary’s writing style, make this book entertaining but also prove that he is far from detached when it comes to the material that he is working with. Fact and opinion mingle freely. It is clear that Choudhary is not simply excavating archives and presenting information. He has a standpoint, and commentary.

While reading the chapter titled “The Husband and the Lover”, you might wonder if you are in the middle of a biography or a primetime family drama. Choudhary writes about Vajpayee’s private life as a love triangle involving Brijmohan Nath Kaul, Rajkumari Haksar and Vajpayee himself. He calls Vajpayee “a lonely, desolate man-child” who struggled with the insistence of the RSS on celibacy for full-time pracharaks so that they could “channel their sexual energy into the selfless task of consolidating Hindus into a political unit”.

Though this book is not hagiographical, it is hard to characterize it as an objective account as it appears to give credence to speculation to spice things up. Choudhary writes, “Some Ramjas (the college where Kaul taught philosophy) alumni close to him speculated that Kaul saheb might have an alternative sexual orientation. After all, it was uncommon in the 1950s to have only one child. Birjan (short for Brijmohan) Kaul was barely in his early forties when his wife met Vajpayee.” The author adds, “Someone else in his position – handsome, popular, well settled in his career – might have walked out of the marriage to find another partner.”

Choudhary has a knack for spotting drama and playing it up. Screenwriters digging into this book for a web series would be charmed by his sense of humour, thanks to the incidents that he uses to shine a light on Vajpayee’s persona. He writes, for instance, about the time when Vajpayee’s pun on Railway Minister Jagjivan Ram’s name made the Lok Sabha “burst into laughter” during a discussion on the Railway Budget in 1958. Referring to frequent accidents, Vajpayee said that passengers buying railways tickets knew that they might have to bid goodbye to “jag” (world) and “jivan” (life), so they travelled with Ram’s name on their lips.

The wordsmith met his match in Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam founder CN Annadurai. When Vajpayee pushed for Hindi to become a link language for the people of India, Annadurai asked Vajpayee to learn Tamil and familiarize himself with Tamil classics. Annadurai spoke of his vision for a future India where his own grandchildren would use Hindi to communicate and Vajpayee’s grandchildren would speak Tamil. He also suggested that Vajpayee could make this happen by getting married to a woman from a language group other than Hindi.

Choudhary’s book deserves to be read not only for laughs but also for his serious engagement with how Vajpayee made a place for himself in the Sangh Parivar and in the hearts of his political adversaries. That might be the key to unlocking how the same person is hailed by some for his contributions to the India-Pakistan peace process and reviled by others for fanning the flames of Hindu-Muslim discord in India. Choudhary is not interested in portraying him as either a hero or a villain. He merely wants to tell an engaging story.

Chintan Girish Modi is a journalist, writer and educator who tweets @chintanwriting

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