Sudheendra Kulkarni Sudheendra Kulkarni

The jury is still out on who is the best prime minister India has had so far. Our first prime minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who still holds the record of serving the longest term in office, had the unmatched aura of struggle and sacrifice before Independence. However, he committed costly mistakes- his mishandling of the Kashmir issue with Pakistan and the border dispute with China. India is yet to overcome these problems inherited from the Nehru era. Indira Gandhi? Well, she was indisputably the strongest prime minister India has had. However, she was also as much feared as admired by the people and politicians. The ruthlessness she displayed in splitting her own party and in establishing a variant of dictatorship during the Emergency severely impaired the development of healthy democracy in our democracy. Helped by a process already initiated by her father, she also changed the character of the Congress party permanently, enslaving it to sycophancy and dynastic rule that is evident in an even crasser manner today. It was also during the Indira years that corruption got institutionalised, corroding both democracy and development in India.

Vajpayee at a Janata Party rally in Chandni Chowk, 1979. Vajpayee at a Janata Party rally in Chandni Chowk, 1979.

Dr Manmohan Singh may have become the Prime Minister with the third longest tenure in office, but history will surely record that his premiership was accidental, determined by the constraints of a super prime minister who could not occupy the chair herself and whose son was not yet ready to do so.

Is Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then, the best prime minister in India's history? He would have been so, had he displayed greater firmness and foresight in stemming the carnage in Gujarat in 2002. It would also have ensured a renewed mandate for him and his party in the 2004 parliamentary elections. Nevertheless, this one damaging slip apart, he undoubtedly remains the prime minister who was most liked by the people of India. Indeed, the liking for him was evident long before he was sworn in as prime minister for the first time in 1996. "Atal Bihari Vajpayee is the best PM India has never had," was the refrain among many Indians during at least two previous decades. The fact that even today he enjoys high popularity ratings, as revealed by several surveys published in this magazine, is a pointer to some unique qualities and achievements that people associate with his name. His greatest personal achievement: he remained an ajaatshatru-a person with no enemies -something so difficult to accomplish in the often unscrupulously competitive arena of politics.

Vajpayee takes his dogs out for a walk, 1983. Vajpayee takes his dogs out for a walk, 1983.

But was it only his personal accomplishment? No. This personal trait also left a deep imprint on the kind of politics that ultimately reshaped the decade of the 1990s and the early part of the last decade. This period will be remembered as the time when consensusbased coalition politics came to be practised with sincerity for the first time in independent India. This became possible because the coalition was led by a charismatic personality who had a pan-Indian appeal of his own and enjoyed wide acceptability in the political establishment cutting across party barriers.

Vajpayee with RSS leaders, 1997. Vajpayee with RSS leaders, 1997.

Remarkably, Vajpayee's contribution to the culture of consensus in the 1990s can be seen both before and after he became prime minister. That he was on very friendly and cooperative terms with prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao is well known. However, the real test of his leadership came after the 1996 elections, when an ersatz advocacy of secularism by the Congress-led Opposition denied him an opportunity to form a stable government even though he had emerged as the leader of the single-largest party in the Lok Sabha with 161 seats. His premiership lasted only 13 days. In the contest between democracy and fake secularism, the latter won. (Contrast this with the Congress party's tally of only 145 in the 2004 polls, and yet the plank of secularism helped it cobble together a stable coalition.) Between 1996 and 1998, the Congress inflicted on the nation the pain of two most unrepresentative governments led by H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral, both of which it destabilised. Vajpayee turned this adversity into success by leading the BJP to a historic victory in the 1998 elections, and followed it up by forming a broad-based coalition of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Many of the parties that had earlier opposed the BJP now became its allies in the NDA. Without in any way belittling the venerable Jayaprakash Narayan, it can be said that Vajpayee's was an even greater achievement than the JP-led initiative of forming the Janata Party in 1997, which disintegrated within two years.

Vajpayee with Sonia Gandhi, 1999. Vajpayee with Sonia Gandhi, 1999.

True to its DNA, the Congress destabilised the Vajpayeeled NDA 1Government within 13 months. Vajpayee lost the trust vote by a solitary vote, which was itself questionable, and, unlike UPA 1, there was no cash-for-votes scandal then to ensure the Government's survival! I remember how heartbroken Atalji was on that day. After the vote, he emerged out of the Lok Sabha, and walked ever-so-slowly to his office in Room No. 10 in Parliament House, most probably wondering, "Is it the last time I'll be entering that room as prime minister?" As one of his aides, I was walking behind him. As soon as he entered the room, which was already filled with all his senior colleagues, he broke down. "Hum keval ek vote se haare, keval ek vote (We lost by just one vote, just one)," he said, tears running down his face. L.K. Advani, his most senior colleague, was equally distressed. He, aided by Pramod Mahajan, had worked several sleepless nights talking to various non-Congress and non-Left MPs for their support. However, that was the first and the last time I saw Vajpayee emoting sadness over the defeat. There was a lion in him, and it roared as the master orator hit the campaign trail for the 1999 parliamentary elections. "The Congress conspired to defeat my government with a single vote," he would say at rally after huge rally across the country. "Now, the single vote of each of you will ensure its victory." Win he did, and how. The people of India had taught a sobering lesson to the destabilisers.

Vajpayee 1999 with Nawaz Sharif (left) at the Wagah border during his bus trip to Pakistan, 1999. Vajpayee 1999 with Nawaz Sharif (left) at the Wagah border during his bus trip to Pakistan, 1999.

I must mention here three other ways in which Vajpayee left an imprint on the 1990s and beyond. His bus yatra to Lahore in February 1999 attested to his sincerity and commitment to normalising relations with Pakistan. In undertaking this peace mission, he was only continuing a courageous effort that he had begun when he was India's foreign minister in Morarji Desai's government in the late 1970s. I vividly remember that after prime minister Nawaz Sharif welcomed him on Pakistani soil, Mushahid Hussain, who was a minister in Sharif's government, whispered to me on the sidelines: "Vajpayeeji has real guts to come to Pakistan like this, and at this time." (Within a few months, after the Kargil fiasco, there was a military coup in Islamabad.)

At the reception hosted in his honour at the Governor's House in Lahore, Vajpayee recited his poem Jang na hone denge, which is about the resolve not to have any more wars between India and Pakistan. The poem was greeted with thunderous applause, and I could see tears at least in some Pakistani eyes.

Vajpayee with his cabinet Vajpayee with his cabinet

In May 2003, Karl Inderfurth, a key aide to president Bill Clinton, wrote an edit page article in The Hindu, saying, "Leaders of India and Pakistan are certain to win the Nobel Peace Prize if they succeed in implementing their new resolve to live in harmony." When I showed this article to Atalji, he said, in a somewhat dismissive tone, "Kya main yeh sab Nobel Peace Prize jeetne ke liye kar raha hoon? Bilkul nahin (Am I doing all this to win the Nobel Peace Prize? Not at all)." What he meant was that lasting peace between India and Pakistan was a reward bigger than anything else.

Some people think that Vajpayee's greatest achievement was that he made India a nuclear weapon state in 1999. He himself never thought so. Pokhran II was necessitated by a peculiar Non-Proliferation Treatyrelated geopolitical reality. He showed immense boldness in taking the step, but it did not in any way reduce his, and India's, commitment to the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. His true feelings and thoughts on this subject are better expressed in his poem Hiroshima Ki Peeda (Hiroshima's Pain), which he wrote after his visit to Ground Zero in Japan. He knew that India, along with all other N-club members, would someday have to eliminate its nuclear weapons. Fulfilling a temporary national security need cannot be regarded as a lasting achievement, especially since the step also, let's not forget, added to global insecurity.

According to me, a far greater achievement of prime minister Vajpayee was how he relentlessly sought to build national consensus and cooperation on socio-economic development. He wanted India to be ambitious in its development goals, commensurate with her needs and potential. At least four of his government's initiatives testify to this: the National Highway Development Project, Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the reforms in the telecom-IT sector. Unlike the frayed Centre-state relations today, even non-NDA leaders admitted (most of them privately and some even publicly) that he was best suited to accelerate reforms through Centre-state cooperation. I remember that at a chief ministers' conference, the chief minister of a Congress-ruled state, who is now the party's general secretary, said, "Atalji, please take the initiative in building consensus on power sector reforms between ruling and opposition parties in different states. You alone can do it."

Under Vajpayee's leadership, the National Development Council (NDC) and the Inter-State Council meetings were conducted with amazing bonhomie. In one NDC meeting, Chandrababu Naidu, former Andhra Pradesh chief minister, suggested that the development challenges before the nation were too big and complex and needed to be discussed threadbare in an informal setting between the leaders of the Centre and states. S.M. Krishna, who was then the chief minister of Karnataka, offered to host the conclave in his state. Atalji asked my senior colleague in the PMO, Dr Prodipto Ghosh, and me to make preparations for the first-ever retreat of prime minister and chief ministers. A high-profile Congress politician, who is now a minister in the UPA Government (he used to meet Atalji regularly), was an enthusiastic backer of this effort. It was felt that senior Opposition leaders in Parliament should also be invited to the conclave. Accordingly, Atalji asked me to meet Dr Manmohan Singh, who was then the leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha and for whom Vajpayee had great respect. Dr Singh was non-committal about his participation in the conclave. However, he warmly welcomed the proposed attempt to build all-party dialogue and consensus on national issues.



Never before in India has power been redefined by one leader in such a short time. In the universe of Vajpayee, it is never absolute, as it was in the days of the Dynasty. India's most popular politician, a position that is not subordinated to the mystique of the Family, handles power with a kind of sagely detachment.He uses renunciation as a means of reaffirmation. He withdraws only to make his indispensability an awesome reality to the enemies within, only to return with another confounding couplet. He is larger than the political size of his party. He is in it and above it, keeping his moral system beyond the grasp of realpolitik, even beyond the demands of his own party. He has changed the grammar of leadership...

The Great Unifier

By S. Prasannarajan, January 12, 2004

The venue we chose for the conclave was the impressive Infosys campus in Bangalore. Dr Ghosh and I visited the venue and interacted with Infosys leaders. A separate preparatory meeting was held in Vidhana Soudha with senior bureaucrats in Krishna's government. Sadly, the idea collapsed within a few days. Krishna informed Vajpayee that the Congress president had red-flagged the participation of her party's chief ministers in it. "What happened?" I later asked Krishna, one of the gentlest politicians that I have known. "You know, Madam?" His incomplete answer told the whole story.

The Vajpayee era has two important lessons, one for India and the other for the party he founded. Our country must shun dynastic rule and confrontational politics, and embrace the path of consensus-building and cooperation as an article of faith. As far as the BJP is concerned, it should learn from Atalji the supreme democratic virtue of being acceptable to all sections of our diverse society.

- The author was an aide to then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the PMO for six years.