'Vajpayee made Hindutva electable, respectable:' Abhishek Choudhary

Mint

3 days ago

The late Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee remains the first authentic 'hero" from the Hindu right who was respected across the political spectrum, believes writer Abhishek Choudhary, who recently published the second volume of his biography of the man.
Divided into four parts, Believer's Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right's Path to Power (1977-2018) examines the rise of the Hindu right from the end of the Emergency in 1977 to 2018, when Vajpayee died. Based on years of archival research, the book chronicles how the fall of institutions, mistakes made by the Congress Party, and fears of change were key to the ascent of Hindutva politics in India.
As Choudhary shows, Vajpayee played a key role in this phenomenon. Among his many contributions was helping the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) function as India's 'deep nation," which Choudhary describes as a parallel moral-political order shaping institutions without holding any formal power.
In an interview with Lounge, Choudhary spoke about his journey as a writer, why he doesn't like labelling his books as biography, and Vajpayee's role in bringing the Hindu right into the political mainstream. Edited excerpts:
Can you tell us a bit about the broad scope of this sequel?
Even though my new book is a sequel, it can easily be read independently. It picks up the thread from 1977 and charts out how we arrived at our present political moment. It covers the years from the Janata Party's installation as the first non-Congress government until Vajpayee's final stroke-crippled vote against the nuclear deal (in 2008). I also write about the years 2009-2025 in the preface.
My broad argument is that India's tragedies implicate many of the Sangh Parivar's present-day haters. Attributing the Hindu right's early success solely to the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 is lazy and misleading. Instead, I explain the sociological universe in which the Hindu right operated. I describe the Congress's role in plummeting the credibility of state institutions, the demise of global communism, and the rise of pan-Islamic militancy. Hindutva benefited by merging historical victimhood with new sociological and geopolitical neuroses.
Where did the title come from?
The title came long before the book did. It was sometime in late 2015, in my early days of visiting the Teen Murti Library archives (in New Delhi) to see whether a book like this was even possible. One weekend the phrase just arrived. I'm a failed economist, and it may have subconsciously come as a pun on 'the prisoner's dilemma" problem from game theory. It seemed to capture what I intended to say. Since then I have tried hard but never found a better—or a less worse—title.
The manuscript overshot the proposed length and became three times its planned size. So my publisher and I split the book, and landed on Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right, 1924–1977 as the first volume. But I began regretting the change almost immediately. So, I reverted to the original title for the second volume.
Is Vajpayee still relevant in today's polity?
Vajpayee is relevant, and will stay so, because he is now firmly, if sometimes grudgingly, part of the Hindu-right iconography. If Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was the ideologue and M.S. Golwalkar the organiser, Vajpayee was the bridge, the persuader. He made Hindutva electable, respectable. We will keep oscillating every few decades towards a wobbly coalition era, and he will remain a study in successfully managing the contradictions.
There is often a comparison made between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Vajpayee.
Yes, and it bores me. It's like trying to quantify whether going from zero to X is more crucial than going from X to 2X. Sangh Parivar is irritated by hyper-fixation on superstars. What matters is that the RSS is among the few right-wing organisations in the world still expanding steadily in its centenary year. Vajpayee helped the Sangh Parivar function as India's 'deep nation".
Did you come upon any striking surprises while writing the book?
Let me emphasise just one. The familiar but clichéd explanation for the Janata Party's disintegration is that some members of it continued to hold 'dual membership" of the RSS. In truth that was secondary. The most significant reason was that the Janata elders—especially Morarji Desai—failed to give former prime minister and party member Chaudhary Charan Singh or his middle-caste constituency their due. Neither Janata nor successive Congress governments grasped the sociological undercurrents.
Then, in 1990, the middle castes broke the door open. Suddenly we had Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar, Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh, and a few months later, the Mandal Commission imbroglio. Lal Krishna Advani began his rath yatra partly to save a BJP vertically split on Mandal. Now we have a middle-caste Prime Minister. We will likely never again have a long spell by an upper-caste Prime Minister; and that's not such a bad thing.
We know little about the personal lives of most Prime Ministers, but a lot has been talked about Vajpayee's.
Neither is entirely true. In Vajpayee's case, the curiosity stems from the fact that he was never formally married. But the interest has mostly been salacious. No one before me wrote about the most fundamental fact: that he had a biological daughter. That one detail puts his life in perspective—including how the Prime Minister's Office-Prime Minister's family axis came to wield such a colossal clout during his years in office.
In a recent social media post you said you felt uneasy with your work being labelled 'biography'.
I'm uneasy with the label because, in our part of the world, a biography often ends up worshipping a great man (sometimes a great woman). That's not how I saw the life-writing craft—whether full-length books or journalistic or literary profiles—when I first began reading them seriously in my early 20s. My kick was to study the making of political power in its myriad ways.
Something shifted when I began working full-time on the book from 2017. The country was entering a phase of schizophrenic polarisation, one that continues. In that climate, anyone researching a right-wing icon raised suspicion. I got the cold shoulder from a certain section of the literati. Although I got stung, deep inside I know that this is an elite bubble, which, when faced with Hindutva populism, has retreated into the comfort of old social capital, and are content churning out op-eds with empty progressive clichés.
I never doubt their intentions to resist majoritarianism. But the truth is: few have bothered to make a real psychological or sociological inquiry of the aspirations and anxieties of the bottom 75%.
Can you briefly tell us about the process of your research?
My research process is terribly slow. After I got the New India Foundation (NIF) fellowship in 2017, I tried to look at every primary material on the Sangh Parivar I could find from across the world. I also scanned the archives of dozens of newspapers and journals. I kept filing the material chronologically—by year, by date. In late summer 2019, once everything was in, including all interviews transcribed, I took printouts of the entire material. I would read a thousand pages, discern patterns, and write a first draft.
After completing three drafts, I would send three or four chapters to (writer and editors) Rivka Israel and Ramachandra Guha at the NIF, which funded the writing of the book. Since 2021, my agent Shruti Debi has been reading the chapters too, and her sharp comments are one of the reasons the second volume took so long to rework.
After the 1960s, the archives dry up—there aren't even the basic intel files that other third-rate democracies release. As for the Sangh Parivar, there is very little of value in their archives.
On the personal front, I was not born into humongous social capital. A project like this requires access at the highest level, and it took me much longer than it otherwise would have. Then there is the question of sustenance. I managed to win a few fellowships and residencies along the way. But it's not a sustainable model. Towards the end, I was perpetually at the edge of anger. You could say that is the story of most struggling writers everywhere.