Vinay Sitapati book cover ‘Jugalbandi: The BJP before Modi’
Atal Bihari Vajpayee was a public speaker, a trait he learned from his father and honed when Deendayal Upadhyaya selected him for public relations roles. Although he was a mid-level poet, he not only perceived the structure of sentences, but also their rhythms. Add to this his extensive presence in parliament, where he was almost always the leader of his party. Vajpayee endured as the most hypnotic independent political speaker India has produced.
If you wear a mask long enough, the mask becomes your face. What parliament did to Vajpayee was teach him the Nehruvian version of India. He was one who respected the public institutions of India, strove to keep Hinduism out of government, was sensitive to post-partition Muslim trauma, wanted state control over the economy, and turned away from the West on foreign policy. Vajpayee initially followed all of this, not out of love for Nehru (as his right-wing critics alleged), but out of love for the parliament of that period.
Vajpayee’s politics were also shaped by the woman in his life. Rajkumari Kaul socialized the provincial Hindu. Their many conversations, the most revealing about Ayodhya, would alter Vajpayee’s mind.
This Nehruvian perspective was at odds with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Vajpayee alleviated this tension in three ways. First, it convinced the RSS that to win the elections it needed it to attract opposition outside of Congress, as well as the moderate Hindu majority. Second, although he cultivated a liberal air, he was ultimately a party man. On supporting the Ayodhya movement or Modi’s permanence as prime minister of Gujarat, Vajpayee was torn between principle and party. But her instinct for self-preservation made her always choose the party. Always.
The third and most surprising way that Vajpayee was able to balance his liberal behavior with Hindu nationalist ideology was in his choice of mate.
As we have read, Partition had transformed Lal Krishna Advani, an English-speaking tennis player, into a grassroots mobilizer, determined to bring India together again. His ability for organization was reinforced by his decade as pracharak in Rajasthan. By the time he entered Delhi as Vajpayee’s secretary in 1957, Advani’s personality had formed: an eye for detail, a head for RSS, and his heart set on his new boss.
Vajpayee and Advani’s relationship since then was held together by mutual love and Bollywood movies. But it was also based on a division of labor required by Hindu nationalism. On the one hand, the party needed to bring its main constituent and its motivated cadre. To maintain the base, he needed a stern face. On the other hand, the accusations stemming from Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 had rendered the ideology untouchable. To come to power, he needed a calm voice. In an election speech Vajpayee delivered in Jaipur, someone threw a snake into the crowd. When the crowd panicked, Vajpayee said, from the podium, there was no snake. The event continued, the audience calmed down.
After the leadership struggle that followed Deendayal’s death, Advani and Vajpayee assumed these complementary roles. When the mood of the nation was one of ideological restraint, as in the 1970s or late 1990s, Advani followed as Vajpayee led. When the mood was similar to anxiety in the 1980s and early 1990s, Vajpayee obeyed while Advani led the party.
Neither Vajpayee nor Advani were intellectuals in the sense that neither had a long-term vision of civilization for their country. But they were able to see the arc of history in the medium term, that is, they deciphered the trajectories of Congress and Hindu nationalism in the first six decades of Indian independence, and their own paired roles throughout this journey. So aware were they of the characters they needed to play that they indulged in role play. Advani acted more intolerant than he really was; Vajpayee was adept at playing the role of a Nehruvian liberal. They were both wearing masks.
Their alliance worked because they rarely interfered with each other’s competition (Advani’s coalition formation in 2004 was the exception that proved the rule). Vajpayee rarely visited the party headquarters. He also trusted Advani’s judgment on the extent to which the cadre was willing to compromise for power. The most vivid example of this was when Advani managed to convince Vajpayee not to remove the Prime Minister of Gujarat in April 2002.
In exchange for this control over the party, Advani ensured that Vajpayee always had his favorite role: speaking for the party in parliament. It even surpassed RSS in the early 1990s to guarantee this. And in what will surely be his prime, Advani handed over the post of prime minister of the world’s largest democracy to Vajpayee, aware that he himself lacked the comforting smile to keep the BJP in power.
When this division of labor was threatened by other party members, Vajpayee and Advani supported each other. Advani supported Vajpayee against Madhok, Sondhi, Swamy, and Govindacharya. Vajpayee cheered Advani against Murli Manohar Joshi. As Shekhar Gupta says: ‘Advani-Vajpayee are like an old couple that you see in the park. They fight, but if someone comes between them, they will defend each other.
In that sense, it was a genuine jugalbandiThere were different instruments, there was playful competition, alternating riffs, and there was, in a deep sense, the same music.
It’s easy to fall in love with Vajpayee. An epicurean, a charmer. Colorless and odorless Advani is harder to feel. But some of that is surely because Advani was more of a man of principle than Vajpayee, less altered by makeup. His opponent, a senior congressman, offers a revealing insight: “Vajpayee was a better actor than Advani. And Modi is a better actor than Vajpayee. With Advani, what you saw is what you got. Sometimes in politics you need to be a good actor. ‘
When their relationship entered the shifting sands of government from 1998 to 2004, it frayed. While Vajpayee was happy to allow Advani to maintain control of the party, he saw the government as an extension of parliament, that is, exclusively his domain. But even when their personal relationship suffered during these years, their professional association was never completely dissolved. In the words of Yashwant Sinha: ‘Vajpayee and Advani realized that they were insecure without each other. People were definitely breathing down his neck. They were unsure that if their differences had gone beyond a point, they would both have been injured. He is mad. Mutually assured destruction. ‘
Sinha is describing the relationship through self-interest, which surely there was. And there was also a lot of love. But as we’ve read throughout this book, Vajpayee and Advani’s ability to work together through thick and thin was based on more than cold calculations and warm feelings. It was also based on an ideology that valued teamwork.
(Footnotes have been redacted in this exclusive excerpt. Published with permission of Penguin Random House India from ‘Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi’ by Vinay Sitapati. Request your copy here).
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