‘Without Vajpayee, there would be no Modi’: How former PM legitimised the Hindu Right

The first volume of Choudhary’s work ended with the Janata Party’s victory. His new book, Believer’s Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right’s Path to Power (1977–2018), published earlier this year, resumes the story from that moment and carries it through to the death of the BJP stalwart. Though the narrative prominently bears Vajpayee’s name and image, it is, in effect, a history of the Hindu Right.

In an interview with The Indian Express, Choudhary explains why he chose Vajpayee as the prism through which to tell that story. He also reflects on why he believes “without Vajpayee there would be no Modi,” and on the challenges of writing a history of the Indian Right.

Excerpts from the interview:

1. Both the volumes of your book, though focused on Vajpayee, are clearly a story of the rise of the Hindu Right. Why did you choose Vajpayee to tell the story of the Hindu Right in India?

I chose Vajpayee partly because he was not the most doctrinaire figure of the Hindu Right. If one wants to understand how an ideological movement travels from the margins to the centre of power, it is often more revealing to study its mediators rather than its zealots. Vajpayee gave the Hindu Right a public face that could speak to Parliament, to coalition partners, to foreign governments, and to the upper-middle class of the 1990s, uneasy with overt majoritarianism. Through him the movement learned how to appear reasonable without fundamentally rethinking its premises. Writing about Vajpayee therefore became a way of writing a political history of adaptation, respectability, and institutional learning; of how the Hindu Right learned to inhabit the Indian state long before it came to dominate it.

At the same time, I must admit that this neat, linear explanation is a bit of an afterthought. When I started in 2015, I was just another struggling writer trying to break into longer-form nonfiction, and this story pressed itself on me far more urgently than the other idea I was flirting with then – a travel book on the ancient melas.

2. There is a point in the book where you write that ‘without Vajpayee there would be no Modi’. Could you elaborate?

Narendra Modi visits Atal Bihari Vajpayee in New Delhi after becoming the Chief Minister of Gujarat. (Express archive)

The statement is not meant as a moral judgement but as a historical one. With its citizenry overwhelmingly illiterate, India’s democratic broadmindedness in the early decades was in some ways a top-down imposition. The Congress diluted it over the decades, especially during 1975–89, preparing conditions ripe for the Hindu Right – always lurking in the background – to take over.

Vajpayee acted as the crucial bridge: he normalised the idea that the Hindu Right could govern India without rupturing constitutional norms. He reassured elites, institutions, and voters that the movement could be trusted with power. That reassurance created the conditions under which a later leader could dispense with it. Modi does not inherit Vajpayee’s temperament, pluralism, or rhetorical restraint, but he inherits the legitimacy Vajpayee constructed over decades.

3. You describe Vajpayee as “a classic doublethinker,” someone who saw Hindutva as the best model for secularism. What exactly do you mean by that?

His self-image was that of an enlightened, imaginative conservative. Vajpayee saw himself as an RSS swayamsevak and a democrat, and had convinced himself early on that both these roles were perfectly compatible, complementary even: that Hindutva presented the only genuine model of secularism. Flipping his conviction slightly, it is easy to argue that Vajpayee was a classic doublethinker. The duality becomes evident in many of his public and parliamentary speeches, where he would defend constitutional morality while simultaneously advancing a culturally Hindu idea of the nation. Oddly, though, it also explains why he remains consequential, while the more progressive of his ilk have faded away in utter obscurity. (Few today remember, say, the CPI legend Indrajit Gupta, a former home minister and eleven-term parliamentarian.)

Vajpayee’s conviction found succour in the fragmentation of party politics at the turn of the century. It made him a face acceptable to people and ideologies he had fought against for much of his life: Karunanidhi of the DMK in Tamil Nadu, the Abdullahs of National Conference in Kashmir. During 1999–2004, he became the first prime minister outside of Congress to finish a full term in office. In doing so he turned India into a multi-party democracy. At our present moment of schizophrenic polarization, it is all too easy to overlook that as late as three decades ago, no one believed that a party other than Congress could steer this mindbogglingly disparate landmass.

4. I found your chapter called ‘The Babri-razers’ particularly interesting. What, in your view, was the most striking finding about Vajpayee’s role in the Babri demolition?

The most striking finding was not that Vajpayee actively planned the demolition, but that he functioned as its moral alibi. In the months leading up to December 1992, Vajpayee repeatedly assured Parliament and the public that the mosque would not be touched, even as the movement he belonged to mobilised openly for its destruction. His authority lent credibility to those assurances. What proved decisive was not what Vajpayee did on 6 December – that is absenting himself from Ayodhya, unlike most BJP elders – but what he did after it: he moved a no-confidence motion two weeks later against the Rao government and defended his party colleagues in a round-about way. Vajpayee understood the political power of ambiguity, and in this case, ambiguity allowed violence to unfold while responsibility remained diffused.

5. Writing about the Hindu Right, the dominant political narrative in the country today, is not easy because of the paucity of material. As a historian, how did you navigate or overcome this challenge?

Primary archival sources on Vajpayee and the RSS are scant and scattered to begin with. By the 1980s they very nearly dry up. As a substitute I scouted information out of dozens of newspapers and magazines, national and global, juxtaposing them with interviews and material gathered from private collections everywhere – photos, souvenirs, letters, documents. It was the literary equivalent of a hungry tramp desperately hoarding the cigarette butts strewn by the roadside.

The scarcity of sources is partly structural and partly intentional. For decades, the Hindu Right functioned as a cadre-based movement suspicious of scholars, journalists, and archives. Much of its intellectual life unfolded orally, or in publications meant strictly for internal circulation. As a biographer-historian, this required working indirectly, tangentially: digging up whatever scrap of information existed in the primary archives; scanning dozens of newspapers and journals from across the world; mining parliamentary debates; conducting long, careful, repeated interviews; and so on. Often, what mattered most was not what was said explicitly, but what was avoided or deferred. Writing this history demanded patience, scepticism, and a willingness to read evasions as evidence rather than absence.

But the lack of archives is not a problem of the BJP’s creation. The Congress in the early decades meticulously saved its archives, but lapses began in the post-Nehru era. We have no private papers of Lal Bahadur Shastri or Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi; in fact post-1960s, we haven’t declassified even the basic intelligence archives in the way Americans or British folks routinely declassify. With the archives missing, the history-writing will suffer. We will instead have journalistic quickies or third-rate memoirs, mixing facts and PR, by retired babus and politicians.

6. You were with this project for almost a decade. Now that both the volumes are out, is there something you could have done differently?

Nothing major, but yes, I am gradually becoming aware of some of the minor lapses of interpretation. To name one, I now think I overstated the Savarkar-Mahasabha influence on the early Vajpayee – and on Hindutva in general – and somewhat underplayed Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s legacy in shaping both. Vajpayee’s strategic ambiguity and doublespeak, and even his literary and oratorical style, seem to owe more to Tilak than I had earlier understood.

This is something even legendary writers go through. I once interacted with Vikram Seth, and he told me he still felt he could rewrite certain chapters of A Suitable Boy. That, I suppose, is the nature of writing loose baggy monsters: you finish a book, but the argument continues to revise itself in your head.