Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whose ill-health has rendered him inactive for the past few years, was a deeply contemplative political leader. It’s not just that he was an incomparable orator, but his speeches were carriers of his carefully expressed thoughts. In private conversations, he became increasingly economical with his words in his later years. Nevertheless, even when he spoke very little, his communication was powerfully suggestive of what he wanted to convey.

The BJP’s defeat in the May 2004 parliamentary elections, which brought his six-year-long premiership to an end, filled him with sadness, although he didn’t show it. He didn’t agree with the many voices within the party and the Sangh Parivar that ascribed the defeat to what was perceived as the BJP’s abandonment of Hindutva. In August of that year, the party held a chintan shibir in Goa to reflect on the causes of the electoral setback. The issue of Hindutva also came up for discussion, but Atalji made no intervention in it. During the tea-break, when I happened to be sitting alone with him, he surprised me by breaking the silence with his remark: “Yeh Hindutva kya hota hai?” If ever there was a telling question, which contained its own answer, this was it. Here was the party’s tallest leader, one who headed the BJP-led government at the Centre, expressing scepticism over the way the party’s core ideology was being interpreted and articulated.

As Prime Minister, Atalji rarely used the term Hindutva. The one time he did so on a public platform was to sharply rebuke its narrow, dogmatic and exclusivist projection. The occasion was the launch of a book, India First, authored by the late K.R. Malkani, at 7 Race Course Road in March 2002. Here is how PTI reported his speech on that day. “In a clear disapproval of the recent actions of the so-called practitioners of Hindutva, the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, tonight said it would be better to ‘keep a distance’ from the kind of Hindutva being practised by some now. Speaking at a book release function here, he said when Swami Vivekananda spoke of Hinduism, nobody called him communal. ‘But now, some people have defined Hindutva in such a manner that it is better to keep a distance from it.’ He said Hindutva should not be equated with religion as it was ‘a way of life’. We should keep away from such Hindutva which is stagnant.”

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