Readers wondering why the period mentioned in the book’s subtitle does not include the entire career cycle of the former Prime Minister which spanned more than seven decades, must be informed at the outset that this book has a prequel, Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right 1927-1977, published in 2023. Along with the first part, this is possibly one of the most meticulously detailed biographies of an Indian political leader. Both books are laborious efforts with the author’s untiring eye for the minutiae, providing a complete account of India’s first non-Congress Prime Minister to not just serve out his tenure, but also log six years plus in office without break, besides the punctuation-like thirteen-day interlude in May 1996.Just to provide a quick recap of the first volume, the principal point Choudhary debunked in that was the popular belief that Vajpayee had been the ‘right man in the wrong party’ and that he was not a leader in the Hindutva mould in which most BJP leaders and other key personalities in the Sangh parivar were cast.Abhishek Choudhary, Believer’s Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right’s Path to Power 1977—2018,Picador IndiaThe sequel continues in the same vein and the author succeeds fairly well in his objective of establishing that Vajpayee “was at the heart of the Sangh Parivar’s project to Hinduize India…, for all his grumbling helped the RSS and its affiliates function as India’s deep nation.” Beginning with that contention, the second volume of the biography clearly establishes Vajpayee as one of the central characters in the “larger pantheon of Hindu nationalism.”Indian writers, taking after journalists in the mainstream media, have long considered the private lives of leaders, especially their personal and sexual relationships, a taboo subject. This is not the choice of this self-appointed biographer of a multi-chromatic leader, in life as well as politics, both in political orientation and his associations. At least since the 1970s, when Vajpayee emerged as front-ranking leader of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), his shared household and life with the Kauls – consisting of Brijmohan, the Delhi University academic, wife Rajkumari, Nandita and Namita, the two daughters and the younger son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya, along with the little one, Niharika or ‘Neha’ – was the least-guarded secret about Vajpayee’s life, but never written or spoken about in public. But Choudhary went by what Gabriel Garcia Marquez said – that all humans have three lives: public, private and the secret – and made it his task to write about at least the first two profiles of his subject. As a committed biographer, Choudhary took the unconventional path and presented Vajpayee not just as the astute politician that he was, but also as a doting father to Namita and loving grandfather to Neha. The author unearthed details from hidden crevices about Vajpayee’s life, like him kissing the granddaughter goodbye before she left for school even as he navigated the tense days before the National Democratic Alliance government returned to office in October 1999. But beyond these public and private facets of Vajpayee, what was the ‘secret’ side of Vajpayee, if any? Choudhary is understandably reticent on this, although there are a few instances where he stops after a discreet mention, for instance while detailing the events after the death of the professor and his cremation in Connecticut, while in the care of his elder daughter Nandita and her husband. The author mentions that despite dying so far away, the family held a condolence meeting at which the grief on the face of Mrs Kaul was visible, but “Vajpayee did not appear mournful at all; he gleefully offered sweets.” Lest this appears as gossip fanned by the ‘Lutyens gang’, the quote is attributed to a senior journalist who had good connections with the RSS-BJP combine. This however, was also no ‘secret’. But, a possible sample of this followed. “The story of Atal and Rajkumari’s relationship had now taken on the air of old lovers reunited with a happy ending,” Choudhary the biographer writes. But, the next sentence divulges half information that could possibly be known to just a handful. “Over the previous decade, Vajpayee had had a few chaste crushes, but he remained a family man.” Choudhary does not go further.Establishing Vajpayee as a “family man”, a person who lived with the others, in what was “more of a home than a politician’s house,” however was not Choudhary’s primary focus. After all, the four decades that the book traverses, were politically the most significant ones in Vajpayee’s life, and of modern India too, starting with being India’s foreign minister in the Janata Party government after Indira Gandhi’s defeat following the Emergency in 1977. Other major episodes which are explored and examined thoroughly include Vajpayee being the founding president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1980. In this crucial phase, he led the charge to, if not completely breakaway, then at least establish visible divergence from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.Also read: When Vajpayee Chose to Fall in Line After GodhraAs part of this enterprise, Vajpayee came up with ‘Gandhian Socialism’ as being the central credo of the BJP instead of integral humanism, which was enmeshed in the ethos of the Sangh parivar. There were other characteristics too, central to the existence of the previous political front of the RSS, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, which were discarded, and these departures were held central to the party rout in the 1984 Lok Sabha polls, which included an electoral humiliation for Vajpayee from his home town, Gwalior. The book reveals that post defeat, Vajpayee regretted that he did not heed requests from party colleagues and even allies to contest from a second seat, be it Surat, Rajkot or even Secunderabad. His innings as the BJP’s founding president was followed by several years of playing second fiddle to L.K. Advani, who is rightly credited for the BJP’s rise from a peripheral party to being a “government in waiting”, a self-description Advani coined after the BJP emerged as the second largest party in Lok Sabha after the Congress in June 1991 and he was appointed to the post of Leader of Opposition in the Lower House.In the years when Vajpayee was sidelined in the party, from late 1986 to the middle of 1993, he had serious differences, among other issues, with the emphasis being put by the party on the Ayodhya issue. To underscore this, Choudhary cites an interview he conducted with BJP’s Lalji Tandon, who said Vajpayee turned down a proposal in 1990 to undertake a Rameshwaram to Ayodhya yatra as a parallel political campaign to Advani’s Somnath to Ayodhya yatra.But Vajpayee was duplicitous on the issue. For instance, he defended the BJP in parliament after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, as well as in December 2000, when, as prime minister, he participated in a debate in Lok Sabha and spoke reverentially about the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation. Behind this two-faced stance on the Ayodhya issue during Advani’s first tenure as president (1986-1991) was also Vajpayee’s inability to come to terms with the rise of his longtime second-in-command in the popularity index. During the 1991 elections, all command positions were in the hands of Advani’s aides and there was little for Vajpayee to do, save practically limit his campaign to the two seats from where he was contesting – Lucknow and Vidhisha — and of course fill in for Advani in regions and important constituencies that the party president was unable to tour because of his packed schedule. Yet, the broader picture that emerges from Choudhary’s account is that despite minor differences, their ties remained as they had been in the past, with Advani continuing to give the same respect and never for a moment attempting to usurp the position of Numero Uno. However, reality was reversed as Advani reveled in being in the driver’s seat and in 1990, after bringing down V.P. Singh with his yatra, he did not stop his aides from the orchestrated campaign to get him voted as BBC’s ‘Man of the Year’ – an effort that was quashed by the corporation after it got to know about the plan.The author gets the narrative correct on the matter of the two veterans joining hands in the middle of 1993 to deny Murli Manohar Joshi a second consecutive two-year long term as party president, which was constitutionally permissible within the party. Joshi was replaced by Advani and he vacated the position of the LoP for Vajpayee. In his tenure as party president, Joshi consistently attempted to go one better than his predecessor and this could be best done by taking out a ‘more successful’ political yatra than the one Advani took out from Somnath to Ayodhya in 1990, which undoubtedly was among the most impactful political campaigns of the BJP in the 1980s and early 1990s. Unfortunately for Joshi, his Ekta Yatra from Kanya Kumari, with the aim of hoisting the Indian tricolour in Srinagar on Republic Day in January 1992, failed to arouse public support. It ended in a damp squib when Joshi and other key yatris were flown to Srinagar in a government defence plane. The yatra was however commended within the party for its logistical arrangements, steered by an individual whose political graph within the party rose rapidly in subsequent years – Narendra Modi. While Modi is missing from the portions where the Ekta Yatra is discussed, the author subsequently treats in detail the awkward ties between Modi and Vajpayee. But it would have been worthwhile to examine how the association with Joshi cast its shadow on this crucial period and the choices party leaders made.These missing tracts, however, do not diminish the value of this two-volume biography, although many a reader who may have tracked Indian politics over the last five decades may find the second volume as little more than a text for a refresher course. But such a conclusion would be unfair given the extent of detailing, and a lot of what has been unearthed by Choudhary, would have been either not known, or simply forgotten. In the literature on modern and contemporary political writing, this book would rank fairly high if only for providing a detailed history of the period when Vajpayee was prime minister and India faced several testing episodes besides many dramatic moments.Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay is a journalist and author of books including Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times and The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right.