The Indian Prime Minister Who Mainstreamed the Hindu Right

A Review of Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right 1924–1977 (Picador, 2023) by Abhishek Choudhary

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the tenth prime minister of independent India (1999–2004), died on August 16, 2018, at the age of ninety-three. What followed was a range of obituaries from India and across the globe, eulogizing his worldliness, his moderate temperament, and his commitment to India’s secular spirit. All of this, despite his lifelong allegiance to the right-wing organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an ultranationalist Hindu group that has relentlessly tried to undermine the secularism enshrined in the Indian constitution.

How did it come to be that one of India’s leading statesmen is remembered as a political moderate and gifted poet, glossing over the fact he was a soldier for the Hindu right? Abhishek Choudhary provides some clues in Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right 1924–1977. The first of a two-volume biography, Vajpayee is an ambitious attempt to show how the history of independent India, lauded as the world’s largest democracy, is intimately connected with the ascent of the Hindu right. And Vajpayee himself, in Choudhary’s account, was a crucial agent promoting the growth of Hindu supremacism and “Hinduizing India.”

The current Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, is famed for promoting hate speech, Islamophobia, intellectual incoherence, and disinformation campaigns, hastening the destruction of secular values and democratic institutions. But Choudhary shows that Modi is anything but an anomaly — these tools have been around since the early twentieth century, when Vajpayee, the future prime minister, first cut his teeth in the right-wing,…