Atal Bihari Vajpayee
Atal Bihari Vajpayee tested nuclear weapons, took a bus to Lahore, and fought a war with Pakistan, in that order and within fourteen months. He was a Hindu nationalist from the movement's founding generation, a poet, and the most widely liked politician of his time in a party most of the country would not vote for. He had been foreign minister in the government that ended the Emergency, and prime minister twice before for thirteen days and thirteen months. The government he formed in 1998 was a coalition of two dozen parties and lasted six years. He ordered five underground tests at Pokhran in May 1998, three weeks after taking office. Sanctions followed from the United States and Japan and were quietly lifted within two years. In February 1999 he rode a bus to Lahore and signed a declaration with Nawaz Sharif. That summer Pakistani troops and irregulars were found dug in above Kargil on the Indian side of the line of control, and the fighting to remove them killed some five hundred Indian soldiers. Domestically he presided over the fastest road-building programme India had attempted, the golden quadrilateral linking the four largest cities, and over telecommunications and disinvestment reforms that carried on from the liberalisation of 1991. Growth ran near eight per cent in his last years. The stain on his record is Gujarat. In 2002 a train fire killed fifty-nine Hindu pilgrims and the reprisals killed over a thousand people, most of them Muslim. Vajpayee said publicly that the state's chief minister should follow the duty of a ruler to make no distinction between subjects, and then did not remove him. That chief minister was Narendra Modi. Vajpayee called an early election in 2004 on a slogan about a shining India and lost it.
- Lived: 1924 CE – 2018 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
