“Believer’s Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right’s Path to Power, 1977–2018” by Abhishek Choudhary
Believer’s Dilemma concludes Abhishek Choudhary’s landmark two-part study of Atal Behari Vajpayee (1924–2018), the RSS propagandist who established himself as an imaginative moderate, drawing the Hindu Right from the fringes to displace Congress as the natural party of power.
This magisterial second volume combines new archival documents with revealing interviews to present an unsentimental history of India’s ongoing political moment, beginning with the short-lived Janata coalition and the Vajpayee–Morarji Desai tussle to steer foreign policy; Mrs Gandhi’s ad-hocism in Assam, Punjab and Kashmir; Rajiv’s cynical turn toward the Hindu vote; Vajpayee’s failure to secularize the newborn BJP; the Sangh Parivar’s meticulous plan to raze the Babri, and much more. Choudhary traces these machinations of the previous half-century to cast fresh light on major events from Vajpayee’s term in office (1998–2004), including his desperation to conduct nuclear tests; his cold pragmatism and heartbreak in negotiating with Pakistan and China; his wide range of emotional strengths, which allowed him to manage an unwieldy thirteen-party coalition and turn India into a multi-party democracy; his role in propping India up as a potential superpower and embedding capitalist aspiration into its socio-political imagination.
According to historian, Ramachandra Guha, this is “the finest biography of an Indian prime minister that I have read”.
Mapping the evolution of the Sangh Parivar, this book reveals a deeper pattern in Vajpayee’s character: his reflexive loyalty to his ideological family in moments of crisis – be it the 1983 Assam riots, the 1992 Babri aftermath, the 2002 Gujarat riots, or his tragic last public appearance in 2008, when the stroke-battered patriarch voted against the Indo-US nuclear deal he had earlier helped seed.
A decade in the making, Believer’s Dilemma is an original and psychologically insightful take on the Hindu Right and its first prime minister.
Read an extract from the book on Moneycontrol. The book is published by Pan Macmillan India.
Today, in the evening, this extract was embedded in Nalin Mehta’s The Editor’s Pick newsletter that is circulated to nearly one million subscribers.
Israel is now an important Indian ally but there was a time when Indian governments shrank away from any overt engagement with Tel Aviv. Check out this interesting account of Israeli war hero and then defence minister Moshe Dayan’s secret trip to India in 1977 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was foreign minister in the post-Emergency Janata government. What is striking is the lengths to which the government went to in order to keep the trip top secret, as per a recently released book on Vajpayee by Abhishek Choudhary.
Abhishek Choudhary studied economics in Delhi and Chennai, followed by brief stints in nonprofits and journalism. He was awarded the NIF Fellowship in 2017 to research former prime minister Vajpayee’s life. During the winter of 2021–22, he was a scholar-in-residence at the International Centre Goa. He lives in Delhi.
25 July 2025
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