Nationalist prime minister made India a nuclear power

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who has died aged 93, was the Indian prime minister who oversaw nuclear tests that ushered in a new arms race in South Asia, starting in the late 1990s. A member of Parliament for five decades, Vajpayee was sworn in three times to the country’s top elected executive office, and he forged and held together a fragile federal coalition of disparate political parties.

From 1999 to 2004, he headed India’s first nonCongress party government that lasted a full five-year term. This was a significant achievement in a country where the Indian National Congress party had dominated politics since independence in 1947.

Weeks into his second stint as prime minister, Vajpayee shocked the world in May 1998 with five underground nuclear tests, prompting international sanctions, rattling neighbours and setting off an arms race with Pakistan.

India first conducted a test in 1974 but had long maintained that its nuclear programme was meant for peaceful purposes. The new tests established India as an overt nuclear-weapon state, and Pakistan responded with its own tests.

United States President Bill Clinton denounced India for undermining the stability of South Asia and directly challenging ‘‘the firm international consensus to stop nuclear proliferation’’. But Vajpayee worked discreet diplomacy behind closed doors and set in motion a friendly dialogue with Clinton, who in 2000 made the first visit by a US president to India in more than two decades.

Vajpayee, known as an avuncular politician, was credited with helping bring mainstream acceptance to his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which became the single-largest party in the elections in 1996 and 1998 but could not form a majority in the lower house of Parliament. As a result, Vajpayee’s government in 1996 lasted just 13 days, and his second term as prime minister lasted 13 months in 1998 and 1999.

But later, his personal charisma and moderate image helped the BJP stitch together a broad-based coalition of smaller, disparate regional parties. Between 1999 and 2004, he deftly managed the unwieldy coalition of fractious partners.

He deployed similar skills to begin a new peace process with his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, and travelled to Lahore, in northeastern Pakistan, by bus in February 1999. But the effort was undermined three months later when the Pakistani army and separatist militants launched an offensive in the Kargil mountains of Kashmir, a Himalayan region claimed by both countries. About 1200 troops from both sides were said to have died in the short conflict; Sharif would later say that up to 4000 Pakistanis died.

The biggest blot on Vajpayee’s term came in the February 2002 religious rioting between Hindus and Muslims in the western state of Gujarat. A government estimate said 1024 people, mostly Muslims, were killed.

Vajpayee continued privatising and reforming India’s economy during his third term. In 2004, the BJP campaigned on his economic accomplishments, coining the slogan ‘‘India Shining’’. But the voters apparently did not feel as prosperous as the BJP thought they were, and Vajpayee was dislodged. He retired from active politics the next year.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee was born in the central Indian city of Gwalior and, from a teenager, was drawn to the Hindu nationalism, joining the newly formed Bharatiya Jana Sangh, predecessor of the BJP, in 1951.

Vajpayee, who never married, was known to like good meat and expensive whisky, and he made several public denials over charges of eating beef, a serious allegation against a Hindu leader. – Washington Post

He was known to like good meat and expensive whisky, and made several public denials over charges of eating beef.