Ex-indian leader who sowed strife, then peace, dies
NEW DELHI — Former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a Hindu nationalist who set off a nuclear arms race with rival Pakistan but later began a groundbreaking peace process, died on Thursday after a prolonged illness. He was 93.
The All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where Vajpayee had been hospitalized for more than two months for treatment of a kidney infection and chest congestion, announced his death.
Vajpayee, a leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, had suffered a stroke in 2009.
Vajpayee was in many ways a political contradiction: He was the moderate leader of an often-strident Hindu nationalist movement. He was the prime minister who ordered nuclear tests in 1998, stoking fears of atomic war between India and Pakistan. Then, a few years later, Vajpayee made the first moves toward peace.
Vajpayee’s supporters saw him as a skilled politician who avoided fanaticism and refused to see the world in black and white. His critics considered him the leader of a fanatic movement — a movement partially rooted in European fascism — that sought power by stoking public fears of India’s large Muslim minority.
It was in India’s relations with Pakistan where Vajpayee’s influence may last the longest.
Within a month of Vajpayee returning to the prime minister’s post in 1998 after resigning in 1996, he approved a series of nuclear weapons tests that shocked the world and pushed Pakistan to launch its own tests.
Then, just before leaving office in 2004, he launched a peace process that, while often rocky, remains the basis of ongoing negotiations.