Atal Bihari Vajpayee: The Unhurried Orator With a Sting in the Tail

A personal column on former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee remembered him above all as a man who never seemed to be in a rush, whether strolling through the corridors of Parliament, greeting admirers, or walking slowly to the microphone at an election meeting in a small town in north India.

Speeches with a twist

The writer recalled going, as a 15-year-old, to Shahid Minar in Kolkata to hear Vajpayee address a Jana Sangh meeting, only to leave disappointed when he arrived late. At the time, Vajpayee was seeking volunteers for a Jana Sangh jail-bharo campaign demanding that the government recognise Bangladesh, and joked to Marwari businessmen that he would serve them hot coffee in jail.

The column said Vajpayee’s skill lay in building a gripping story out of very little, and that audiences waited less for his subject than for the small sting at the end. Before the 1991 election, at a national council meeting in Jaipur where talk was of a Ram wave, he warned the party against being swept away by it and said the BJP was a political party, not a religious assembly.

Ayodhya, December 1992

The writer, who said he attended the BJP meeting in Lucknow on December 5, 1992, the eve of the kar seva in Ayodhya, along with Chandan Mitra, disputed claims that Vajpayee made a provocative speech there. Instead, the column said, he spoke with typical ambiguity, describing crowds and jostling in Ayodhya that morning and wondering aloud what would happen if more people went.

A flexible politician

According to the column, Vajpayee rose on the strength of his oratory, his standing as a parliamentarian and a reputation for being above rigid ideology. That image, and his ability to draw extra votes, led to his return to a leadership role in 1996 after 12 years on the sidelines. The writer left open whether the reputation was deserved, describing him as a shrewd reader of public mood who was neither doctrinaire in his liberalism nor in his Hindu nationalism, but who remained rooted in the movement that shaped him.

See also: Political leaders

Originally published on 17 August 2018. Rewritten on 9 October 2026.

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