NEW DELHI: Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who as India’s prime minister from 1998 to 2004 stunned the world by ending a decades-old moratorium on nuclear weapons tests but nevertheless managed to ease tensions with Pakistan and build closer ties to the US, died yesterday in New Delhi.
The 93-year-old had battled poor health for years but his condition deteriorated sharply in recent days, with doctors placing him on life support.
Vajpayee, a diabetic, was admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi on June 11 with kidney tract infection and other ailments.
India declared a seven-day mourning period across the nation and said a state funeral would be held this afternoon.
A published poet, Vajpayee dabbled in law, journalism and rebellion against British colonialism as a young man. A leader of the Hindu nationalist opposition to the once-invincible Indian National Congress party of Gandhi and Nehru, for most of his 50 years in politics he was virtually unknown outside India.
But for six years in his late 70s, Vajpayee was the face of the world’s most populous democracy, a nation of one billion.
India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi, said on Twitter that Vajpayee’s death marked “the end of an era.”
By the time he became prime minister, Vajpayee was an experienced, nuanced politician. He had served decades in parliament, was foreign minister from 1977 to 1980 and was even prime minister for 13 days in 1996, a tenure cut short when his squabbling coalition fell apart.
Two months after he was sworn in, India detonated several nuclear bombs in underground tests. It had been 24 years since the country’s only previous test, in 1974, and while its nuclear weapons capability had long been assumed, the 1998 tests impressed on the world that India had joined the circle of declared nuclear powers.
Pakistan responded quickly with its own tests. Some nations invoked sanctions and condemned India for breaking its moratorium, but Vajpayee defended the move as vital to Indian security.
Vajpayee later met President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and established diplomatic and transportation links.
He also went to China and began to resolve a longstanding border dispute. As the Cold War ended, he moved nonaligned India closer to the US, welcoming President Bill Clinton to India in 2000 and strengthening bonds with pledges of support for America after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
In economic overhauls, Vajpayee privatised state-owned industries, encouraged foreign investment, eased trade restrictions and fostered an information-technology revolution that created a million jobs.
Vajpayee supported equal rights for Muslims, Christians and others in his overwhelmingly Hindu nation. He also championed women’s rights.
He resigned as prime minister in May 2004 after an upset by the Indian National Congress. In declining health, he retired from active politics in December 2005.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee was born on December 25, 1924, to a family of high-caste Brahmins in Gwalior, in central India. His father, Krishna Behari Vajpayee, was a secondary-school teacher. As a youth he flirted with communism before shifting ideologically and joining the National Voluntary Service, a right-wing paramilitary group that was the guiding force behind Hindu nationalism. In 1942 he was jailed for 24 days for anti-British activities.
Journalist
He graduated from Victoria College in Gwalior, earned a master’s degree in political science from Dayanand Anglo-Vedic College in Kanpur and studied law in Lucknow. But with independence and partition into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, Vajpayee became a journalist, working for Hindu nationalist publications.
In 1951 he helped found Jana Sangh, a Hindu nationalist party. He was first elected to parliament in 1957.
Re-elected 11 times, he became a prominent critic of the governing Congress party. In 1975, he and thousands of other dissidents were jailed under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s emergency decrees suspending civil liberties and elections. He became foreign minister in a new coalition two years later.
In 1980 Vajpayee helped found the Bharatiya Janata Party, which became the main opposition group and his primary vehicle to power. He shared its view that India should enshrine Hindu culture, but he passionately opposed discrimination against other religions.
Critics called it contradictory, but voters did not agree, and in the 1990s he became one of India’s most popular figures.
While he never married, Vajpayee raised as his own child Namita Bhattachariya, the daughter of a longtime friend. She became a teacher and at times served as his official hostess.