Peek into BJP's lone PM Vajpayee's life: Follows the news, silently; no one visits him

NEW DELHI: Less than a five-minute drive from the Ashoka Road headquarters of BJP, where the old guard is losing ground to the new, Atal Bihari Vajpayee sits quietly in a wheelchair in his SPG-guarded Krishna Menon Marg bungalow watching snatches of television and reading newspaper headlines.


The master orator, who was silenced by a stroke in 2009, cannot grasp either the small print or the big picture of what's happening within the party he nurtured. The three-time Prime Minister — last between 1999 and 2004 — bid adieu to active politics almost a decade ago. Now, as Modi — whom he'd wanted removed as Gujarat chief minister after the Godhra riots of 2002 — tightens his hold over BJP, some of his close friends and followers are feeling slighted or pushed to the wall.

Unlike the good old days, no one comes calling on him with complaints about the party or to listen to his poetry. The only regular visitors are N M Ghatate, Vajpayee's friend of nearly six decades, L K Advani and B C Khanduri (the general-turned-politician who was chief minister of Uttarakhand), who come to sit by his side or ask daughter Namita about his health.

Ghatate who visits him almost every week, sometimes even twice, says, "Prime Minister Manmohan Singh makes regular inquiries about his health and never misses wishing Vajpayeeji personally on his birthday." The two, Ghatate says, have an old association. Ghatate remembers how then PM PV Narasimha Rao called Vajpayee to complain that his finance minister Manmohan Singh had taken criticism of his budget by the opposition to heart and had offered to resign.

During a career spent mostly in opposition, Vajpayee had criticized everyone, from Nehru to his daughter Indira, but never realized it could hurt someone so much. Ghatate says Vajpayee immediately called Singh and told him not to take such comments to heart as they were meant to score political points. The Rao government was saved an embarrassment, and a new friendship was forged.

Ghatate says Vajpayee is still mentally alert. "But the stroke he suffered does not let him speak." Till then, he'd kept himself busy with books and writing. Within two months of the 2004 electoral defeat, he wrote a four-page article on the successful NDA coalition experiment and how even Congress had to fall in line; he argued that coalitions were here to stay.

A better part of Vajpayee's day, Ghatate says, is spent with physiotherapists, doctors and nurses. "I go there and just watch him or talk to family members. He understands everything but cannot have a conversation," he says. Vajpayee's favourite food — Chinese and prawns — is now served only in small portions.

Advani, who was deputy PM in the last NDA government, is reported to have wistfully told some people that Vajpayee would consult him on "everything". When asked if BJP leaders still asked him for advice, he is believed to have replied, cryptically, "When they need to."

For Ghatate, who first met him in the 1950s, the sight of the silent statesman is heart-rending. Vajpayee, who had known Ghatate's father, Babasaheb Ghatate, a senior Hindu Mahasabha leader, took the young law student under his wing in Delhi and treated him like a younger brother.

Of all the things that the protracted illness has taken away, Ghatate misses Vajpayee's sense of humour the most. When Ghatate gave him the news of the death of JN Dixit, Manmohan Singh's first national security advisor, Vajpayee said, "He was a good man. His problem was he used to work hard and worry a lot about the consequences." Ghatate pointed out Vajpayee's NSA and Dixit's predecessor Brajesh Mishra was also hard working, to which Vajpayee retorted with a mischievous smile, "Yes, Brajesh too was hard working, but then I had to worry about the consequences," Ghatate recounted this to Mishra and the two had a good laugh.

Ghatate has been busy compiling Vajpayee's jokes and witticisms into a book. He has so far collected about 80; he knows there are many more out there.