Atal Bihari Vajpayee- Visionary, Charmer, Orator

Atal Bihari Vajpayee introduced rightist economic polices, tested nuclear bombs, weathered global sanctions, wrote poetry and loved watching movies. And, he knew the people of India quite intimately.

- Sachidananda Murthy

During the 1971 Lok Sabha Elections, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was a star campaigner for the 'grand alliance' of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, Congress (O), Swatantra and the Socialists, fighting a charismatic Indira Gandhi. After a delayed road campaign, he had reached the Allahabad railway station just in time to catch a train. A local leader, looking at the dust-covered icon, ruefully remarked that there was no time for a bath. Vajpayee, with his sense of humour intact, quipped in Hindi, “Don't worry. I always carry with me the soil of this country.”

Vajpayee, who breathed his last on August 16, knew the soil, the water, the air, the language, the food, and the people of India quite intimately. Like the earth accumulating soil every season, he accumulated credibility, and the affection of the nation year after year for more than six decades of his peripatetic public life. It enabled the BJP to campaign successfully on the slogan 'the man India awaits' in the 1998 Lok Sabha elections. After Vajpayee lost the trust vote and faced the nation a year later, the BJP spoke of him as 'the man India trusts'.

In 1973, when he rode a bullock cart to Parliament to protest the hike in petroleum prices, the Congress had scoffed that the urbanite school teacher's son had no experience in farming. Vajpayee retorted that he had spent more time with farmers than Indira's entire cabinet. When he became prime minister, he was obsessed with rural road connectivity so that he could realise the farm-to-table chain for agricultural and horticultural crops.