Cherished memories

The passing away of Atal Behari Vajpayee, former Prime Minister of India, on Thursday afternoon came as a great shock to every Indian. His days as Prime Minister of India were brief, and most of us regarded him more as the ideal human being than as prime minister or politician. For most people he was the kind of person one wanted to be.

My first meeting with Vajpayeeji had been on a trip abroad. I was one of the lucky newspaper editors invited to accompany him on a tour of Oman, Namibia, South Africa and Mauritius in August and September, 1998. Of the hurricane tour of four countries, our stay at Durban for the NAM Summit was slightly longer. But wherever we went, hundreds of Indians turned up to hear Vajpayee speak. People drove hundreds of miles to listen to him. In Oman, we had camped at Salalah where the king lived. But hundreds of people drove down from Muscat to hear Vajpayee. And it was the same story in Windhoek, Durban and Mauritius as well. For those who have heard him speak, this is hardly surprising. There are few speakers as gifted and persuasive as Atal Bihari Vajpayee was.

What must have endeared Vajpayee even more to those in the entourage was that he invited each member of the group for a brief chat while we were airborne. To me, he was different from the other prime ministers of India I have met because he could laugh gleefully and without restraint. All the others seemed to have lost the ability to laugh whole-heartedly after becoming prime ministers. But what is far more significant is that he did not permit the political culture of the BJP to influence his style of functioning or to make him deviate even slightly from what he regarded as rajdharma for the head of government. His belief in secularism for a country like India was so complete that he said, “If India is not secular, then India is not India at all.”

As Prime Minister of India and the first editor of the Panchajanya, Atal Bihari Vajpayee presented the Panchajanya Nachiketa Award to me on 23 March 2001. He followed this up with an invitation to me and my family to dinner at his residence that evening. He had the remarkable knack of making people forget that they were talking to the Prime Minister of the country, and we all had a very memorable and enjoyable evening. I hark back to these cherished memories as I mourn the passing away of one of India’s greatest and tallest leaders. May his soul rest in eternal peace.

— D. N. Bezboruah