One of them, Parichay (Introduction), begins with the line: Hindu, tan-man, Hindu jeevan, rag rag Hindu mera parichay (Body and soul Hindu,. Hindu Tan Man Hindu Jivan Poem of Shri Atal Bihar, Hindu Tan Man, Hindu Jivan - Poem of Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee by Bharatiya Janata Party Download.
When I heard Atal Bihari Vajpayee for the first time, I was barely in my teens. It was a cold January night in the latter half of the 1960s and Indira Gandhi was the prime minister of the country. He reached my town Najibabad, located in the foothills of Garhwal, very late to address a public meeting that had been organised in Moorti Devi Saraswati Intermediate College where I studied. People in small towns usually go to bed early but the 200 odd people who had gathered to listen to Vajpayee did not budge. He was wearing a long overcoat and looked quite nattily dressed in comparison with the traditionally attired Jan Sangh leaders whom I used to see in my town. The moment he opened his mouth, there was a palpable wave of excitement in the audience that soon became absolutely spellbound.
Sometime before this, I had also attended a public meeting addressed by another Jan Sangh stalwart Deendayal Upadhyaya in the main market Chowk Bazar. His speech was drab and dull and party workers and sympathisers listened to him out of respect. But, Vajpayee was very different. Although, like Upadhyaya, his Hindi too was laced with a lot of Sanskrit words, but somehow this did not act as an impediment and he was able to strike an immediate rapport with the audience. By raising his voice and bringing it down like a consummate classical singer, placing emphasis on words to enhance the impact of his message and with a flow that reminded one of a cascading downpour, he turned the audience into putty in his hands.
After that, I heard him dozens of times. In fact, as JNU students, we campaigned for him despite our ideological differences when he contested for Lok Sabha from New Delhi constituency in 1977 post-Emergency polls. However, after I became a professional journalist, my interactions with him were rather limited as he was sulking at home while L. K. Advani had taken charge of party affairs.
It was probably the summer of 1989 when I received a message from my editor Vir Sanghvi (I was working with the news weekly Sunday at that time) that I should go to Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s house and collect some of his poems from him. When I went to his house at Raisina Road, facing the Press Club of India, I met a very different Vajpayee. He welcomed me with a warm and wide smile and within a few minutes, it became clear that Vajpayee took himself very seriously as a poet. Throughout this meeting, I felt that poetry was perhaps closest to his heart and he had accidentally strayed into politics.
A man steeped in traditional culture, he offered me tea and biscuits and recited three or four poems in his deep, resonant voice. His was the typical Kavi Sammelan style of reciting poetry but his enthusiasm was infectious. A line from one of those poems has stuck in my memory: “Doodh mein daraar pad gayee” (A crack is there in the milk). The poem was written against the background of Khalistani terrorism that was raging in Punjab at that time and Vajpayee was underlining the common heritage of the Hindus and Sikhs.
Later, when his collection of poetry Meri Ikyavan Kavitaen (My Fifty-one Poems) was published in June 1995, this line became the title of the poem and I noticed that Vajpayee had used it three times at the end of every stanza so as to emphatically make his point, just like a Hindustani classical vocalist who would use a tihai (repeating the same phrase thrice) to enhance the musicality of his performance. Just to quote a stanza:
Khoon kyon safed ho gaya?
Bhed mein abhed kho gaya.
Baant gaye shaheed, geet kat gaye,
Kaleje mein kataar gad gayee
Dhoodh mein daraar pad gayee
(Why does blood turn white?
Unity is lost in discord
Martyrs are fought over, songs chopped off
A dagger pierces the heart,
A crack there is in the milk)
Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s grandfather Shyamlal Vajpayee was a Sanskrit scholar and father Krishna Bihari Vajpayee was an established poet of Brajbhasha and Khariboli Hindi. Atal Bihari also began to try his hand at composing verses using the traditional prosodic forms of ‘Saviayan’ and ‘Kavitta’. Later, he also became a popular Kavi Sammelan poet. Although in his early teens he became a member of the Arya Kumar Sabha, youth wing of the Hindu reformist organisation Arya Samaj, his family was devoted to the Hindutva ideals of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Therefore, he too joined it as a swayamsevak and remained one till the end of his life.
Meri Ikyavan Kavitaein,
Atal Bihar Vajpayee,
Kitabghar Prakashan, 1995
Atal Bihar Vajpayee,
Kitabghar Prakashan, 1995
His oratory skills and literary talent drew the attention of the Sangh leadership and when it decided to bring out a magazine Rashtradharma, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the obvious choice for its editor. Similarly, he became the first editor of the RSS Hindi organ Panchjanya when it began its publication in 1948. He also edited Hindi dailies Swadesh and Veer Arjun and literary journal Chetna.
After joining politics as a full-time worker, the poet in Vajpayee receded into the background and the world took notice of his poetic personality when his book Kaidi Kaviray Ki Kundaliyan, a collection of his poems written inside the prison during the Emergency, was published when he had become the country’s external affairs minister in the Janata Party government headed by Morarji Desai.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee wrote two different kinds of poetry. In one, he comes through as a very sensitive, humane poet who has a tender heart and wants to express his experiences of love, longing, separation, compassion and universal humanity. In the other, he is a fiery Hindu leader who looks at everything with hurt Hindu pride and an intense desire for making “historic wrongs” right and taking revenge. What he wrote as a student of Class X remained his life-long motto: “Hindu tan-man, Hindu jeevan, rag-rag Hindu mera parichay” (My body and heart are Hindu, my life is Hindu, my entire existence is Hindu and it is my sole identity).
As a poet, he dreamt of an ‘Akhand Bharat’ and of conquering Gilgit and other areas to undo the Partition. His poem “Gagan mein laharta hai Bhagwa hamara” remembers the jauhar of Padmini and wants to see the Bhagwa flag being hoisted on everything. Being a moderate, his methods were different. But, the ultimate goal in which he believed and for which he worked all his life was not very different from that of the present rulers.
Kuldeep Kumar is a senior journalist who writes on politics and culture.
New Delhi: Atal Bihari Vajpayee was always accessible, always the affable “mukhota” (mask) of the party, polite and pleasant to even those journalists who may have written something that he did not like and who did not share his world view shaped by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. When he did not want to answer a question put to him, he would turn it into a joke with a wonderful aside.
“You see Vajpayeeji is like a Ceylonese doll, you punch it from the right, it sways but soon stands up straight, you punch it from the left, it wobbles, but stands up straight again.” This is how a senior BJP leader once described Vajpayee’s ability to come out unscathed from any embarrassing political event that would ordinarily besmirch the reputation of even a seasoned politician.
But there should be no mistake that Vajpayee was the quintessential RSS swayamsevak who would not flinch from doing the organisation’s bidding. He was shrewd enough not to be present in Ayodhya when the Babri Masjid was razed to the ground on December 6, 1992. A day before the demolition, he spoke in Lucknow suggesting that the Supreme Court had allowed the leveling of some of the areas at the disputed site. Some people believe that he had actually instigated karsewaks to carry out the demolition the next day with his play on words.
As he himself famously said in September 2000 while addressing the Overseas Friends of the BJP on Staten Island in New York, one day he would not be Prime Minister, but “once a swayamsevak always a swayamsevak” he would remain. With that one sentence, he quelled all criticism within the Sangh parivar about his supposedly liberal ways and made it clear that he was no less than any other in his loyalty to the RSS.
This resolve had earlier been put into practice when the BJP broke away from the post-Emergency Janata Party government on the issue of dual membership of the Janata Party and the RSS. Jana Sangh members led by Vajpayee quit the government and gave up power rather than repudiate their membership of the RSS.
It is well documented that Vajpayee planned to remove Narendra Modi as chief minister of Gujarat at the party’s national conclave in Goa after the 2002 riots in the state. But he was thwarted by the deft footwork of L.K. Advani and Arun Jaitley. In a preemptive move, Modi offered to resign and Advani made sure that almost the entire national executive rose up as one rejecting this offer and backed it with a party resolution. Vajpayee had to retreat. But in doing so he appealed to the most crass anti-Muslim sentiment within the party and the RSS.
That evening, at a public meeting in Goa, he delivered the most communal speech I ever heard him make in 20 years of covering the party. Muslims everywhere make trouble and cannot live in peace with their neighbours, he said, speaking as he did after the most gruesome riots in Gujarat. His speech led to a privilege motion again him, but he turned the situation around by the explanation that he was only referring to “some” Muslims who have a “jihadi mentality”.
Politicians from across the political spectrum do not tire of describing Vajpayee as the right man in the wrong party, a man who by nature was a secular humanist and a liberal but who had somehow become entangled in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a rightwing fascist organisation.
Nothing in fact could be further from the truth. Vajpayee was as much committed to Hindutva and to Golwalkar’s vision of Muslims and Christians being allowed to live in India as second class citizens at the “mercy” of the Hindu majority community as Prime Minister Narendra Modi or the current RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat are. He wrote a poem, ‘Hindu Tan Man Hindu Jeevan’, underlying his very identity – his body and soul – as being nothing but Hindu. That poem, which had been initially put on the party website after he became prime minister was quickly taken down specifically at his instruction, perhaps because as prime minister of a coalition government he did not want to court a fresh controversy.
Having said that, it is a fact that Vajpayee was accessible and pleasant to journalists, even those who were critical of him. In this he presented a stark contrast to Narendra Modi, who, it would seem, finds it hard to accept, forget or forgive criticism. Columnist and television anchor Karan Thapar has in his recent book written about the attempt made by him to get his professional relationship with Modi back on track (after a disastrous interview where Modi walked out), but to no avail. And we have the recent exit of journalists from the ABP television channel to underscore the point that Modi does not take kindly to criticism.
Of course, Modi was accessible to journalists when he was party general secretary here, just before he went to Gujarat in 2001 as chief minister. But in Gujarat he quickly did away with the regular media briefing with journalists.
A journalist once asked Vajpayee about the BJP’s foreign policy – this was before he became prime minister – and he dismissed the question with one sentence: “Bomb Pakistan, Destroy Pakistan.”
That was said in jest, but meant seriously. The indication was that his party was obsessed by Pakistan and had only one passionate foreign policy point – destruction of Pakistan. Of course, after he became prime minister, he famously wanted to extend a “hand of friendship” to Pakistan, undertook the Lahore bus ‘yatra’, and organised the Agra summit with General Pervez Musharraf that Advani made sure ended disastrously.
When the media approached him for his comments on the party’s Gujarat crisis caused by the Shankarsinh Waghela rebellion against chief minister Keshubhai Patel in 1995, he advised us to “ask Advaniji”, clearly enjoying the discomfiture of the party under Advani’s leadership.
Vajpayee knew how to bide his time when he could not have his way within the party. In 1999, he could not appoint Jaswant Singh as his finance minister because the RSS bosses objected. He accepted Yashwant Sinha, but a few years down the line brought in Jaswant Singh.
Finally, it was perhaps K.N. Govindacharya who aptly described Vajpayee – although he consistently denied authorship – as the “mukhota”, the mask that is useful to the RSS in its long march to power, a “mask” that gave it legitimacy by bringing in as allies a whole plethora of regional parties from the socialist minded Biju Janata Dal and Janata Dal (United) to the like minded Akali Dal and the Shiv Sena, and to the AIADMK and the Telugu Desam.
Vajpayee never forgave Govindacharya for that remark, but patiently waited for the right time. And then, Govindacharya was banished, never to come back. The Ceylonese doll stood upright again.
Neena Vyas covered the Bharatiya Janata Party for years for The Hindu.