Believer's Dilemma

A. B. Vajpayee and the Hindu Right's Path to Power 1977-2018: Volume 2
The magisterial conclusion to Abhishek Choudhary’s award-winning biography of India’s twelfth prime minister and co-founder of the BJP, Atal Behari Vajpayee.

The definitive, riveting conclusion to the landmark biography of India’s most enigmatic prime minister.

‘Riveting’ Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Foreign Affairs
‘A political biography that reads like a thriller’ Telegraph India
‘Doubles as a history of Hindu supremacism . it won’t be bettered for a long time’ Pankaj Mishra
‘The finest biography of an Indian prime minister that I have read’ Ramachandra Guha
‘An instant classic and a total triumph’ Shruti Kapila

Believer’s Dilemma: Volume 2 delivers the magisterial conclusion to Abhishek Choudhary’s definitive biography of Atal Behari Vajpayee. Combining newly uncovered archival documents with revealing interviews, Choudhary exposes the forces that enabled Vajpayee and the Hindu Right to emerge from the fringes and displace Congress as India’s natural party of power.

Expertly tracing the long road to power, from the Janata experiment – the first non-Congress government and the Hindu Right’s first real taste of power – to the inner workings of Vajpayee’s prime ministership, Choudhary pulls back the curtain on Vajpayee’s reflexive loyalty to his ideological family in moments of crisis, his desperation to conduct nuclear tests and cold pragmatism with Pakistan and China, and his ability to manage an unwieldy thirteen-party coalition while propping India up as a rising global superpower.

This final volume completes a compelling and psychologically revealing look at the Hindu Right, and the patriarch who enabled Narendra Modi’s rise and permanently embedded Hindutva and capitalist aspiration into the national imagination.

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