Indian Foreign Policy by Christopher Ogden

Author:Christopher Ogden
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Profile 6.1 Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924–present)

India’s first non-Congress affiliated prime minister Atal Vajpayee led the 1998–2004 NDA coalition via his leadership of the right-wing BJP. A career politician first elected to the Lok Sabha in 1957, he was imprisoned during the 1975–7 Emergency and was minister of external affairs under the 1977–80 Janata Party government, during which time he visited China in an attempt to generate better relations, and encouraged a secret visit to India by Israel’s Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan. Such events were precursors to much of India’s foreign policy under his future leadership, when better relations with both these states (and many others) were significantly accelerated. Consolidating many of the policies undertaken by Narasimha Rao, his conduct of the 1998 nuclear tests, rapprochement with China and complete step-change in Indo-US relations all indicated how he ‘radically transformed India’s strategic status in the international community’.14 These developments asserted India’s great-power ambitions to the world in a more proactive manner than in any previous generation. Renowned for his consensus building, Vajpayee’s further legacy would be the solid placement of pragmatism as the central theme of India’s twenty-first-century foreign policy approach, as well as establishing the BJP as India’s de facto opposition party. In recent years, Vajpayee has vied with Indira Gandhi as India’s most popular prime minister in national polls.

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