Top of His Game

Aft

er Atal Bihari Vajpayee resolved a half-century of animosity with China on a state visit to Beijing last month, the Indian Prime Minister's traveling press pack tried valiantly to find some balancing spin. Settling a dispute over India's eastern border with Tibet was all well and good, said a reporter at a press conference in Beijing, but what about India's most famous foreign resident, the Dalai Lama? A junior correspondent queried whether the aging Prime Minister would be around to complete New Delhi's rapprochement with Beijing. Another contrasted China's soaring economic progress with India's bureaucracy-bound growth. Vajpayee held up his hands and grinned at his last inquisitor. "Give me another five years," he said. "We'll get there."

While it may stretch the limits of adolescence to anoint a 78-year-old as Asia's new comeback kid, there's little doubt that India's once fading leader has returned with a bang. Abroad, he's never been so well received: before clinching the landmark deal with China, Vajpayee made a whirlwind tour of Russia, Germany and France for bilateral talks on the sidelines of this summer's G-8 summit. For the third time in his six-year term, he's expending political capital to try to make peace with neighboring Pakistan. At home, Vajpayee's star has never been higher. The opposition Congress Party is asleep on its benches. Last month Vajpayee quashed a leadership challenge from within his own Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by supporters of hard-line Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani. Even more bold, Vajpayee has drafted a moderate Hindu leader to come up with a compromise to one of the longest-running flash points in Indian politics—the decades-old dispute over whether a Hindu temple should be built at a site in Ayodhya where a mosque once stood. The Telegraph newspaper in Calcutta ran the front-page headline hard as diamond, soft as flowers over a picture of a bare-chested Vajpayee depicted as Ram, a Hindu god. One of Vajpayee's detractors on the Hindu right admits, "It is accepted by one and all that Vajpayee is a total win-win man today."

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A year ago the Prime Minister seemed almost crushed by the burdens of office. His health was suffering, the BJP had suffered a string of state election defeats, war with Pakistan was looming and, sensing weakness, Hindu mobs had slaughtered some 2,000 Muslims in the western state of Gujarat. "He just felt down and out," says Times of India political editor Manoj Joshi. A Hindu critic says, "Everybody was doubting how long he would be able to last and saying a change in the leadership was just around the corner." That view was reinforced when Vajpayee promoted Advani to the newly created post of Deputy Prime Minister in 2002.

So what changed? "He suddenly decided he didn't care so much," says Joshi. "He's relaxed and he's confident. And when he's like that, there's no one in India to touch him." Friends of Vajpayee say the Prime Minister's trimmer figure comes from a regimen that has him cutting down on fatty and sugary foods and a new commitment to using the treadmill in his New Delhi bungalow.

To a large degree, Vajpayee's recommandeering of India's political agenda is testament to the shrewdness of the man now acknowledged as one of the country's canniest operators. Vajpayee has played up the image of himself as grandfatherly thinker and poet, and in India the idea of the wise elder, the guru, has a mystique and appeal that cuts across political lines. For Vajpayee, it enables a regal rise above India's noisy democracy. Last year, with his rightist rivals ascendant, Vajpayee more or less retired from public view. But after the fundamentalists reached their high-tide mark last December with the re-election of the ultra-hard-line Narendra Modi as Gujarat's Chief Minister, a chasm opened in the center of Indian politics that only Vajpayee could fill. Last month, when BJP president Venkaiah Naidu suggested that Deputy Prime Minister Advani should lead the party into a general election jointly with Vajpayee, the PM merely had to threaten to resign and Naidu backed down, apologized and offered to relinquish his own post. No one in India wants to be known as the man who brought down a Prime Minister whose approval ratings run at 69%.

The fight with the hard-liners is far from won, and nobody expects quick solutions about Pakistan or Ayodhya. Moreover, Vajpayee's health is still a concern: after visiting China, the Prime Minister canceled all his engagements and went immediately into eye surgery. But if he can sustain his dominance into a general election (due by the end of 2004), Vajpayee will need his health to not only win another term but also to stay on the treadmill of Indian politics long enough to complete a very ambitious agenda.