by SAGARIKA GHOSE
An excerpt from Sagarika Ghose’s biography of Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Saturday, 20 February 1999 was a crisp and sunlit winter day in Delhi. It was a day when a gleaming deep-gold-coloured luxury coach, with the Indian and Pakistani flags and the name of the bus – Sada-e-Sarhad (Call of the Frontier) – painted on its front, rolled towards the border between India and Pakistan. Slowly, it drove towards the Radcliffe Line, that blood-drenched line drawn by retreating British imperialists in 1947 which separated the mortal enemies who had fought three wars.
In the bus sat India’s Prime Minister Vajpayee and twenty-five chosen celebrities, from actors Dev Anand and Shatrughan Sinha to cricketer Kapil Dev, sculptor Satish Gujral, lyricist Javed Akhtar, danseuse Mallika Sarabhai and Akali Dal leader Prakash Singh Badal. Vajpayee was crossing into Pakistan on a bus.
He was inaugurating the Delhi–Lahore bus service, on the invitation of Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. A prime minister from a Hindu nationalist party, head of a government that had just tested nuclear weapons, was journeying towards his Muslim counterpart, the head of a government of an Islamic republic, which had also recently tested the atomic bomb.
It was an act of assertive risk-taking Vajpayeeism, part of the long arc of subcontinental “Nehruvian” peacemaking he had begun as Janata foreign minister.
In November 1998 the BJP had been badly routed in assembly elections. The Congress swept to a record win in Delhi, bringing Sheila Dikshit to power as chief minister; it retained power in Madhya Pradesh, with fifty-one-year-old Digvijay Singh at the helm; and it streaked to a two-thirds majority in Rajasthan, Ashok Gehlot felling BJP stalwart and Vajpayee’s friend Bhairon Singh Shekhawat.
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