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'Misreading Vajpayee as a Nehruvian liberal exaggerates the novelty of the 2014 mandate'

Scroll | October 25, 2025 2:39 PM CST

History moves through a series of events that stack upon one another – timely and mistimed, intentional and accidental, logical and baffling. To understand the present means understanding this stack, something Abhishek Choudhary achieves effectively in Believer’s Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right’s Path to Power, 1977–2018, the sequel to his award-winning Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right, 1924–1977.

To grasp how the Hindu right rose so meteorically in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, one must study former Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s life, a task not yet undertaken with such analytical depth. The text in both books itself is remarkably fluid and compelling, the kind you gobble up rather than simply read. Through a series of messages, emails, and calls, Scroll spoke to Choudhary to understand both the book and his process behind it.

I was fascinated by your prose style. It’s uncommon for political nonfiction to have novel-like touches. It reminded me of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood – and generally of the American New Journalism of the 1960s-’70s. Was that intentional, and could you talk about it in detail?
I should take that as a compliment: thank you. The answer to whether it was intentional is, in most ways, no. In my 20s, I...