Believer's Dilemma: Volume 2 : A. B. Vajpayee and the Hindu Right's Path to Power 1977-2018 - Abhishek Choudhary

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`It won't be bettered for a long time' Pankaj MishraBeliever'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 second 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.