The following is an excerpt from Abhishek Choudhary's Believer's Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right's Path to Power, 1977-2018 (Picador India, July 2025).

Even in late March 2002, after a month of riots, half a dozen people were getting killed in Gujarat every day. Vajpayee frequently called up Modi, often late in the night, for updates, advice, and rebukes. But his ire was not personal. He knew the failure was a mix of Modi’s deliberate administrative inefficiency and the Sangh Parivar’s planned vendetta. He hated Modi for strengthening himself by polarizing the atmosphere in Gujarat, though he was perfectly aware of the Sangh affiliates’ intricate tapestry on the ground. Had Modi not allowed the local BJP–VHP– Bajrang Dal cadres to vent their anger, he risked becoming unpopular among his peers.

But soon everyone – eight of the NDA’s twenty-three allies, opposition, media, civil society – publicly demanded Modi’s head. Vajpayee thought it prudent to rehabilitate him in Delhi. He flirted with the idea of swapping Modi and his fellow Gujarati, Kashiram Rana, the textiles minister. (Talking to Delhi journalists in public, Modi had, in the recent past, mocked Rana as a ‘maans khaane waala’ – a meat-eater – not sufficiently self-aware that most Delhi journalists ate meat too, and what worked as a great joke in Gujarat didn’t land nearly as well in the national capital.)

Simultaneously, however, a four-member team was meeting every week at 7 RCR – Vajpayee, Advani, Kushabhau Thakre, Madan Das Devi – to discuss the matter. The other three disagreed. The party had lost all major assembly polls. Gujarat was the last bastion, awaiting polls in less than a year. Firing Modi would be a top-down decision, which would pit the centre against the local cadres, worsening the confusion on the ground. Instead, a mid-way solution might be to call for early elections. There seemed to be a Hindu resurgence at work, and they calculated that the party would massively benefit. Winning the POTO vote on 26 March proved that he could easily survive the exodus of an ally or two. Vajpayee still wanted to play safe and replace Modi.

The prime minister was to make a week-long foreign trip in early April 2002. Partly out of the anxiety that he might be grilled abroad about evading his executive responsibilities, he decided to visit the riot-torn state. In preparation, Vajpayee summoned Modi to explain why the rehabilitation had been sluggish. On 27 March, while Modi made a PowerPoint presentation at 7 RCR, Vajpayee sat with a pout.

He snubbed the unflappable chief minister when the latter defended himself, claiming he had no funds to build houses for the victims whose homes had been burnt and were now living in the relief camps. Well, raise money from private agencies, the boss rebutted, like Patel had for the earthquake victims. Modi complained of exaggerated media reports. Vajpayee countered that he was not bothered so much about media or opposition, but what should he tell the NDA allies who enquired why the killings had not stopped. Advani sat by awkwardly.

The prime minister landed in Ahmedabad on the morning of 4 April. Three helicopters flew his delegation to Godhra, where the remains of the S6 coach lay near an abandoned building in the railway yard. Vajpayee climbed into the coach using a special wooden chair. He walked through the coach with a stiff face. Only Modi followed his boss into the coach, his calm face concealing the awkwardness of the occasion. On return, the helicopters landed at a football ground near the Kankaria relief camp in Ahmedabad, the majority of whose inhabitants were Hindus. This quickly done, Vajpayee left for the Shah-e-Alam camp.

Modi had never visited Shah-e-Alam, the largest of all relief camps, sheltering Muslims. The PMO had rejigged Vajpayee’s itinerary the previous evening to include it. Vajpayee entered to find a 4,000-strong crowd – miserable, grieving, and agitated – waiting for him. Among the first things he heard was a slogan directed at the chief minister: ‘Modi – haaye, haaye!’ As Vajpayee caressed a five-year-old orphan’s head, a young man pointed at Modi and screamed: ‘He is the killer.’ Another victim who had lost six members of his family broke down, saying the attacking mob had said they had been ordered by the government: ‘Upar se hukum hai.’ Yet another one stooped to touch Vajpayee’s feet, begging him to stop the violence. They were whisked away. His voice choked and eyes welled up, Vajpayee addressed the crowd, asking half to himself: ‘Have satanic forces overtaken humanity?’ He promised, amid applause, that the refugee camps would continue as long as necessary, and the government would rehabilitate them all; and that widows, orphans, and the destitute would receive money as part of relief packages.

The visit was to be wrapped up with a press conference at Ahmedabad airport. Asked whether he was considering a change of guard in the state, Vajpayee responded: ‘I don’t think so.’ To another question, Vajpayee answered that Hindus were capable of safeguarding themselves: ‘It is the minorities who need protection.’ The PMO had planted the ‘one last question’ on a friendly scribe. She asked if Vajpayee had a message for Modi sitting on his left. Vajpayee paused for a few seconds before replying that he ‘would want the chief minister to adhere to rajdharma’. He took another long pause, then added: ‘Rajdharma – this word is imbued with meanings. I adhere to this principle too, have been trying to.’ Modi feigned a smile but was beginning to look embarrassed. The prime minister went on: ‘A king cannot treat his subjects unequally – not on the basis of birth, or caste or religion.’

Unable to fight his urge to stay quiet, Modi retorted that he was doing his job rather fine: ‘Hum bhi wahi kar rahe hain, saheb.’ The crowd chuckled at his audacious response. Vajpayee closed the press interaction with an oblique, half-sarcastic remark, which could be interpreted in whichever way: ‘I am certain Narendrabhai is doing exactly that.’

This exchange is often invoked as a mark of Vajpayee’s liberalism. It was at best an executive head’s pusillanimous appeal. It proved that Vajpayee was admitting Modi’s culpability but he just could not find the courage to sack him. Here was a crafty patriarch balancing his contradictory loyalties, hoping to prolong his survival in office. If the prime minister felt embarrassed by his subordinate’s audacity, he had only his ego to swallow.

As he sat aboard his flight to Singapore, Vajpayee feared being humiliated abroad. That the cursed place was not the Hindi heartland, rather India’s fastest-growing state, could scare away potential investors. By the time he landed, he had found an answer. In a post-9/11 world, it was easier to fix the causality: India’s communal problems were a consequence of a global jihadi network. He felt further encouraged after his hosts informed him that the Al-Qaeda tentacles had touched Singapore, and that they had recently arrested a dozen-odd suspects.

The second leg of his trip, Singapore to Cambodia, was time-travel from the future into the past. His most significant engagement was signing an agreement to restore the Ta Prohm Temple in the Angkor Wat complex. Walking with the help of a stick, he took in the remnants of the old Hindu state of Kamboj, some of whose sky-high temples constructed a millennia ago still survived.

While the prime minister was away, the Sangh Parivar carried out a fierce whisper campaign: Modi had to be defended at all costs; Vajpayee was too out of sync with the party’s dominant mood, too old in any case, and had led the party into one electoral mishap after the other. He had entered a fifth year of office: maybe he should demit in favour of Advani.

The morning after he returned, he left for the national executive meet in Goa, where he had to formally deliver the verdict on Modi. Brajesh Mishra had arranged for the senior ministers to travel in Vajpayee’s plane. Just before landing in Panaji, Advani agreed to ask Modi to offer – though only as roleplay – his resignation. At the national executive that afternoon, everyone played by the script. Though visibly tense, Modi rose to make a passionate defence of his conduct in the aftermath of Godhra. At the end, he offered his head. Suddenly, most of the 175-odd members gathered there began a chorus in his support. It was a stage-managed decision to be sure, so much so that even the Gujarat chief minister’s sworn foes – Keshubhai Patel, Pramod Mahajan – trimmed their sail and vigorously backed him. Even so, Vajpayee was surprised by the force of Modi’s backing. The BJP president Jana Krishnamurthi announced that the final decision would be discussed at 8 p.m., after the prime minister returned from a rally he was to speak at in Panaji. His authority fading, Vajpayee chose to fall in line.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.