On August 16, India's former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee died at the age of 93, after a prolonged illness.
He took office thrice - in 1996 he resigned his minority government knowing it would lose a trust vote. In 1998 he lost a dramatic trust vote in Parliament by a single vote. In 1999 after yet another election, he formed a government that served out a full term.
He will be most remembered for:
* Re-establishing political stability in India after the post-Cold War political and economic tumult in India that saw several short-lived governments.
* Ending the de facto one party state that India was for half a century under the Congress Party.
* Vajpayee was the first non-Congress PM to rule a full 5 year term. All governments since have served out full terms.
* Ending India's decades long policy of nuclear ambiguity by conducting a series of nuclear explosions and establishing a strategic forces command. Today, India acknowledges an arsenal of air-delivered bombs, rail and road mobile IRBMs and ICBMs, as well as a submarine based nuclear missile platform.
* Expanding economic reforms, establishing the Golden Quadrilateral and NSEW highway system in a country that had no quality roads.
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- Revelation
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Re: RIP Atal Bihari Vajpayee
BarfBag wrote:* Ending India's decades long policy of nuclear ambiguity by conducting a series of nuclear explosions and establishing a strategic forces command. Today, India acknowledges an arsenal of air-delivered bombs, rail and road mobile IRBMs and ICBMs, as well as a submarine based nuclear missile platform.
That, and you guys have launched Vindaloo at the world too!
I don't know which I fear more.
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- ElPistolero
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Re: RIP Atal Bihari Vajpayee
One of the great Indian PMs, and a poet to wit.
He and Jaswant Singh were the architects of India's emergence as an international power in the late 1990s/2000s.
Like Jaswant Singh and Yashwant Sinha, he belonged to the kinder, gentler, inclusive, unifying strand of Indian nationalism- the one that saw all Indians as equal, regardless of religion. Good thing he retired when he did; his utter lack of sympathy for the more virulent strands of Hindu nationalism wouldnt have gone well with the social media morons who make the most noise these days.
He and Jaswant Singh were the architects of India's emergence as an international power in the late 1990s/2000s.
Like Jaswant Singh and Yashwant Sinha, he belonged to the kinder, gentler, inclusive, unifying strand of Indian nationalism- the one that saw all Indians as equal, regardless of religion. Good thing he retired when he did; his utter lack of sympathy for the more virulent strands of Hindu nationalism wouldnt have gone well with the social media morons who make the most noise these days.