- Lived:
- born Gwalior, 25 December 1924, to a family from Bateshwar in the United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh); the life happened in Parliament and on the road — Balrampur, Lucknow, Delhi — and ended in Delhi, 16 August 2018
- Field:
- politics and Hindi oratory — Jana Sangh, then the BJP he founded; Prime Minister of India for 13 days in 1996 and from 1998 to 2004; a published Hindi poet all the while
- The Big Idea:
- In a democracy, patience is a strategy. He lost for forty years without turning bitter, then proved that a coalition of two dozen quarrelling parties could govern India — and used that fragile mandate for the biggest strategic and infrastructure decisions since Nehru.
- In their words:
- "Andhera chhatega, suraj niklega, kamal khilega" — "the darkness will lift, the sun will rise, the lotus will bloom" (to the BJP's founding session, Bombay, 1980, when the party had every reason to believe none of it)
- If you remember one thing:
- The same twelve months held a nuclear test and a bus to Lahore — deterrence in one hand, an offered handshake in the other — and the man holding both was a poet who had spent four decades losing elections without once losing the respect of the people who beat him.