Vinay Sitapati is a political scientist and author of Half Lion, a biography of former Indian Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao. His new boo...
Vinay Sitapati is a political scientist and author of Half Lion, a biography of former Indian Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao. His new book, Jugalbandi: The BJP before Modi, tells the story of India’s Hindu nationalist movement through the careers of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and former party president Lal Krishna Advani. In addition to the portraits of the BJP stalwarts, the book also makes several arguments for why the BJP and the Hindu nationalist movement is so successful today.
Jugalbandi has made headlines in part for details about Vajpayee’s personal life and how the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh handled that and Sitapati’s analysis of the culpability of Vajpayee and Advani in the Babri Masjid demolition. Its broader argument suggests that the resilience of the BJP comes from the RSS worldview of prizing Hindu unity above all, and uses the up-and-down careers of the two men as a way of portraying how the party went from pariah to the dominant political force in India.
I spoke to Sitapati about how he came to study these two pivotal figures of independent Indian history, how his “Hindu unity” thesis has played out in the past, and what it may tell us about the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah era of the BJP.
What made...
