Atal Bihari Vajpayee (25 December 1924 – 16 August 2018) was an Indian politician and statesman who served three terms as India’s tenth Prime Minister. He served a full term from 1998 to 1999, then from 1999 to 2004. He was a member of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a voluntary Hindu nationalist group. He was the first Indian prime minister to serve a full term without being a member of the Indian National Congress. He was also a famous poet and writer.
He has been a member of the Indian Parliament for over 50 years and has been elected to the House of Representatives, Lok Sabha, ten times and the Senate, Rajya Sabha, twice. He was a member of parliament in Lucknow and retired from active duty in 2009 due to ill health. He was one of his founding members of Bharatiya Janathan (BJS) and from 1968 he was its chairman until 1972. The BJS merged with several other parties to form the Janata Party, which won the 1977 general election. In March 1977, Vajpayee was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in Prime Minister Morarji Desai’s cabinet. He resigned in 1979 and the Janata alliance soon collapsed. A former member of BJS, he formed BJP in 1980, with Vajpayee as its first president.
During his tenure as Prime Minister, India conducted the Pokhran II nuclear test in 1998. Vajpayee took a bus to Lahore to meet with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to improve diplomatic relations with Pakistan. After the Kargil War with Pakistan in 1999, he worked with his President Pervez Musharraf to try to restore his ties and invited him to India for a summit in Agra.
In 2014, Narendra Modi’s government declared Vajpayee’s birthday, December 25, as Good Governance Day. In 2015, He was awarded Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honor, by President Mukherjee. He passed away in 2018 from an age-related illness.
Vajpayee was born on December 25, 1924 in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh into a Brahmin Hindu family. His mother was Krishna Devi and his father was Krishna Bihari Vajpayee. His father was a school teacher in his hometown. His grandfather, Shyam Lal Vajpayee, had migrated from his ancestral village Bateshwar in the Agra district of Uttar Pradesh to Morena near Gwalior.
