Former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had a sweet rapport with Lucknow.
When I first saw Vajpayee in 1984, I was a student; at that time, I had never thought in my wildest dreams that one day, I would be attending Vajpayee's press conferences as a journalist in Lucknow's Raj Bhawan and he would be prime minister!
Vajpayee believed that there should be a good rapport between two ‘Ps' (press and politicians) and both are sine qua non to each other. Even as a prime minister, whenever Vajpayee visited Lucknow, he made it a point to interact with the press. Not only this, he had good sense of humour that reflected in his political speeches and personal interactions.
In 1984, then prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated and elections were announced. At many places, furious Congress workers resorted to stone pelting in Lucknow and in one such incident, Vajpayee got injured. Because of an injury on his foot, he was limping.
On the same day, Vajpayee had a series of public meetings organised by his party, the BJP, in Lucknow. When he reached to address a public meeting in Jhendewala Park in Lucknow, it was late at night and some BJP workers helped him climb up the podium.
Since Vajpayee had injured his foot, he started delivering his speech sitting in a chair. The initial couple of sentences were full of puns. He said, “Congress has compelled me to address you in a sitting position, because I always put my leg in their arbitrary policies. They do not like this, so they thought that they should break my foot that I do not put my foot in their matters.” And the audience burst into laughter.
Vajpayee represented Lucknow five times in the Lok Sabha. Once after the Kargil war, when Vajpayee had come down to Lucknow as prime minister, he was addressing a press conference in Raj Bhawan.
The hall was packed with scribes and questions were being bombarded at him. In between, a scribe asked about Indian forces not being properly equipped with equipment for fighting at such a high altitude: “What is your comment on this, Atalji?” The question was not very palatable. Vajpayee closed his eyes and suddenly said, “Let us go to have Lucknavi chaat!”
Every one present in the room started laughing and the attention was diverted. This was his acumen to deflect and dilute a question he did not want to answer. Unlike the present-day politicians, who get furious at those question that they do not like. After that, I too covered Vajpayee's activities many times, whenever he visited Lucknow.
During the 2004 general elections coverage, I had an opportunity to visit Balrampur, an eastern UP district, from where Vajpayee had contested elections in the 1950s. His contemporaries recalled an interesting incident, which shows that he was a go-getter kind of leader.
Those days, campaigning was simply devoid of SUVs, choppers and other high-profile means of today. In rural areas, it was mostly done with bicycles, tractors and even bullock carts. During one such campaign, while Vajpayee was in the area, it was found that there was no glue to paste the posters in the villages and time was running out and like today, there were not many shops from where it could be procured quickly.
Vajpayee came up with a novel idea—he asked for cow dung from the villagers to stick the posters on walls of houses from where he was campaigning. Within no time, enough cow dung was arranged and he himself pasted many posters with it.
In 2007, I had a chance to visit Bateshwar, a small town about 70km from Agra, where villagers narrated an incident that shows that how simple a man Vajpayee was. About 40 years ago, when Vajpayee once visited Bateshwar, he was quite thirsty. That time, he was a member of Parliament. He visited a house and asked for some water; when the head of the house started drawing water from the well, Vajpayee offered to draw the water himself. As an MP, too, he did not have an iota of ego.
A very senior BJP leader from Lucknow, Lalji Tandon, who had been Vajpayee's protégé says, “Atalji was a simple man sans ego, but a great politician who never knew to quit.”