Atal Bihari Vajpayee

"Few people have noticed that there have been no communal riots in India since Vajpayee became prime minister. Remember the Congress record of one major communal riot every few months? Meerut, Maliana, Bhagalpur, Moradabad, Mumbai. Riot after riot after riot. Nobody punished. No action taken against policemen and officials guilty of criminal administrative failure. So the absence of communal violence should have gone in Vajpayees favour. It did not again - because perceptions have been more important than reality."

"I have a vision of India: an India free of hunger and fear, an India free of illiteracy and want. I dream of an India that is prosperous, strong and caring. An India, that regains a place of honour in the comity of great nations."

"No matter how many concessions A.B. Vajpayee offered during his 13-day tenure as Prime Minister in search of a majority, no matter how hard he kicked his Kashmiri refugee supporters in the groin by promising to preserve Art. 370, no matter how sincerely he condemned the Ayodhya demolition, he did not get a single undertaking from a non-"communal" parliamentarian to support the government during the confidence vote. No matter how deep the BJP leaders crawl in the dust begging for certificates of good secular conduct from their enemies, this has never yielded them anything except contempt. But so far, everything indicates that they can be counted upon to continue in the same direction."

"The Indian and Western elite did not regard any of Nehru’s successors as ‘thinking’ leaders. Indira Gandhi tried hard to win over India’s intellectual elite, but the Emergency broke a nascent link. When men like P.N. Haksar and P.N. Dhar were hounded out of her inner circle, India’s intellectuals deserted her. Rajiv Gandhi was never taken seriously by this elite. Narasimha Rao may have been a scholar in his own right, but he was an ‘outsider’ to India’s metropolitan elite. In Andhra Pradesh, among the Telugu-speaking elite he was known as an ashtavadhani, a literary master. But Delhi’s elite tended to conflate his intellectual achievements with the fact that he was fluent in many languages. Vajpayee too was a highly regarded poet. Indeed, Rao and Vajpayee enjoyed the company of intellectuals and could count many professors among their friends. But in the snobbish world of the metropolitan elite, an Oxbridge type like Dr Singh was regarded as a class apart from these home-grown politician-intellectuals."

"There are some people who are telling the Muslims not to vote for the BJP whereas the truth is that the BJP has never worked against any minority, including the Muslims."

"India is not a piece of land, but a living entity."