Atal Bihari Vajpayee

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Atal Bihari Vajpayee (25 December 1924 – 16 August 2018) was an Indian statesman and a poet who served as prime minister of India, from 1998 to 2004, and previously for two weeks in 1996. He was the first non-Congress prime minister to serve a full term in the office. Vajpayee was one of the co-founders and a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He was a volunteer and full-time functionary (pracharak) of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing Hindutva paramilitary volunteer organisation. Vajpayee combined cultural nationalism with political moderation, shaping a distinctive strand of post-Independence Indian conservatism rooted in civilisational identity. Vajpayee represented a current in Hindu nationalism that sought to harmonise cultural identity with democratic pluralism. The longest-serving member of the Indian Parliament and its lower house, the Lok Sabha, Vajpayee was a parliamentarian for over five decades, having been elected ten times to the Lok Sabha...

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