Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Center for Contemporary South Asia

Modi needs a Vajpayee

January 3, 2013

Professor Ashutosh Varshney’s latest Indian Express column addresses the national significance of Narendra Modi’s third consecutive victory in the recent Gujarat Assembly Elections. Drawing on the similarities of Modi’s achievement and the meteoric rise of L.K. Advani in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Varshney suggests that as Advani found in Atal Bihari Vajpayee an ideologically moderate counterpart, for Modi to rise nationally, he needs a Vajpayee or must become one himself. Read the full text.