WHY is Atal Bihari Vajpayee important? The answer seems to lie in the introduction to The Believer’s Dilemma, the recently-released second volume in Abhishek Choudhary’s two-part biography of the sage elder. “Vajpayee, for all his grumbling, helped the RSS and its affiliates function as India’s deep nation,” it says. A vivid — albeit poignant — picture emerges from these words: “In his last public appearance, in 2008, the stroke-battered patriarch allowed himself to be stretchered off to the Parliament House to vote against the Indo-US nuclear deal, whose seeds he had himself sown while in office.”

Amid the maelstrom of Indian politics, Choudhary says, “I locate him in the larger pantheon of Hindu nationalism, and narrate the story by reflecting him in the mirror of other crucial characters.” We asked the author to tell us five things we did not know about the “nuclear statesman”, that the book reveals.