Literary portraits of two political giants from opposite ends of the globe have caught the attention of serious readers. The books in question are Joe Biden: American Dreamer, written by Evan Osnos, and Vajpayee: The Years That Changed India, by Shakti Sinha.
Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee rose to his position without the aid of a political pedigree or patronage. His singularity as a leader was formed in the furnace of his life, fraught with certain contradictions—he was a man with a modest background, who brought enormous reforms in the economy and polity of the nation and dared to conceive of great developmental projects like the Golden Quadrilateral network; a man with both the sensitivity of a poet and the steely resolve which was required to conduct the Pokhran-II nuclear tests; a sharp diplomat who transformed India’s dynamic with the US, but also an unrelentingly patriotic Indian.
On the other end, Biden’s life has also been forged out of much complexity. The new president-elect of the United States of America, Biden, who has been termed as ‘the luckiest man and the unluckiest man’, has made his way through a political career spanning five decades, and several personal tragedies. However, his hardships and victories are what have made him into a remarkable political figure, one on whom all eyes are set now, as he prepares to assume the pedestal of POTUS.
In Vajpayee: The Years that Changed India, Shakti Sinha takes a close look at the political challenges which Vajpayee faced in his first term as Prime Minister and gives readers a glimpse of him as a decision maker who brought lasting strategic and economic reforms to India. Sinha, who worked with Vajpayee very closely for three-and-a-half years in the 1990s, as secretary to the Leader of Opposition (1996-97) and as his Private Secretary (1998-99), knits his close association with the former PM into his narrative and provides an insider’s view into Vajpayee’s work and philosophies.
Meanwhile, Osnos, National Book Award winner and staff writer with the esteemed The New Yorker, uses his experience as a keen journalist and political observer to paint an intricate portrait of Joe Biden. He blends up-close journalism and broader context, drawing on interviews with Biden’s family members, friends, opponents, advisors, activists and associates – including former president Barack Obama—to capture the character of Biden as some deeply flawed, but fired by a strong resolve and tempered by deep empathy for others.
Both biographical works incisively examine the lives and rise to power of two extraordinary political leaders: Vajpayee, who was a politician unmatched by any other in contemporary Indian politics, and Biden, who has taken centre stage at an interesting turn in history, after a dramatic election, no less. While Joe Biden: American Dreamer hit the stands in late October, Vajpayee: The Years That Changed India is scheduled for a release on 25 December this year, on Vajpayee’s 96th birth anniversary.