Newsmaker of the Year 2003: Atal Bihari Vajpayee is an embodiment of positive leadership

Men don't make history. Not always. History makes use of them. Quite often. Nations are redeemed in their dreams. Nations have gone asunder in their fantasies. They are leaders as events, and they happen unannounced, as if their arrival is an inevitability that cannot be postponed by the truisms of the day.

As their passage through the aspirations and anxieties of a people becomes a performance in renewal, paradigms are punctured, stereotypes are shattered, dogmas declassified, and on their footprints lie the first notations of a new coda of national rhapsody.

They are cartographers of destiny. The chosen ones. Like Atal Bihari Vajpayee. There he is, alone in reassuring stillness, and behind him spreads 2003 as a fresh memory of national well being: a year that brought India from the backyard of hate to the forefront of healing, from the stagnant bazaar to a new Sensex sensation, from the banality of political greed to the fairness of punishment.

A year that bears the indelible stamp of Vajpayee, the unifier-in-chief in a country where Partition has graduated from being a fact in history to a state of the national mind. In 2003, though, the mind of Vajpayee prevailed. The day of the active interventionist? No. His patented pause has come to signify a new doctrine of passivity in political managemen

Newsmaker 2003 advertisement ❮❯ Read Full Story