The word ‘poetry’ acts like a trigger in some circles of New Delhi where Atal Bihari Vajpayee still rules. “Get me the fat book,” an aide of the former Prime Minister yells out to one of his men. “Which one?” the assistant, clearly still a trainee, asks. “Sa’ab ka kitab,” the aide replies — and a thick volume is reverentially placed in front of him. It’s a coffee-table tome, full of verse interspersed with glossy pictures. The aide thumbs through the book, loudly revelling in the poetry of a modern-day philosopher-king.

“If you really want to understand him, you have to read his poetry,” says the old Vajpayee associate. “What the Arthashastra was to Kautilya, Vajpayee’s poetry is to him,” he says.

For the last six years, though, the pen has mostly been dry. He wrote an occasional poem or two on his birthdays, but the toils of power — along with problems posed by a group of demanding allies and sniping party men — kept him away from his muse.

Vajpayee should have all the time for poetry now. By the middle of June, when he moves out of his official bungalow on Race Course Road to an ex-Prime Minister’s residence on 6A, Krishna Menon Marg, time will not be as elusive as it was during Vajpayee’s two terms as Prime Minister — one short-lived, and the other wilfully curtailed.

Two weeks can truly be a long time in politics. On May 13, the day the Lok Sabha results were announced, Vajpayee was still Prime Minister. He sat at home with some friends, watching the unfurling electoral story on television. “What happened?” he asked one of his oldest aides, Shiv Kumar. “Nothing — they just didn’t vote for us,” Kumar replied.

Vajpayee hasn’t been seen in public since then. There has been a stream of visitors, though — bureaucrats bidding goodbye, new Members of Parliament seeking his blessings, old MPs in search of answers and even would-be Rajya Sabha members looking for support. “I seem to be even busier than before,” Vajpayee said in jest a few days ago when he was presented with his list of appointments for the day.

But those seem to be the last busy moments in Vajpayee’s life. On Tuesday, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will elect its leader in the Lok Sabha. And though some friends of Vajpayee have been urging him to hold on to the mantle of the leader of the party in the Lok Sabha, party insiders stress that the post will go to Lal Krishna Advani. “There is a time for everybody,” says a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP’s parent outfit. “This is the time for Advani,” he stresses.

For the last six years, Vajpayee held the top slot in the government and the parliamentary party while organisation man Advani was his number two. At the Tuesday meeting, party members expect that a titular position, such as the chairman of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), will be bestowed on Vajpayee and Advani will be elected to steer the party in and outside Parliament. “Vajpayeeji will continue to play the role of an elder statesman in the party,” says former minister Arun Jaitley.

The BJP holds that the party will now have to take on a more aggressive role. Advani will work in tandem with party president M. Venkaiah Naidu. The youn-ger lot — Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj and Pramod Mahajan, to name a few — will be more active, while some of the older lot, including Jaswant Singh and Murli Manohar Joshi, will take something of a backseat. And, Vajpayee will be there, somewhere at the top, but not quite within. “Vajpayee will of course have a say on larger policy matters, but is not likely to be involved in micro-issues,” says a party leader. Adds Sanjay Joshi of the RSS, now on deputation to the party: “There will be a new thrust in the BJP.”

Read between the lines, it is clear that Vajpayee is on his way out. “What Vajpayee era?” .K. Advani said at a press conference on Friday when asked if the “Vajpayee era” was over. “Vajpayeeji adopted policies accepted by the party and the NDA which the BJP had forged,” Advani emphasised.

The era, Vajpayee’s associates insist, would have ended even if the NDA won this round, for he had wanted to step down after the end of his tenure as the Prime Minister of the 13th Lok Sabha. He was keen to finish his term, and then go in for elections. But he couldn’t oppose the advancing of polls, because — the associate elaborates — he feared it would give the impression that he was keen to hold on to his chair till the last possible day.

For a man who has in recent times been described as one of the most popular Prime Ministers of all time, the political end has come unexpectedly. In 1998, it was Vajpayee’s pan-Indian image of a genial moderate in the BJP that helped the party cobble a working alliance together. He was universally liked — for he was, after all, the man who made a mean khichdi and liked his fish cooked in the Chinese style. He loved his dogs, painstakingly removed their ticks, reared rabbits and personally buried two when they died in the heat.

For long years, the Vajpayee magic held. “The common man sees him as a sensitive person,” says a Vajpayee watcher. “It is this trait that attracts people to him,” he says.

The former Prime Minister believes that his lasting contribution to modern India’s political history is his ability to get along with others. “The one thing that he is happy about is the fact that he has managed to successfully run a coalition at the Centre,” says a team member.

There has been no public requiem for Vajpayee, but he is said to be happy with a few significant turns that his government took. He launched three initiatives on Pakistan, got India to play in Pakistan and was happy with the way peace was returning to Kashmir. “These were some of the issues that he was most concerned about,” says the team member. Six years ago, when Vajpayee went to Manali for the first time as Prime Minister, Pakistan and Kashmir often came up in his informal discussions with his group.

It was, in many ways, a comfortable term that he served. By the time the elections were announced, his party had won three Assembly elections, the economy was looking up and the Sensex was chirping cheerfully. A Vajpayee camper points out that the former PM was particularly lucky because there were no major catastrophes that pinned him down in the last six years, unlike most of his predecessors who had different things to contend with. Nehru had the 1962 defeat, Indira Gandhi had the Emergency, Rajiv Gandhi had Bofors while Narasimha Rao had Babri Masjid.

Vajpayee, of course, had Gujarat — but the December 2002 election results gave the BJP the feeling that there was little to worry about, electorally speaking. It was, however, the killing fields of Gujarat that deeply dented Vajpayee’s image. Vajpayee, it was hinted time and again, wanted Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi out — but could do little to unseat him. Then in a flipflop that many say has been his leitmotif, Vajpayee went to Goa for a party meeting and publicly accused the Muslim community of intolerance.

Vajpayee’s Goa speech, his critics hold, defines the man — underscoring his wavering positions as well as the inability to stand by a conviction. Vajpayee reached Goa after Singapore, where he had met Lee Kuan Yew. The Singapore nation founder urged the Indian government to take a strong stand on Islamic fundamentalism. “Why do you keep saying religious fundamentalism?” Lee asked Vajpayee. “Why can’t you just call it what it is — Muslim fundamentalism?”

Vajpayee did just that. He reached Goa, and was openly critical of the Muslim community. That very evening, when television channels had started dissecting his words, he realised that he had made a serious mistake. Vajpayee called his advisors and asked them to issue a denial. It was too late for them to do so, and they urged him to wait till the morning. The next day, when he got his first calls from Delhi, he realised that his speech had hit the headlines in the national dailies. “I told you we should have issued a retraction last night,” Vajpayee said to his team.

But that, many say, is the quintessential Vajpayee. Not just caught in a party with which he often vehemently disagrees, but incapable of sticking to his own position. “Some say this is his weakness, the fact that he cannot speak out openly about what he believes in,” says a member of his erstwhile team. “But this is his style — he is like that.”

It was this trait that stopped Vajpayee from saying a word when, after NDA’s defeat, three senior BJP leaders, Sushma Swaraj, Uma Bharti and K.. Govindacharya, launched an aggressive attack on Sonia Gandhi — with Swaraj threatening to shave off her hair if Sonia Gandhi was appointed Prime Minister. “But he seldom speaks out when there is something in the party that he doesn’t believe in. He may initiate a debate on a controversial subject, but he doesn’t take part in it,” a party insider says.

Of course, there have been occasions when Vajpayee has given vent to his displeasure. As Prime Minister, for instance, Vajpayee has not always taken kindly to efforts aimed at undermining him. When party members tried that, Vajpayee ensured that they were suitably penalised.

Some months ago, when Naidu described Advani as a man of steel and Vajpayee as the one for development, the former Prime Minister was greatly displeased about the comparison which seemed to show his deputy off in a better light than him. Naidu was made to apologise and clear his position.

On another occasion, a critical article in Time magazine on Vajpayee’s believed health problems irked him so much that ministers whom the Prime Minister’s Office thought were somehow involved with the write-up were unceremoniously dumped. Earlier still, when party ideologue Govindacharya described Vajpayee as a mask, he was banished from the central headquarters.

Vajpayee’s open detractors — members of the Left, for instance — have always endorsed Govindacharya’s view that Vajpayee’s secular front was just that — a front. Rajendra Prasad of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (Sahmat) issued two booklets on Vajpayee before the elections. One sought to debunk the theory that the RSS and Vajpayee didn’t get along, and the other pulled out records from the archives to maintain that he had informed on his friends to escape a prison term during the Quit India movement.

Prasad recalls the poet W.H. Auden to underline his take on the man. “Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after [wrote Auden]/ And the poetry he invented was easy to understand.../When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,/ And when he cried the little children died in the streets.”

In Vajpayee’s aide’s office, where the walls are lined with books, quite a few of which are by or on Vajpayee, the associate has a poem for every occasion. He zeroes in on a verse Vajpayee had written during the Emergency to make his point.

“Honour lost at busy crossroads [the aide intones in Hindi],/ Knights defeated by pawns,/ Do I make my final move or do I withdraw from battle?/ What road should I go down?”

The visitors’ room in the Prime Minister’s Office seems to have the answer to that. A painting on the ceiling, marking the Hindu way of life, beams down at visitors waiting in the high-domed room on Raisina Hill. The last panel is a depiction of sanyaas — the path that the scriptures urge all good Hindus to follow. And that, clearly, is the road that Atal Bihari Vajpayee has taken.