This election was also a referendum on whether Vajpayee can carry out those functions. The 20-30 seat majority that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has secured showed that he has a charisma and appeal across the country. But the electorate, it would seem, was not that impressed with his pressing of the nuclear button and shelling Pakistani intruders into submission, two among the 75-year-old Vajpayee's few decisive acts as Prime Minister for the last year and a half. These were the two major issues that the party sought to project as the government's signal achievements during its truncated term. In the last count, however, it is this image of a wise and good man, a man who will weigh all his options before he commits himself and a man who will deliver that has earned the alliance a working majority.

Now, on the verge of becoming Prime Minister for the third time-in May 1996 he led a minority government which lasted 13 days-Vajpayee somehow seems to be in awe of his own good fortune. Quite understandable, considering that less than two decades ago he sat in Parliament with just one member of his party to keep him company, thoroughly lost and facing a political cul-de-sac. At that time he seemed light years away from accomplishing India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's reported prophesy that Vajpayee would one day become Prime Minister.

Among the faithful, Vajpayee commands immense respect and awe. Many senior leaders of the party swear by him. "My victory is not just mine, it is a victory for Vajpayee," said BJP's Sahib Singh Verma, former chief minister of Delhi, who won from Outer Delhi constituency. Chandrababu Naidu, triumphant Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh who leads the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), conceded that the results owed a lot to the image of Vajpayee. It is the type of adulation few political leaders in India command.

In this hour of victory, Vajpayee himself knows that there are hounds sniffing at his heels. Something about the way he has been carrying himself in the last few weeks of the campaign, however, suggests that he is not even bothered. Something about his demeanour tells us that he is happy doing the last lap.

His campaign this time lacked glitter, his famed rhetoric lost its bite and humour. In the last week, when the Priyanka Gandhi Vadra-led Congress campaign in Uttar Pradesh was hogging the headlines, he was left babbling and even reacting to Priyanka's "withering ambush" of the BJP candidate in Rae Bareli constituency. "As Prime Minister he was as avuncular and indecisive. More now than in the past, the feeling has grown that behind his silences and pauses, he lets a whole range of things which he is opposed to, go," Harsh Sethi, author and editor of the high-brow Seminar magazine, told IANS.

It is these silences and the pauses that speak more than his words. It is this lack of firmness and exactitude that helped him remain at the helm of the BJP, it is his conviction not to align himself with the hardcore majoritarian Hindu nationalists within his party that will ultimately mark his exit too. "I am a misfit and sometimes feel misplaced in politics," he once said.

A senior leader of his own party was on record as calling him a "mask". There was truth in what the leader said, for Vajpayee was a mask that the BJP needed. `Masks' normally don't merge with the persona. In Vajpayee's case it has. It is this dichotomy that marked Vajpayee's prime ministership too and prevented him from ruling with a flourish during his 18-month tenure. As Prime Minister he was left managing the contradiction within the coalition and his own party. To his credit he never made bombastic statements, nor resorted to threats, trying till the very end to desperately save his coalition government. At the end of his tenure only two labels hung on him: Pokhran and Kargil, both violent reassertions of a nation ambushed by a fiery neighbour and sought to be tied down by the nuclear brotherhood. The rest of his tenure was words. And pauses in between.

If Vajpayee is to leave a mark on history, he will have to rise above the contradictions of his persona and his 24-party coalition. If his performance earlier is any indication, he could be dragged down by the everyday complexities that mark Indian governance. But then Vajpayee knows the electorate has given him a last chance to prove the skeptics wrong and his admirers right.