Former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda today mourned the death of AB Vajpayee, saying with his passing a vacuum has been created in polity, as several state leaders joined him in expressing grief. In his condolence message, Gowda said with the death of Vajpayee, the country lost a statesman and politician who believed in the country’s diverse culture. “He was a true parliamentarian.

With his death, a vacuum has been created in polity and end of an era of politics in this country. He was a great orator who refused to attack his opponent personally. He did not allow the House to be disturbed during my tenure as the prime minister for the 11months,” Gowda said.

Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy described Vajpayee as being among a “rare breed” of politicians who lived as per the values they believed in.

“His death has created a vacuum in the political circle of the country,” he said. Quoting a line from Vajpayee’s poem that said “Will never accept defeat, will never be afraid of new challenges”, Kumaraswamy said it was a mirror to his personality. He was a great orator and parliamentarian, he said. Congress’ Karnataka president Dinesh Gundu Rao took to Twitter to condole the death.

“Atal Bihari Vajpayee, one of the most well-respected, loved and broad hearted political statesman India has seen. A towering personality and a great orator. I express my deepest condolences on his passing away. We are all going to miss him,” he tweeted. BJP state president and former chief minister B S Yeddyurappa said it was a great loss to the country, especially BJP, for which he was a leading and guiding spirit.

“Country has lost a great political thinker and a statesman in the death of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee,” Yeddyurappa said in his message.

The former chief minister recalled that Vajpayee’s organizational and political acumen was put to test during his regime when he led the NDA comprising more than 25 parties with political agenda of their own.

“Still the words of Vajpayee at Mumbai plenary session of BJP in 1990 when BJP got only two seats in the Lok Sabha, ‘Andhera Chatega, Suraj Niklega, Kamal Khilega’ (Darkness goes, sunrises and lotus blooms) keeps reminding me of his vision and optimism in politics. This vision and optimism of Vajpayee made the workers and leaders to work harder and Narendra Modi to win the elections 2014 by a thumping majority,” Yeddyurappa said.

Others who expressed grief over the death were deputy chief minister Parameshwara, Congress vice president Eshwar Khandre and BJP Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

In an unprecedented gesture, the government of Mauritius will fly both the Mauritian and Indian national flags at half mast on Friday in honour of former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

“Following the passing away of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the government has decided that both the Mauritius and India flags will remain at half mast from sunrise to sunset on Friday,” a directive issued by the office of Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth said.

“An appeal is also being made to the private sector for ll flags to be flown at half mast during the same period,” it said.

Vajpayee passed away in Delhi on Thursday at the age of 93 after prolonged illness.

Around 68 per cent of Mauritius’s population of nearly 1.3 million are of Indian descent. Many are descendants of Indian indentured labour brought to work on sugarcane plantations on the Indian Ocean island nation in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In a condolence message to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Jugnauth said that Vajpayee “shaped the destiny of India through his bold leadership and his deep-rooted empathy for the common man”.

“Today, as India shines as a beacon of progress and development on the global stage, we cannot forget the strong and able stewardship of Vajpayee,” Jugnauth stated.

“His was a leadership characterised by determination, perseverance, fairness and equity.”

Jugnauth also recalled Vajpayee’s deep affection for Mauritius and its people and said that “we were honoured to receive him in March 2000 as chief guest at the National Day celebrations and whenever he visited Mauritius”.

“Mauritius mourns the loss of a man who stood not only for India but also for Mauritius,” he said.

A four-member delegation from Pakistan will be attending the last rites of former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on Friday, the media reported.

Caretaker Law and Information Minister Ali Zafar, Foreign Office spokesperson Mohammad Faisal and other senior officials from the Law Ministry will represent Pakistan at Vajpayee’s funeral, Geo News reported citing sources.

The delegation will return the same day after attending the funeral, it said.

Vajpayee, 93, had battled poor health for years, and died at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi on Thursday.

His last rites will be performed at 4 p.m. at Smriti Sthal.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who talked to Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on the flood situation on Friday, will travel to the state for an aerial of the affected areas on Saturday.

“Later this evening, I will be heading to Kerala to take stock of the unfortunate situation due to flooding,” Modi tweeted.

“Had a telephone conversation with Kerala Chief Minister just now. We discussed the flood situation across the state and reviewed rescue operations. ”

Modi is expected to land in Thiruvananthapuram by 9 p.m. and will be staying at the Raj Bhavan. He will take an aerial survey of the flood-hit areas on Saturday.

Torrential rains, overflowing rivers and a series of landslides have resulted in the death of nearly 100 people in the state.

Thousands of Muslims from around the world gathered on Friday in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca ahead of the annual Haj pilgrimage.

Pilgrims were praying around the Kaaba at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s most sacred site, where Muslims go each year to perform the Haj, reports Efe news.

Saudi Arabian authorities announced earlier that more than 1.6 million people had arrived in the holy city of Mecca for this year’s Haj, which starts on Sunday.

Minister of Haj and Umrah Mohamed Benten said on Thursday that Qatari pilgrims had reached the kingdom through Kuwait, stressing Qataris were not prevented from performing Haj.

Riyadh has cut all economic and transport links with its smaller neighbour Qatar in June last year over allegations of funding terrorism.

Muslims are expected to perform the Haj, one of Islam’s five pillars, at least once in their lifetime, provided they are fit enough and have the financial means to do so.

He was a man of moderation in a fraternity of jingoistic nationalists; a peace visionary in a region riven by religious animosity; and a man who believed in India’s destiny and was ready to fight for it.

Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee (93), who died on Thursday, will go down in history as a person who tried to end years of hostility with Pakistan and put development on the front burner of the country’s political agenda. He was also the first non-Congress Prime Minister to complete a full five-year term.

Even though he lived the last 13 years of his life in virtual isolation, dogged by debilitating illnesses and bedridden, he has left an enduring legacy for the nation and the region where he was much loved and respected across the political spectrum and national boundaries, including in Pakistan.

In the tumultuous period he presided over the destiny of the world’s largest democracy, Vajpayee stunned the world by making India a declared nuclear state and then almost went to war with Pakistan before making peace with it in the most dramatic fashion. In the process, his popularity came to match that of Indira Gandhi, a woman he admired for her guts even as he hated her politics.

He also became the best-known national leader after Indira Gandhi and her father Jawaharlal Nehru.

After despairing for years that he would never become Prime Minister and was destined to remain an opposition leader all his life, he achieved his goal, but only for 13 days, from May 16-28, 1996, after his deputy, L.K. Advani, chose not to contest elections that year.

His second term came on March 19, 1998, and lasted 13 months, a period during which India stunned the world by undertaking a series of nuclear tests that invited global reproach and sanctions.

Although his tenure again proved short-lived, his and his government’s enhanced stature following the world-defying blasts enabled him to return as Prime Minister for the third time on October 13, 1999, a tenure that lasted a full five-year term.

When finally he stepped down in May 2004, after an election that he was given to believe he would win, it marked the end of a long and eventful political career spanning six decades.

Vajpayee had gone into these elections riding a personality cult that projected him as a man who had brought glory to the nation in unprecedented ways. The BJP’s election strategy rested on seeking a renewed mandate over three broad pillars of achievement that the government claimed — political stability in spite of the pulls and pressures of running a multi-party coalition; a “shining” economy that saw a dizzying 10.4 percent growth in the last quarter of the previous year; and peace with Pakistan that changed the way the two countries looked at each other for over 50 years.

The results of the elections could not have come as a greater shock to a man who was hailed for his achievements and who was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 influential men of the decade.

Success didn’t come easily to the charismatic politician, who was born on Christmas Day in 1924 in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, into a family of moderate means. His father was a school teacher and Vajpayee would later recall his early brush with poverty.

He did his Masters in Political Science, studying at the Victoria College in Gwalior and at the DAV College in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, where he first contested, and lost, elections. He began his professional career as a journalist, working with Rashtradharma, a Hindi monthly, Panchjanya, a Hindi weekly, and two Hindi dailies, Swadesh and Veer Arjun. By then he had firmly embraced the ideals of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS).

But even as he struggled to win electoral battles, his command over Hindi, the lingua franca of the North Indian masses, his conciliatory politics and his riveting oratory brought him into public limelight.

His first entry into Parliament was in 1962 through the Rajya Sabha, the upper house. It was only in 1971 that he won a Lok Sabha election. He was elected to the lower house seven times and to the Rajya Sabha twice.

Vajpayee spent months in prison when Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency rule in June 1975 and put her political opponents in jail. When the Janata Party took office in 1977, dethroning the Congress for the first time, he became the foreign minister.

The lowest point in his career came when he lost the 1984 Lok Sabha polls, that too from his birthplace Gwalior, after Rajiv Gandhi won an overwhelming majority following his mother Indira Gandhi’s assassination. And the BJP he led ended up with just two seats in the 545-member Lok Sabha, in what looked like the end of the road for the right-wing party. In no time, Vajpayee was replaced and “eclipsed” by his long-time friend L.K. Advani.

Although they were the best of friends publicly, Vajpayee never fully agreed with Advani’s and the assorted Hindu nationalist groups’ strident advocacy of Hindutva, an ideology ranged against the idea of secular India. Often described as the right man in the wrong party, there were also those who belittled him as a moderate “mask” to a hardline Hindu nationalist ideology. Often he found his convictions and value systems at odds with the party, but the bachelor-politician never went against it.

It was precisely this persona of Vajpayee — one merged in Hindutva ideology yet seemingly not wholly willing to bow to it — that won him admirers cutting across the political spectrum. It was this trait that made him the Prime Minister when the BJP’s allies concluded they needed a moderate to steer a hardliner, pro-Hindu party.

He brought into governance measures that created for India a distinct international status on the diplomatic and economic fronts. In his third prime ministerial stint, Vajpayee launched a widely acclaimed diplomatic initiative by starting a bus service between New Delhi and Pakistan’s Lahore city.

Its inaugural run in February 1999 carried Vajpayee and was welcomed on the border by his Pakistan counterpart Nawaz Sharif. It was suspended only after the 2001 terror attack on the Indian Parliament that nearly led to a war between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.

The freeze between the two countries, including an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation on the border for nearly a year, was finally cracked in the spring of 2003 when Vajpayee, while in Kashmir, extended a “hand of friendship” to Pakistan. That led to the historic summit in January 2004 with then President Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad — a remarkable U-turn after the failed summit in Agra of 2001. Despite the two men being so far apart in every way, Musharraf developed a strong liking for the Indian leader.

His unfinished task, one that he would probably rue, would be the peace process with Pakistan that he had vowed to pursue to its logical conclusion and a resolution of the Kashmir dispute.

He was not known as “Atal-Ji”, a name that translates into firmness, for nothing. He could go against the grain of his party if he saw it deviate from its path. When Hindu hardliners celebrated the destruction of the 16th century Babri Mosque at Ayodhya, he was full of personal remorse for the apocalyptic action and called it — in a landmark interview to IANS — the “worst miscalculation” and a “misadventure”. He even despaired that “moderates have no place — who is going to listen to the voice of sanity?”

In his full five-year term, he successively carried forward India’s economic reforms programme with initiatives to improve infrastructure, including flagging off a massive national highway project that has become associated with his vision, went for massive privatisation of unviable state undertakings despite opposition from even within his own party.

While his personal image remained unsullied despite his long innings in the murky politics of this country, his judgment was found wanting when his government was rocked by an arms bribery scandal that sought to expose alleged payoffs to some senior members of his cabinet. His failure to speak up when members of his party and its sister organisations, who are accused of killing more than 1,000 Muslims in Gujarat, was questioned by the liberal fraternity who wondered aloud about his secular proclamations. He wanted then Chief Minister — now Prime Minister, Narendra Modi — to take responsibility for the riots and quit but was prevailed upon by others not to press his decision.

A day before his party lost power, Vajpayee was quoted as saying in a television interview that if and when he stepped down he would like to devote his time to writing and poetry. But fate ruled otherwise. The man who once rued that “I have waited too long to be Prime Minister” found his last days in a world far removed from the adulation and attention — though across the nation people prayed for his well-being — surrounded only by care-givers and close family whom he even failed to recognise.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday described the passing away of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee as “end of an era” and said that every Indian and every BJP worker will continue to be guided by his vision.

Modi said in a series of tweets that Vajpayee’s death had left him speechless but a wave of feelings was sweeping his mind.

“I am speechless, I am thoughtless but a wave of feelings is sweeping my mind. Our respected Atalji is no more. He dedicated every moment of his life to the service of the country. His passing away is end of an era,” he said.

Modi quoted a poem of Vajpayee to express his feelings. The poem spoke of Vajpayee’s lack of fear of death.

“Atalji is not with us now but every Indian and every BJP worker will get inspiration and guidance from him. May the Almighty rest his soul rest in peace and give strength to every one who loved him to bear the loss. Om Shanti,” he said.

Vajpayee, a founder member of the BJP and the first non-Congress prime minister to complete a full term in office, died in Delhi on Thursday after prolonged illness. He was 93.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday called the death of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee a great loss for the country.

“Am deeply saddened. A great loss for India,” he said in a tweet.

Kejriwal, who turned 50 on Thursday, had visited AIIMS along with his deputy Manish Sisodia to enquire about the health of Vajpayee, who was critical.

The 93-year-old former Prime Minister, who was admitted in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) on June 11, was “on life support”.

Kejriwal had requested Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) volunteers and his well-wishers not to celebrate his birthday in view of Vajpayee’s condition.

President Ram Nath Kovind on Thursday expressed his condolences on the death of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

“Extremely sad to hear of the passing away of Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, our former Prime Minister and a true Indian statesman. His leadership, foresight, maturity and eloquence put him in a league of his own. Atalji, the Gentle Giant, will be missed by one and all,” he tweeted.

Vajpayee died at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi. He was 93.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday termed former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s passing away a “very big loss” to the nation.

“Very very saddened that the great statesman and former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee ji is no more with us.

“His passing away is a very big loss to our nation. I will always cherish many fond memories with him. Condolences to his family and his many admirers,” Mamata tweeted.

Vajpayee passed away at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi after prolonged illness. He was 93.