As per report another historic event that Vajpayee expressed anguish about was the post Godhra communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the chief minister. Meanwhile when unwilling to hide his feelings over the riots, Prime Minister Vajpayee said the government must follow "raj dharma". Furthermore in his autobiography, former President Pranab Mukherjee wrote that the Gujarat riots were "possibly the biggest blot" on Vajpayee's government that could have cost the Bharatiya Janata Party the 2004 Lok Sabha elections.
After Vajpayee announced his retirement from politics in 2005 and slipped into relative political oblivion, he was rarely seen in public after suffering a stroke in 2009, and subsequently developed dementia. Meanwhile in his Independence Day speech, Modi said he wants to resolve the Kashmir issue through Vajpayee's doctrine of "Insaniyat, Kashmiriyat, Jamhooriyat", which seeks to preserve the composite Kashmiri culture while ensuring democracy in a humane manner.
Moreover when he assumed office for the second time in 1999 as the head of
a more stable coalition, Vajpayee had to abandon some of the cornerstones of
BJP's policies to get the backing of more secular groups, which included the
BJP's demands for scrapping the special status for Jammu and Kashmir, building
a Hindu temple on the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya and abolishing the
separate civil code for Muslims.
