pq If Vajpayee's overtures to Pakistan result in lasting peace, that would be his greatest legacy.

NEW DELHI - India's prime minister is a puzzle: a poet and peacemaker who came to power brandishing Hindu nationalism in a country that professes nonsectarian values, and who set off a nuclear arms race with Pakistan.

Yet after six years in office and running for another five-year term, 79-year-old Atal Bihari Vajpayee has already forged a breathtaking legacy.

A former Soviet ally, India is now firmly in Washington's embrace. Israel and China, two longtime foes, are now its good friends. An economy that long closed itself to the outside world is now wide open and redrawing the global trading map.

If Vajpayee's overtures to Pakistan result in lasting peace, that would be his greatest legacy.

As ever, the question is which Vajpayee is running for office: the nationalist who holds the trident of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, or the great unifier who holds out an olive branch to Islamic Pakistan and to India's own 150 million-strong Muslim minority.

As the world's largest democracy votes in a three-week election, Vajpayee appears sure to retain his Parliament seat - a prerequisite for another term as prime minister.

It takes a shrewd politician to juggle the colliding forces of India, and Vajpayee has done it by courting them all.

He's a man of dry, self-deprecating wit, cherubic charm and a common touch. He'll receive foreign heads of state wearing a traditional loose cotton tunic and pants, then take his scruffy dogs for a walk. Another day will find him mesmerizing a crowd with his rhetoric. Then he'll take off to deep-fry fish, write an ode to Mother Nature or catch the latest "Bollywood" blockbuster to roll off Bombay's conveyor-belt movie industry.

A bachelor, Vajpayee lives with an adopted daughter, her husband and their daughter. And in a country where politics are suffused with corruption, he has another huge asset: He's regarded as squeaky-clean.

He first became prime minister in 1996 but was out within days, a victim of parliamentary instability. His present term dates from 1998, the longest since the Congress party of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty was in power. Polls project Vajpayee's multiparty coalition, the National Democratic Alliance, winning enough seats in the 543-member lower house of Parliament to return him to office, although his majority may be slimmer.

Vajpayee remains a man of confounding contradictions: one who upholds secular democracy and equality for all castes and religions, but makes no bones about Hinduism being India's underpinning.

"If 50 years after its independence from foreign rule, India still remains a secular state, it is essentially because the majority of the country's population is Hindu and this nation's culture and traditions are rooted in the Hindu ethos," he states on his party Web site.

Born to a schoolteacher on Christmas Day, 1924, he got into politics as a student, joining the RSS, a Hindu nationalist group inspired by 1930s German fascism, which today is widely accused of stoking hatred of Muslims and Christians.

After graduating from college, he was a journalist and social worker before founding what is today the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. He was elected to Parliament in 1957. While keeping close ties to the RSS - its leaders meet him frequently at his residence - Vajpayee puts forward a moderate face.

"The secret of his being able to do all of those apparently contradictory things is that, in none of his many roles, is he a fanatic," said Pran Chopra, a political adviser to the nonpartisan Center for Policy Research. "He is a moderate in his beliefs and actions and recognizes that things are not painted in black and white."

Others complain the BJP speaks peace but condones violence.

In 2002, after a Muslim mob set fire to a train in Gujarat state, killing 60 Hindu pilgrims, vengeful Hindus murdered more than 1,000 Muslims. The BJP was accused of looking the other way.

Speaking to Muslim survivors of the pogrom, Vajpayee professed to be baffled as to how Hindus could burn Muslim women and children alive.

"What is this demonic rage?" he wondered. "Have we lost our way so much that we cease to be humans?"

Yet a year later, Muslims were outraged to hear him tell a rural, mostly Hindu audience: "Islamic fundamentalists are spreading terror … This is the opposite of the culture of Hinduism."

"Wherever there are Muslims in large numbers, they do not want to live in peace," he said.

Vajpayee's one-size-fits-all politics means "the gentleman has no firm convictions on any issue except his own survival in office," says Ram Jathmalani, an attorney who is running against him Wednesday in Lucknow, the capital of northern Uttar Pradesh state.

Jethmalani was a longtime friend of Vajpayee and served as law minister in his Cabinet, but says he became disgusted with the party's Hindu fundamentalist bent.

The economy grew by 8 percent last year, and although the new friendships with the United States and Israel provoked rumbles of protest from Hindu and Muslim hard-liners alike, the peace gestures toward Pakistan are highly popular.

But when it comes to peace at home, the Gujarat pogrom remains Vajpayee's biggest blemish. The party has painted itself as more focused on economics and development than its original platform of turning India into a Hindu nation, and Vajpayee has left the movement of "Hindutva" - all things Hindu - to others. But he backs its ideology and tells supporters so.