Shakti Sinha, a former civil servant, is the honorary director of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Institute of Policy Research and International Studies, MS University, Vadodara and a distinguished fellow at the India Foundation. He was earlier the director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML). He worked closely with the late Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee for three and a half years in the 1990s, as secretary to the leader of the Opposition (1996-97) and as his private secretary (1998-99).