I thought I knew Pramod, Pravin
One brother basked in the other brother's success.
What happened?

Kumar Ketkar

knew the brothers, Pramod and Pravin Mahajan, very well. Or so I thought till Saturday morning, when “Breaking News” on TV announced Pravin had shot Pramod. I began to go back in time, in search of anything that could reconcile what I thought I knew with what looked like an episode in a TV serial.

I had known Pramod since early BJP days, when he would urge us to publish some press release or earnestly invite us to Vajpayee’s rallies. He was in his thirties then. Argumentative and energetic. Smart and self-confident. His rise up the political ladder didn’t make him lose these attributes. Pramod looks at the peak with self-assurance and thinks it is reachable. How many “candidates”, after all, would be eligible for the post of prime minister, say in 2009 or 2014?

To say that he is ambitious would be an understatement. But he always knew he had to work and struggle hard. That included networking and media management, moving with elite business houses and living five-star.

For a lower-middle class Brahmin family boy, that too from a backward village in Marathwada, the journey to Delhi was never going to be easy. In Maharashtra, to be Maratha by caste matters hugely. He is neither Maratha nor has any family link with political power. Being the son of a primary school teacher and member of a family owing allegiance to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, meant additional disqualifications. His political ambitions must have been fired after the defeat of the Congress and Indira Gandhi in 1977 and the Janata Party’s ascendance to power. Most opposition parties and persons realized for the first time then that the Congress could be ousted from the Centre, too.

Vajpayee was Pramod’s mentor. As a young activist, Pramod had delivered a speech from the same dais and Atalji saw promise in the young man. That was during the 1977 election campaign, soon after Pramod had come out of jail. Imprisonment during Emergency then was like a political halo.

Vajpayee and Advani, in their fifties then, became cabinet ministers in the Janata government. Thanks to Jayaprakash Narain, the Parivar had acquired legitimacy. Though the Janata experiment collapsed, opposition parties had tasted blood. The Bharatiya Janata Party began its march to power slowly but surely. Neither did the marginalisation in 1980 elections nor the1984 elections, when its strength was reduced to just two in Lok Sabha, demoralised it.

It was during those dog years that Pramod began to develop a relationship with the press. Himself a student of journalism once and a sub-editor in the Sangh mouthpiece, Tarun Bharat, Pramod knew the ropes. There was no 24x7 TV news those days and nobody even discussed the possibility of private channels. We in the print media were the only option for political parties and leaders. Like many other journalists, I met Pramod at that time. We all were impressed by his energy and ability to argue a difficult ideological position. Nobody then really thought the BJP would be in power at the Centre. Not only the Congress but the so-called non-Congress secular parties were also hostile to it. Who would form an alliance with the BJP? But Pramod would argue that the BJP is a party of the future. Pramod’s friends in the press used to be condescending in their conversation with him. Rajiv Gandhi appeared almost invincible in the mid-eighties and so did the Congress.

But after the defeat of Rajiv’s Congress in 1989 and the rise of V P Singh with the support of the BJP, it was Pramod’s turn to be condescending to his friends in the press. He was at his eloquent best during the 1990 Rath Yatra. He was at his shrillest when the Babri Masjid was destroyed. It was after 1992 that he began to develop the streak of arrogance, which reached its peak in 1996, when he became a defence minister in the 13-day government of the BJP. That government was to fall anyway, but Pramod knew now nobody would question the possibility of the party coming to power. In 1998 and again in 1999, the BJP won. The Congress began to look pathetic and out of sync.

Between 1999 and 2004, all of us have seen Pramod on every single TV channel, arguing and fighting with anchorpersons. His fast track rise in the party had upset even the old guard in the Parivar. They looked at him as an upstart. What was his contribution to Hindutva? Was he not hobnobbing with the stars and starlets, with business houses and builder-contractors? How could he be the “proper” representative of the Sangh? Most of Pramod’s rivals are in his own party. He has admirers in the Congress.

I met Pravin when Pramod had already reached the zenith of his career. To be defence minister, even if it was for 13 days, was a huge achievement, and Pravin, the youngest brother, was basking in his brother’s glory. We used to meet fairly frequently. His voracious reading, agile memory and the ability to analyse political events impressed me. He struck me a wonderful conversationalist.

Pravin, like his brother, is argumentative, intelligent and energetic. I remember talking to him immediately after Princess Diana was killed in a car crash. Pravin tried to argue that Diana’s death should be seen in the context of some powerful people feeling that she had lowered the prestige of Buckingham Palace. There was a long argument in the course of which we digressed and discussed the psyche of the killers. What does fiction, including murder mysteries, tell us about why some people can kill, and most can’t, we wondered. Pravin appeared to be an aficionado of crime fiction, as I am. The murder he tried to commit, though, is stranger and sadder than any fiction.

The writer is editor, Loksatta