As a Mumbai journalist, I had got to know Mahajan first. He had a debonair flamboyance that marked him out amidst the BJP’s conservative and rather nondescript cadre. He may have got his early inspiration from the RSS but appeared to have little time for its austere lifestyle. He was the first politician I knew who wore Ray-Ban, who never hid his affiliations to big business houses and who openly enjoyed his drink. One of my unforgettable journalistic memories is of sitting in a rooftop suite of Mumbai’s Oberoi hotel with Bal Thackeray smoking a pipe while Mahajan drank chilled beer. To think that the pipe-sucking Thackeray and the beer-swilling Mahajan were the architects of the original ‘conservative’ Hindutva alliance indicates sharply how ideological Hindutva was in fact tailor-made for hard political strategy.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 11:36:54 +0000