New Delhi: It’s like a lightening falling on the BJP! This was how party’s senior-most leader and former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee described Pramod Mahajan’s death on Wednesday.
Mahajan was BJP’s best organiser, manager and fund collector and he died when the party needed him the most.
The first question that arises is who replaces Mahajan in the party now?
Narendra Modi, regarded as the BJP’s most successful chief minister, perhaps leads the race to replace Mahajan. He powered the BJP to victories in the Assembly and civic elections in Gujarat and is the poster boy of Hindutva politics.
But he has one big disadvantage: the 2002 Gujarat riots are a blot on his administration.
Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj and Venkaiah Naidu are other members of the BJP’s GenNext leaders. Jaitley is a strategist and organiser like Mahajan, Swaraj is a former chief minister and the party’s star campaigner and Naidu a former party president.
But can any of them combine all of Mahajan’s skills? Even Jaitley, a media-savvy leader who was often seen as Mahajan’s rival, has admitted that the late leader is irreplaceable.
“He was indefatigable,” Jailtey wrote in an obituary for a newspaper. “Unquestionably amongst the most brilliant in his generation. He was never afraid of controversies and criticism. He wasn't any easy loser. A void we can never fill,” he wrote about Mahajan.
Due to Mahajan’s death the BJP will now have to find a points person to interact with the Shiv Sena and the RSS.
That job was Mahajan’s, and he did it very well. He was instrumental in bringing the Sena Sena and the BJP ahead of the 1996 Lok Sabha poll.
Mahajan never failed to admit his failures, also constantly looked for ways to overcome setbacks. In 2004, he was the only media-savvy BJP man who hopped from one TV studio to another after the Lok Sabha disaster.
In recent times, Mahajan developed differences with both Narendra Modi and the now-ousted Uma Bharati.
He has even once remarked that Modi's victory in the 2002 assembly elections in Gujarat was because of the communal polarization, inviting Modi’s displeasure.
Nevertheless, the one thing that stood out about Mahajan’s was the fact that he essentially remained a team man.
In January 2003 when he was divested of the telecom portfolio, Mahajan refused to take an alternative and preferred to join the party organisation as a general secretary - even though that meant working under Venkaiah Naidu who was far junior to him in the party hierarchy.
Mahajan was not just another BJP leader. In a party fraught with an aging leadership, a confused second-generation line-up and internal strife, Majahan was a rare team player.
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