After Union minister and BJP leader Babul Supriyo was allegedly heckled by students at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University, the strongest condemnation came from the party’s Bengal in-charge Kailash Vijayvargiya, who called the state “a fit case for imposition of President’s Rule”.
A week after the incident, Kailash Vijayvargiya offered his neatly wrapped verdict on West Bengal’s politics to ThePrint, “Today, the CPM’s influence is limited to a few university campuses where they try to flex their muscles to stay relevant. But at least they have an ideology, Mamata Banerjee has none”.
Babul Supriyo may have been the one who was allegedly roughed up on the campus, but the real neta to watch out for in West Bengal is Indore’s singing politician Kailash Vijayvargiya.
He has the Herculean task of delivering West Bengal for the BJP in 2021. He has stationed himself in West Bengal ahead of the Durga Puja as RSS’ Mohan Bhagwat and other BJP leaders visit the state. The mission is to calm the frayed nerves over the prospect of a new NRC in the state. Leaders are gearing up to assure the Hindus in West Bengal that they would not be affected – that the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill would be passed first.
“I have been to each district at least a dozen times, set up offices and have acquired a working knowledge of Bengali,” Vijayvargiya said.
And if he does manage to breach Fortress Bengal, then he will truly reinvent his political identity: the rabble rouser-turned-astute election manager. From allegations regarding a pension scam to using muscle power, Vijayvargiya is not new to controversies. Which is why he desperately needs an image makeover as the Mamata slayer in the new BJP of Amit Shah and Narendra Modi.
Also read: After JNU, Jadavpur University is the new ‘Left’ bastion everyone wants to storm
Slash-and-burn style
Kailash Vijayvargiya called the shots in Indore, Madhya Pradesh’s largest city, with his slash-and-burn style of politics.
In September 2009, the Indore edition of the Hindi daily Patrika published a series of investigative reports about a Rs 33-crore pension scam involving then Madhya Pradesh industry minister Kailash Vijayvargiya.
The newspaper alleged that when Vijayvargiya was the mayor of Indore in 2000, the government pension for the aged and widows was disbursed not through nationalised banks and post offices as directed by the Centre but through branches of the Nanda Nagar Sahkari Sakh Sanstha, a cooperative bank controlled by the BJP leader. As a result, the investigation claimed, less than 25 per cent of the total beneficiaries covered under the scheme received their pay-outs.
But very few people in Indore were able to read these reports in the Patrika.
“Vijayvargiya’s men would turn up mob handed to intimidate vendors and forcibly lift all copies of the newspaper from the distribution centres. This continued for several weeks and we were forced to take police protection,” recalls Indore-based journalist Pankaj Mukati who was the resident editor of the Patrika at the time.
Like father, like son?
Never a mass leader, Vijayvargiya has been a six-time legislator from Indore and neighbouring Mhow between 1990 and 2013 – he has never lost an election. Local BJP workers credit his wins to “a liberal use of muscle and money power riding on a pro-BJP sentiment”.
In 2018, he decided not to contest to facilitate the entry of the next generation of Vijayvargiyas into politics. (Of the BJP’s 230 candidates in the 2018 Madhya Pradesh assembly election, 43 were family members of politicians). Vijayvargiya’s older son, Akash, was the party’s candidate from the Indore-3 constituency, his younger son is a small-time businessman, while his brother runs ‘Vrindavan’, a middle-sized family restaurant in Indore.
But that didn’t go very smoothly. Kailash Vijayvargiya’s political heir Akash opened his first innings as a BJP legislator by publicly assaulting an official of the Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) with a cricket bat in June. Akash was protesting against the demolition of a dilapidated building by the IMC – the corporation is incidentally controlled by the BJP.
Those who know Akash Vijayvargiya say he was only mimicking the aggressiveness of his father. “Akash is a mild-mannered, almost colourless young man, who has never been known to raise his voice or his hand, leave alone a bat. The general opinion in Indore is that Akash was incited by his supporters to don a dabang avatar and show the people that he was cast in the same mould as his father,” says a family friend.
Akash, who is said to be spiritually inclined and is the author of a book on Shiva, spent four days in prison before being released on bail to an enthusiastic welcome by the BJP workers. He showed no remorse, but said he would try to follow Mahatma Gandhi’s path of non-violence while raising public issues in future.
It was left to his father’s bitter political rival and eight-time MP from Indore Sumitra Mahajan to point out, while talking to the media, that the apple never falls far from the tree. “When a son commits a mistake, the first thing that strikes his mother’s mind is that she must have committed some mistake in his upbringing.”
But Vijayvargiya was unfazed. True to form, he doubled down to defend Akash and blamed the entire episode on his son’s inexperience and the official’s arrogance. It was only after Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned his party members, in what was seen as a condemnation of the assault, that arrogance and misbehaviour would not be tolerated irrespective of “whoever it may be, whoever’s son he may be” that Vijayvargiya piped down.
But no disciplinary action has been taken against Akash. Vijayvargiya senior, in fact, denies that the party high command is angry with him. “I would have been instantly sacked from my post then,” he tells ThePrint.
Also read: Not just Pragya Thakur, BJP disciplinary panel doesn’t really punish any of its leaders
A politician is born
Kailash Vijayvargiya is the son of a mill worker – at one time, Indore had nearly a dozen cotton mills, which formed the economic backbone of Madhya Pradesh’s most prosperous city. The family lived in three tin-roofed rooms on a small piece of land in Nanda Nagar, a sprawling neighbourhood of mill employees.
Vijayvargiya continues to occupy the same plot although the old house is long gone, replaced by a modest two-storeyed structure. Elder residents of the colony remember the small shop Vijayvargiya’s mother ran from home, which sold biscuits and chooran. His father worked with the Hukumchand Mills and was an active member of the Indian National Trade Union Congress.
Vijayvargiya grew up during a period of struggle when the mills had started closing down and hundreds of workers were laid off. It’s not surprising that his political journey followed a radically different trajectory from his father’s. In 1975, he joined RSS-affiliated student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, while still in college. Vijayvargiya became a councillor of the Indore Municipal Corporation in 1983 and an MLA in 1990.
Vijayvargiya came into his own as a politician in the midst of the real estate boom in Indore in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As property prices skyrocketed, vast tracts of prime government land reserved for widening of roads and opening new schools and hospitals were illegally acquired by powerful builders, in connivance with an army of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, for constructing shopping malls and housing colonies.
Vijayvargiya once admitted that legislators of his own party had made a fortune because of the unlawful building activity, but claimed that the land mafia was run by the leaders of the Congress, which was in power at that time in Madhya Pradesh.
His own stint as the mayor of Indore Municipal Corporation, however, was not been blemish-free. “Under his mayor-ship, nothing happened in Indore without his knowledge,” recalls a former corporator of the Indore Municipal Corporation.
Man with bulldozing skills
In December 2003, Vijayvargiya was inducted into the state cabinet and remained a minister till 2014, leveraging his bulldozing skills to execute the writ of the party. He even did important peace work in Madhya Pradesh’s own Ayodhya-like disputed site.
In 2006, Kailash Vijayvargiya was sent by former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan to broker peace between two communities at the 11th century Bhojshala-Kamal Maula monument in Dhar district. Hindus believe it is a Saraswati temple and are allowed to offer prayers at the site on Tuesdays and on the occasion of the Basant Panchmi; Muslims insist it is a mosque and offer prayers on Fridays.
That year, Basant Panchmi fell on a Friday, but with both communities insisting on their right to worship inside the complex, different timings were allotted for puja and namaz. But when devotees led by the Hindu Jagran Manch refused to vacate the premises after offering prayers, they were forcibly evicted from the area, sparking off clashes.
Vijayvargiya received the Indira Gandhi Award for Communal Riots Prevention and Harmony by the Congress party-led UPA government for his role in dousing communal tensions on that day. (All references to the award have since been deleted from Vijayvargiya’s social media profiles.)
In 2013, a similar situation arose at the Bhojshala site and Hindu activists were reportedly lathi-charged by the police. Vijayvargiya, who was not coordinating the peace-keeping efforts this time around and had long ago fallen out with Chouhan, attacked his own government’s handling of the situation.
For years, Vijayvargiya tried undermining Chouhan’s leadership in Madhya Pradesh so that he could become the chief minister. Every time Chouhan’s name cropped up in any scandal, Vijayvargiya’s supporters positioned their leader as the likely successor, but his hugely popular and politically sophisticated adversary was unshakeable. By the time Chouhan became CM for the third time in 2013, the mega-ambitious Vijayvargiya had become increasingly isolated in the state – some of it also had to do with his genius for spotting a counter-narrative, mostly the wrong one.
Also read: BJP begins work for 2021 Bengal polls — picks candidates to groom in each constituency
Foot in mouth
Barely a few days after the Nirbhaya gang-rape in Delhi, Vijayvargiya claimed that the real reason behind the spate of crimes against women was their lack of morals. “If they cross the line, they are bound to suffer the same fate as Sita who crossed the Laxman Rekha and was abducted by Ravan.”
Vijayvargiya has defended self-styled godman Asaram Bapu, calling him a saint and his imprisonment a “part of a political conspiracy by the Congress”.
He also slammed Dadasaheb Phalke awardee and poet Pradeep (he died in 1998) for writing a glowing tribute to Mahatma Gandhi in the 1954 movie Jagriti, wondering why Pradeep had never been “slapped, boxed and kicked” for ignoring freedom fighters who had adopted a path other than non-violence.
More recently, he dismissed Vyapam, the massive college admission and recruitment scandal in Madhya Pradesh in which undeserving candidates made the cut by unlawful means, as a “chutput (small) scam”.
Vijayvargiya, however, was never even reprimanded for his deliberately outrageous comments. Simply because, as time would tell, he had his uses.
Hindu and Hindutva-ness
The BJP had just won the 2014 parliamentary elections, the Congress was in disarray, but Amit Shah had no time to rest. His next mission was to capture power in all the opposition-ruled sates. For the job, he needed henchmen who were ruthless and thorough while following orders, asked no questions and delivered results at any cost. Vijayvargiya ticked all the boxes for Amit Shah and brought something extra to the table – he was desperate to prove himself and show that he was more capable than Shivraj Singh Chouhan.
Vijayvargiya was made in-charge of the BJP’s election campaign in Haryana – barely two months later, the party won a majority in the state. Next year, in 2015, he was promoted as national general secretary of the BJP and made the party observer in West Bengal. Tasked with pursuing an aggressive programme of Hindu mobilisation in the state, while targeting the Mamata Banerjee government for its politics of ‘Muslim appeasement’, this was an assignment after Vijayvargiya’s own heart.
Vijayvargiya has always flaunted his Hindutva-ness. In college, he was a member of the Nanda Nagar Ramayan Mandali, a group of youngsters who moved across the city reciting verses from the epic, said a friend of Vijayvargiya.
He still loves to sing bhajans, and occasionally gets a godly makeover – Vijayvargiya has appeared at religious functions dressed up as Krishna and Vishnu. He is never seen without a vermillion tilak on his forehead. But for Vijayvargiya, being a good Hindu is about being anti-Muslim, although he insists that he has many ‘Muslim friends’.
“In his world, the two narratives are forever locked in a death-like embrace,” believes an old neighbour and a former journalist.
Publicly, Vijayvargiya has repeatedly trolled superstar Shah Rukh Khan – comparing him to Dawood Ibrahim and branding him a Pakistani at heart. The BJP has distanced itself from Vijayvargiya’s comments, but he continues to defend his position. “Shah Rukh Khan held a charity concert in aid of Pakistanis when the country was affected by floods, but has done nothing to support victims of natural calamities in India. That’s the reason I was upset,” claims Vijayvargiya.
Early this year, after the BJP was edged out of power in Madhya Pradesh, he chastised a party candidate for losing to a Congressman who was a Muslim. “It is surprising that a nationalist government which stopped cow slaughter was in power, but a beef-eater won against you. It is a matter of shame for all of us,” Vijayvargiya had said.
Also read: Amartya Sen has a message for Mamata: Don’t define Bengalis narrowly like BJP does
Mission Bengal
Soon after taking charge of Bengal, Vijayvargiya travelled across the state, mapping constituencies where communal fault lines run deep, accompanied often by Mukul Roy, the former Mamata Banerjee bestie who defected to the BJP armed with the TMC’s dirty secrets.
“The groundwork had all been done by him (Roy), since Vijayvargiya was not a son of the soil and knew no Bengali. Vijayvargiya gave inflammatory speeches, dialled up the violence and panned Mamata Banerjee at press conferences. But it is also true that only a street fighter like Vijayvargiya could have taken the goons of the TMC head on and emerge victorious,” says 22-year-old Subrat Sen, a history student at a Kolkata college and a freshly minted Modi supporter, who is torn between his disdain for ‘outsider’ Vijayvargiya and a sneaking admiration for his guts-and-gore style of politics.
The West Bengal results in the Lok Sabha elections were a personal triumph for Vijayvargiya. For the first time, Hindutva punctured the state’s electoral narrative – the BJP bagged 18 of the 42 seats, up from two in 2014; the Trinamool Congress was down to 22 seats from 34.
“I was a huge fan of Mamata Banerjee before I went to West Bengal since she single-handedly ended the over two decade-long terror-run of the CPM in the state. But I soon found out that she had only replaced their army of goondas with her own, who are totally out of control because they have the protection of politicians, police and bureaucrats,” Vijayvargiya said.
He added, “After Didi’s poor showing in the Lok Sabha elections, this nexus has begun to unravel. Driven by fear, the TMC supporters have become even more aggressive.”
Vijayvargiya said that if BJP comes to power in Bengal in 2021, NRC will be implemented in the state: “This is the wish of 99 per cent of the population and Mohan Bhagwatji has clearly said that no Hindu will be left out of the list, here or elsewhere in the country.”
Chief minister in-waiting
On his return to Indore after the BJP’s impressive show in West Bengal, Vijayvargiya was welcomed by a giant banner showing him strangling a leopard with Mamata Banerjee’s face – it was later covered up following objections by the local police.
But if Vijayvargiya was hoping to be rewarded for the BJP’s blockbuster showing in West Bengal with a larger national footprint, he was disappointed. While three other senior leaders from Madhya Pradesh, Thawar Chand Gehlot, Narendra Singh Tomar and Prahlad Patel, were given ministerial berths in Narendra Modi government, Vijayvargiya is likely to continue as the BJP’s bouncer-in-chief in West Bengal till the 2021 election.
But Vijayvargiya claims he has the more important position in the party. “In the BJP, the organisation is above everything. My status as general secretary is higher than the cabinet minister rank. That’s why when Amit Shah walks into a room as party president, Narendra Modiji always gets up,” he says.
The boast is dismissed by a former colleague and a minister in the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government, who insists that Vijayvargiya has been in the dog house since the 2018 Madhya Pradesh polls when he gave up his assembly seat for his son Akash so that he could contest the Lok Sabha elections in 2019.
“But the party denied him a ticket citing its ‘one family one ticket’ policy even though several other senior leaders like Maneka Gandhi and Rajnath Singh were allowed to break the rule. He was not even considered for Rajya Sabha. Maybe they think he lacks gravitas, because of some of the things he says and does.”
Last year, Vijayvargiya participated in a cultural programme in Indore, sporting a Bollywood-inspired 1970s rock-star look with long hair and a guitar in hand. In 2017, he was playing Sachin Tendulkar, comparing the cricketer to Narendra Modi and dismissing Rahul Gandhi as the captain of the Kenyan cricket team. “It did not even occur to him that he was being downright racist,” says the former minister.
But the same Vijayvargiya confesses to being a die-hard admirer of Narmada Bachao Andolan leader Medha Patkar. “Her politics and ideology are opposed to mine, and I don’t even support her definition of development, but she has dedicated her whole life for a cause without any personal gain. I respect her hugely,” says Vijayvargiya.
Meanwhile in Indore, where Vijayvargiya continues to be powerful, his supporters still hope that he will be the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh one day. “If Yogi Adityanath could become the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, why not him,” they ask.
Also read: Three reasons why Mamata Banerjee is losing the plot in West Bengal
The author is an independent journalist. Views are personal.