New Delhi: Dressed in a black vest and white trousers, the man stands with one leg resting on what appears to be the armrest of a couch. There is a gun in one of his hands and another in his mouth. Many people slip in and out of the video, dancing around the man, as a 1990s Bollywood song plays in the background.
Through the clip’s 1.36-minute duration, the man continues to wave guns.
At one point, he brings his leg down from the sofa and begins to dance. There’s a gun each in both of his hands, with a third parked in his mouth, framed by a look of pure mirth.
Uttarakhand BJP MLA Pranav Singh "Champion" who was expelled from the party last year has been re-inducted. pic.twitter.com/EWpUAECxz8
— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) August 25, 2020
The man purportedly seen in the video, Uttarakhand BJP MLA Pranav Singh Champion, was not pleased when it became public just over a year ago. He described it as an invasion of his privacy, as he told news agency ANI in an interview at the time.
But the BJP reportedly saw the video as an embarrassment. When the video surfaced in July 2019, Champion was already under a three-month suspension for other instances of alleged indiscipline. The BJP extended his suspension “indefinitely” and the bar finally ended Monday, after Champion redeemed himself before the party with his “good conduct” and “repeated apologies”.
The MLA also offered an apology before the media, but, speaking to ThePrint, he said he is unfazed by the public’s perception of him.
“I work 18 hours a day… The remaining six hours are mine and it’s nobody else’s business what I do in them,” he said, describing himself as a “vikas purush (man of development)”.
Although a member of the BJP for only four years, Champion has been a part of Uttarakhand’s political landscape pretty much since the state was formed. He is, by his own admission, a flamboyant personality who loves expensive liquor and perfumes.
A former national-level arm-wrestler, he is known to be a fitness enthusiast with an abiding love for guns.
However, he has also found himself at the centre of many a controversy — from challenging a fellow MLA to a wrestling match to settle scores, and allegedly opening fire at a dinner party, to describing party colleague and Haridwar MP Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ as a “migratory bird”.
In 2016, after a failed attempt to meet Bollywood star Salman Khan, he described himself as a “real-life hero” as compared to the “reel-life hero”, also taking a potshot at the latter’s height.
A former Congress colleague alleged that he sees himself as a king, but BJP members offer a different assessment of Champion. He has made mistakes, they admit, but point to his hold on his constituency — Khanpur — to suggest his leadership credentials are watertight.
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A royal descendant
Born in April 1966, Champion is a descendant of Uttarakhand’s erstwhile Gujjar royal family, and grew up in a palace called ‘Rang Mahal’ near Roorkee.
He now stands at 6’1”, and weighs more than 100 kg, but Champion says he was not always this burly. “I was very skinny when I was 11 years old and had severe bronchitis in my left lung. The doctors were very worried for my health but my father, who I consider to be my mentor, friend and patron, helped me become healthy,” he said.
Speaking to ThePrint, he added that he had compartmentalised his life into three neat categories. “Fifteen per cent of my personality is politics-oriented, 15 per cent is sports-oriented, while the remaining 70 per cent I perceive myself as an intellectual,” he added.
A proficient arm-wrestler, he said he dropped out of a postgraduate course in zoology for a tournament. He then sought to make a distinction between qualification and knowledge, saying he has knowledge of “world history, Pythagoras (theorem) in maths, geography etc”, and doesn’t belong to any one discipline.
From 1989 and 1994, he said, he won multiple national-level arm-wrestling tournaments. That was the year he got married. In 1995, he quit the sport.
In the time preceding his marriage, he also gave the civil services exam a shot, with an eye of the Indian Forest Service. “However, at that time, Lady Luck did not support me,” he said. “Lady Luck only came to me after I got married.”
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An 18-year political career
He started his political career in 2002, when he fought as an Independent candidate and became the MLA from Laksar. Shortly afterwards, he joined the Congress under the then chief minister N.D. Tiwari’s guidance.
When the Congress assumed office in Uttarakhand in 2012, Champion was made chairman of the Uttarakhand Forest Development Corporation and held a cabinet minister’s rank.
In this role, he raised the issue of district forest officers being saddled with obsolete weapons and urged that they be armed with service revolvers. He also cried foul about Indian Forest Service (IFoS) cadre vacancies in Uttarakhand being filled up by members of the the Provincial Forest Service (PFS), which he said was “demoralising” IFoS officers and also impacting the efficiency of the state forest department.
He triggered a major row in September 2013 when he allegedly fired in the air at a dinner party thrown by then state minister Harak Singh Rawat, injuring two people, including a Congress leader. A Hindustan Times report at the time had quoted a Congress leader as saying that Champion was unhappy with the state cabinet’s decision to privatise river mining.
In October 2013, he was removed from the forest corporation. The same month, the Congress issued a showcause notice to Champion over a public outburst against the then chief minister Vijay Bahugana that reportedly involved the use of “indecent language”.
Speaking to ThePrint, Uttarakhand Congress vice-president Jot Singh Bisht said Champion was well-versed with the system but “had the raja-praja (king-subject) mindset and views himself as a raja”.
“The way Champion spoke to people was also, at times, very crass,” he added.
Champion was one of the eight MLAs to resigned from the Congress in 2016 and thrust the state into a crisis that included brushes with President’s Rule. He was disqualified as an MLA when he joined the BJP, but won his seat again in the 2017 assembly polls.
Four years later, Champion has few qualms discussing the reason why he moved from the Congress to the BJP. He and two other leaders “met a key BJP leader who assured us a ministerial position if we manage to bring down the government”. However, he claims, the promise didn’t materialise.
“The other two leaders were made ministers in the state cabinet because one was a Thakur and the other a Brahmin. But I was not made a minister because I am a Gujjar from the OBC community,” claimed Champion.
In June 2019, he was suspended by the BJP for three months for alleged indiscipline, including purported threats to a journalist. A month earlier, he had challenged fellow MLA Deshraj Karnwal — reportedly a rival — to a wrestling match when the latter questioned his educational and sporting qualifications.
The same year, he referred to Haridwar MP and Union minister Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ as a “migratory bird”, reportedly miffed because he wanted his wife fielded from the seat.
Talking about Champion, former Uttarakhand BJP spokesperson Virendra Bisht said the hold he has over his constituency is absolute, adding that he wins Khanpur “irrespective of the party” he is with. Bisht claimed he is confident “Champion has learnt from the suspension period and would be more careful in the future and would not make the same mistakes”.
Meanwhile, Champion himself is not too bothered by the air of controversy surrounding him and says his work as an MLA will speak for itself. “I am unapologetically fond of costly perfume, liquor,” he said. “And it is this flamboyance that the press cannot digest.”
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Is expensive liquor & perfume the exclusive domain of the pseudo-seculars, the chatterati and champagne-socialists?