Lucknow: Ganeshwar Shastri Dravid — jyotishacharya responsible for overseeing the pran pratishtha rituals at the Ram Mandir in January, Baijnath Patel — senior Bharatiya Janata Party worker from the Jana Sangh era, Lalchand Kushwaha — two-time councillor from Varanasi, and Sanjay Sonkar — general secretary of BJP’s Kashi unit, are the four proposers backing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s poll nomination for Varanasi.
PM Modi filed his nomination papers Tuesday for the high-profile Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency, which he has represented twice so far. The seat was his launchpad to the national politics in 2014.
The proposers represent Brahmin (Dravid), OBC (Patel, Kushwaha) and Dalit (Sonkar) communities — the dominant communities in Varanasi Lok Sabha.
The prime minister offered prayers to river Ganga Tuesday morning, on the occasion of Ganga Saptami, and boarded the Alaknanda cruise at the Dashashwamedh Ghat. He alighted from the cruise at the Namo Ghat and then offered prayers at the Kaal Bhairava temple, along with Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath and BJP state president Bhupendra Chaudhary. Modi then went on to file his nomination at the District Collectorate.
Chief ministers of 12 states — UP, Madhya Pradesh, Sikkim, Haryana, Maharashtra, Bihar, Assam, Tripura, Goa, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan — were present during the nomination process, besides National Democratic Alliance partners, including Rashtriya Lok Dal’s Jayant Chaudhary, Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas)’s Chirag Paswan, Apna Dal (Sonelal)’s Anupriya Patel, Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party’s O.P. Rajbhar, and Nishad Party’s Sanjay Nishad.
Who are the proposers?
Among the four proposers for Modi’s candidature is Vedic scholar Ganeshwar Shastri Dravid (68), whose grandfather Dharmapran Lakshman Shastri Dravid, was the raj purohit (royal family’s priest) of the erstwhile king of Kashi.
Narayana Ghanapathi, who runs the Guru Charan Sewa Samiti gurukul at Hanuman Ghat, told ThePrint that Dravid’s family is originally from Tamil Nadu and that they arrived in Kashi three generations ago.
“His grandfather, Guru Dharmapran Lakshman Shastri, was the raj purohit of the Kashi maharaj, while his father was the renowned ‘Pandit Raj’ Rajeshwar Shastri, who got his title from the first President Rajendra Prasad. He is an expert in ved shashtras, puranas, jyotisha, mimamsa, ayurveda and nyay shastra,” said Ghanapathi, whose family also hails from Tamil Nadu.
“He conducted the pran pratishtha of Ram Lalla’s idol and was present there along with other priests. He has conducted several yagyas and anushthans, and runs the Sanga Veda Vidyalaya, a 120-year-old gurukul in Kashi.”
Baijnath Patel, another proposer, is a senior Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) worker, and a resident of Varanasi’s Harsos village in Sewapuri assembly constituency.
Sudhir Singh, a member of the BJP’s Kashi unit and in-charge of the Prabhat Pheri programme in Varanasi, told ThePrint that Kushwaha is a two-time councillor from Varanasi’s Chittupur, and belongs to Maurya community.
“Sonkar is the general secretary of BJP’s Kashi unit, where he held several posts,” Singh said.
The Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency has the maximum number of Patel voters followed by Muslims, Brahmins, Dalits, Bhumihars, other OBCs and Thakurs, Singh said.
BJP sources said that this time, a list of 50 people was prepared for prospective proposers, of which 18 names were forwarded to the party high command. These names were deliberated upon by Union home minister Amit Shah and BJP general secretary Sunil Bansal. Four names were then finalised, which were approved Monday by Modi.
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The proposers in 2019 & 2014 elections
In 2019, the PM’s proposers came from diverse fields of work. 91-year-old former principal of Banaras Hindu University’s Mahila Mahavidyalalya, Annapurna Shukla, was one of them. Her extensive research in the UK had led to the government there making it mandatory in the 1970s for baby food supplements and formula makers to cite a warning saying that the products are not a substitute for mother’s milk.
Another poll proposer was Jagdish Prakash Chaudhary, the chief cremator at Varanasi ghats and resident of the Man Mandir Ghat, who had inherited the title of ‘Dom Raja’ — responsible for “liberating” the departed from the everlasting cycle of life and death.
Other proposers were RSS worker Subhash Gupta, and agriculture scientist Ramakant Shukla.
In 2014, Giridhar Malaviya — a retired high court judge and grandson of BHU founder Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, classical singer and Padma Vibhushan winner Pandit Chhannulal Mishra, Virbhadra Nishad (a boatman), and Ashok (a member of the weaver community) were PM Modi’s proposers.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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