New Delhi, Jan. 17: “Independent” Aman Lekhi, “normal” Zubin Irani, substance-over-style Parakala Prabhakar and staunch defender Brij Bedi may be strangers to one another but are members of an expanding new club.

They are the “lesser-known halves” of a sisterhood of BJP luminaries, although some of them are well known in their own professions.

Brij, the latest entrant to the group, is the estranged husband of the BJP’s latest prize catch, former police officer Kiran Bedi.

“We don’t stay together but that doesn’t mean we have differences. I told Kiran, ‘I’m sorry I won’t be able to do much’ (for her political career). She said, ‘Just give me your blessings’,” Brij told The Telegraph from his home in Amritsar today.

He said he would have loved to campaign for his wife when she fights the Delhi elections but lacks the strength at 70-plus. “Age has caught up with me.”

Brij said the couple rarely met these days. But to prove that the 520km between Delhi and Amritsar had not dimmed their mutual affection, he said his wife had alerted him about her decision to join the BJP a day before her formal induction.

“She’s mature and believes in good governance; she’s not going there to make money. Think, she’s almost 65 and still ready to put in so much hard work. So what is Mr (Abhishek Manu) Singhvi’s problem?” he asked.

At a news conference yesterday, Congress spokesperson Singhvi had accused Kiran of “opportunism” and harbouring “overweening ambition”, scoffing that someone who couldn’t become Delhi police commissioner was dreaming of becoming Delhi chief minister.

A junior had indeed superseded Kiran to the top police post in 2007. Brij rose to his wife’s defence. “It is Mr Singhvi’s party that refused to make her the police commissioner,” he said.

Brij has assiduously kept away from politics, choosing to call himself a “social activist”. He runs an NGO, Citizens’ Forum Vidyamandir, with Kiran as its chief patron, to educate former drug addicts free of cost.

They had met in the early 1970s on a tennis court at the Service Club in Amritsar when he was a textile engineer and Kiran a leading tennis player and a lecturer in political science at the Khalsa College.

Brij disowned an interview that appeared in an Amritsar magazine in 2013. The interview purportedly quoted him as accusing Kiran’s parents of souring their relationship and denying their only child Saina the “love of a mother” and the “affections of a father”.

Saina is now married to a documentary filmmaker, Ruzbeh Bharucha, and lives in Pune.

Aman Lekhi, a top Supreme Court lawyer, however, doesn’t fancy being known as the husband of Meenakshi Lekhi, BJP spokesperson and New Delhi MP. He turned around a line feminists often quoted in the 1960s and 1970s to say: “The identity of a man is completely independent of his wife.”

Aman jealously guards his apolitical identity although his father Pran Nath Lekhi, best remembered as the lawyer who defended Indira Gandhi’s assassin Satwant Singh, leant towards the Jana Sangh in his lifetime.

“I was always keen to distance myself from politics because the commitment law required of me was total. At a future time, when I think I need to give back to society what it gave me, I might join politics,” he said.

BJP insiders, though, said that Aman’s defence of Sangh senior Indresh Kumar in an alleged terror case linked to the 2007 Mecca Masjid blasts helped Meenakshi’s rise in the BJP.

But Aman played this down, arguing: “I have taken up cases of all political hues, and the so-called terror (case) is just one aspect.”

With Nirmala Sitharaman and spouse Parakala Prabhakar, the division of identities is straight. She is a BJP minister in Narendra Modi’s government while her husband is a communications adviser (with cabinet rank) in N. Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party government in Andhra Pradesh.

Although Prabhakar came from a family of communists and Congress supporters, Nirmala has emerged as the more avowedly political and focused of the two since she joined the BJP.

A PhD holder from the London School of Economics, Prabhakar conducted research for think-tanks and held analytical programmes on television before joining the now disbanded Praja Rajyam Party as spokesperson and general secretary. He quit when the party merged with the Congress, which his position as Nirmala’s husband made it untenable for him to join.

As Naidu’s backroom media strategist, Prabhakar is said to have advised his boss to stress substance rather than style. Indeed, the chief minister’s first 100 days have been marked not by hype but by a slew of MoUs relating to power, defence production and motorcycle manufacturing that are expected to fetch the new state investments worth Rs 8,000 crore.

Zubin Irani, husband of minister Smriti Irani, keeps a low profile. He has a plastics business and a fruit farm in Mumbai and only occasionally expresses himself publicly through a tweet or two. But his Twitter page is mostly devoted to re-tweeting Smriti’s posts.

“Just a normal person” is how Zubin introduced himself.

As the number of political husbands rises in India, they might well consider carving a distinct identity of their own. Perhaps they can emulate their more numerous British opposite numbers who have formed an unofficial support group that meets twice a year at an Indian restaurant in Westminster for a curry meal.