Ahluwalia

New Delhi, March 21: When the last voice in Rajiv Gandhi’s “shouting brigade” bid farewell to Parliament today, he graciously chose the sound of silence to deliver a parting kick to his current boss.

Surinder Singh Ahluwalia, the one-time boy from Bengal who is better known as S.S. Ahluwalia, thanked everyone from Rajiv Gandhi to Sonia Gandhi to Arun Jaitley. But Nitin Gadkari was missing from the “thank-you” list.

Ahluwalia, the BJP’s deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha, not expressing gratitude to his own party president is more eloquent than the vocal power which the outgoing member was once known for.

By not mentioning Gadkari, Ahluwalia was articulating a perception among several BJP leaders that he should have been renominated to the Rajya Sabha. Ahluwalia, 61, was overlooked apparently because of differences between Gadkari and Lok Sabha Opposition leader Sushma Swaraj with whom the Rajya Sabha MP shares a good rapport. It is another matter that the candidate Gadkari reportedly supported, NRI businessman Anshuman Mishra, has backed out. ( )

What also stood out was the irony of Ahluwalia paying tribute to Rajiv and mentioning Sonia in a throwback to a forgotten but heady era in the 1980s.

The quartet of Ahluwalia, Suresh Pachauri, Ratnakar Pandey and Baba Mishra had made what was then known as “the shouting brigade” — a boisterous group that would pounce on anyone who dared to utter a word against Rajiv or Sonia between 1985 and 1991.

The four were never part of the once-celebrated Rajiv Camelot, a reference to the King Arthuresque hopes the new crop of leaders had fuelled in the mid-1980s. But the shouting brigade came in handy for Rajiv when the dream soured and the Bofors scandal — “scam” would not enter the political lexicon for another six years when the securities scam broke — erupted in 1986 and the atmosphere turned ugly.Ahluwalia made a fleeting reference to those days today.

“It was Rajiv Gandhi who brought me first into the Rajya Sabha in 1986. I also worked with Narasimha Raoji and later with Soniaji and I was helped by Vajpayeeji and Advaniji and inducted first into the BJP by party president Kushabhau Thakre… and later I have worked with my leader here Jaitleyji,” said an emotional Ahluwalia. He also thanked Sushma Swaraj.

Ahluwalia also recalled an ancestral journey from Sialkot in Pakistan to Delhi by foot and later to Asansol in Bengal. His grandparents and parents were compelled to leave home during Partition. Some heard in the story a parallel with his unexpected departure from the House after serving as a member for over two decades.

Ahluwalia is no stranger to leaving political homes. After the assassination of Rajiv, the shouting brigade had tried hard to prevail upon Sonia to take over the party leadership. At one juncture, Sonia got so tired of their antics and statements that she denied them an audience.

Pandey, for instance, kept telling the world that he had taught Sonia Hindi, though she had learned the language at Hindi Institute in Green Park, New Delhi. On another occasion, Pandey said he would offer his skin if Sonia wished to wear shoes made of it.

Ahluwalia began embarking on an annual yatra collecting holy water from all rivers and carrying it to Tamil Nadu’s Sriperumbudur, where Rajiv was killed.

Ahluwalia eventually gave up on Sonia, joined hands with Narasimha Rao and became a junior minister in 1995. In the fag end of 1997, when the Congress was tottering under Sitaram Kesri, Ahluwalia shifted loyalties to join the BJP. By 2002-03, he was the BJP’s favourite spokesperson to attack Sonia on television screens.

The rest of the quartet stayed on with the Congress but none are MPs now and they are mostly confined to the political periphery.

In his younger days, the alumnus of St Joseph’s School in Asansol and Calcutta University law department apparently contributed to the constitution and flag design of the Congress’s student wing, now known as NSU(I).

Ahluwalia said he also fought “Naxalites and Marxists” in Bengal but could not realise his dream of bringing about (Trinamul, are you listening?) “parivartan”.

Ahluwalia today said he would eventually live in Patna where he has a house. The outgoing MP quoted Jaitley as asking him what he had earned in life. “Love and respect,” Ahluwalia said.

Additional reporting by Radhika Ramaseshan