Kedarnath might just get a little crowded this autumn. Uma Bharati is already headed to the Himalayan shrine, and she may soon have Pramod Mahajan for company.A day before the October 13 polling in Maharashtra, Mahajan held a press conference in Mumbai to assert that the Shiv Sena-BJP combine was certain to get a clear majority and that the BSP was ‘‘the most significant factor’’ in the elections. After the formal press conference, TV crews gathered around him for exclusive soundbytes. How would the Maharashtra polls impact on his personal future, they asked. Always quick with a repartee, Mahajan told a couple of reporters: ‘‘If we win, I will be going to Rashtrapati Bhavan; if we lose, then Kedarnath.’’ In other words, a BJP victory would give the party the necessary brio to bring down the UPA. A defeat would mean political sanyas, at least for him. For Mahajan, this defeat is a double blow. As the man in charge of the BJP’s LS campaign, he was the fall guy when the BJP got a drubbing. At the party’s post-debacle national executive meeting in Mumbai in June, A.B. Vajpayee even ticked him off for relying too much on hi-tech, for fashioning a campaign that was too high-profile. For the Maharashtra polls, Mahajan went to the other extreme — no flashy advertisements, no telephone calls, no SMS campaigns. Instead, it was ‘‘grassroots’’ all the way, as he went from door to door, house to house, village to village. His ‘‘double defeat’’ has ensured that he will be no threat to Venkaiah Naidu and Arun Jaitley just yet. But Mahajan is no pushover. A spell in Kedarnath might just result in new inner-party equations, and help Mahajan find the ‘‘middle path’’ between hi-tech and low-tech.
